Holinka Was A Real One

PVP Arenas
1

There was a bug after Legion S1, that caused people who racechanged their chars to loose their freshly received Vindictive Gladiator Drake. This affected prolly less than 10 players, with me being one of them and since it was affecting like 0.000002% of players, I was assuming this issue being absolute bottom tier priority for Blizz to resolve, therefore I was mentally preparing myself for having to wait months to get my mount.

I made a forum post at that time to find out who else was affected by this and tweeted @Holinka. He responded within a few hours by saying: “That’s you, right?” and he linked me the forum post I made on the EU forums. My issue was resolved within 24h (the other guys affected by this had to wait a bit longer :)))) but not for too long, like 1-2 weeks).

Therefore I’ll admit I’m biased af when it comes to this topic, but I think the dude actually really cared. I’ve seen a lot of you celebrating his departure across the EU+NA forums and also over on Twitter. Players are constantly bringing up his failures, but I don’t think that he ever had any ill intent. Ultimately he tried a few things, took some risks and yes, he failed a few times, but I much prefer someone who cares, tries and fails over what we had during BfA+SL, where there was zero communication in regards to PvP and PvP’ers therefore assuming, that Blizzard just completely abandoned us.

Also I’ve seen many people assuming that he was back to being the PvP guy for DF and are blaming it’s shortcomings on him, but you guys are mistaken… He was not the lead PvP dev, he was the combat guy for both PvP and PvE, so yes, he had a saying in all of it, but not to the extent people are blaming him for.

Furthermore I’m convinced that Holinka reclaiming a role in PvP development, lead to us getting any communication at all regarding PvP and faster hotfixes/balance passes in between major patch releases. I really hope I’m wrong, but I think we will move back to a BfA/SL hotfix cycle, where major changes are only happening during big patches and hotfixes are only being applied to major outliers that are too problematic, stuff like the ret dispel after 10.0.7, making dot specs completely unviable. I mean this season we haven’t seen any balance changes done for PvP yet, while they were pretty frequent during S1, especially at the start and I think that’s a sign of things to come.

TL:DR Holinka good, future prolly bad.

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2

First weeks of DF s1 we saw a bunch of changes and fixes, now not so much. Not at least ones that are confident to say come as target on the concern of the community, now they’re changing hybrid spec healing when… yeah, kind of need some changes done to instant wizard damage (leave precog, they desere it), but no fine tuning there?

Yep, back to old deaf ears and 5 month fixes.

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I also think that a spell with cast time should deal more damage than instant spells. Except for procs.

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  • lower caster damage
  • heavily prune melee mobility
  • get back to the roots: casters high uptime lower dmg, needs cc chains, melee low uptime high dmg, needs to know when to go in, when to hide and not yolo mobility.
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I don’t know if you played MoP but if you remember S12 was a similar clown fiesta to the Ret one few months ago but lasted whole season. Arms was one shotting with Taste for Blood, BM was one shotting due to bug, Frost Mage killed people in one Deep Freeze. Literally everything hit like a heavy train. Greg Street who was knows as “Ghostcrawler” left and PvP look horrible. Suddenly a guy from Blizzard popped up and started posting really good ideas that people mass liked like PoM shouldn’t work with Ring of Frost (yes I know that it’s hard to believe but RoF was instant in Cata and in early MoP you could PoM it). He also wanted to make PvP power (a stat that boosted your healing and dmg in Arenas and BGs) to be a bit weaker and resilence to be stronger. Literally whole PvP community supported him so he became PvP dev. His name was Brian Holinka. He “fixed” MoP and thanks to him we got S14 and S15 that are the most beloved season among the community. WoD didn’t work for him but Brian is the guy who made MoP good and fun let’s not forget it.

It was never like that. If you want “back to the roots” then caster damage was actually higher. The difference was that almost everything was casted and meele damage pushed back casts. Also MS effects were stronger.

It’s right now that Frost Mage doesn’t really “hit hard” it just spams dozens of instant Ice Lances that kill you instead of one big Shatter Combo like in the past.

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I didn’t play MoP and WoD, just heard good things about S15. However I have fond memories of Legion PvP and he was mostly responsible for that.

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i mean if u lose something due to a bug just make a ticket of it and gm returns it, nothing to do with holinka or need to make wall of txt of nonsense stories about it

“Head up the team responsible for all combat related systems for World of Warcraft including class design and player versus player content.”

“Responsible for planning and execution of player versus player content and systems for World of Warcraft.”

This is what his linked profile says, people say he has no power over anything at blizzard, yet the guy self seem to think he was in charge of everything and if so then why does the guy go and say on interviews that he has no clue of half of the things he is in charge of designing

Can you people make up ur mind or find somekind of logic atleast in your claims you make

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He waa a good chap, will miss his input in WoW for sure.

WoD being bad class design wise was largely at fault of Celestalon, my least favourite community manager till this date. My god that guy was so arrogant to players and sometimes downright toxic, it seemed all feedback fell on def ears.

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GMs are not allowed to give out gladiator mounts without permission from higher ups. People who lost Gladiator mounts due to bugs had to sometimes wait months or even close to a year, before they got them back, in the past.

It was more about the fact that he cared enough to go on the EU WoW forums and link me my own thread, in order to confirm that I was the same person reporting this problem on the forums. How many WoW Lead PvP Devs do you know, that would take matter in their own hands regarding a bug that affects max 10 players and is only about cosmetic rewards, so nothing affecting gameplay?

People’s LinkedIn profiles generally list all roles/experiences, current and former. His profile shows timestamps for his role at the company, you might want to check those again.

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How many wow lead pvp devs have we had? xd

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He was the one responsible for fixing MoP. WoD and Ashran was a bit off mark but still this dude put an effort. I respect him and I think he received too much of undeserved hate.

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on one hand guy claims he is in charge of everything, on other hand fanbois say his hands are tied and he is the best pvp dev wow has ever had

then guy is on interview says he has no clue of half of the things he is on charge of designing nor has ever tried half of it, all while he sports titles as being in charge of everything

nice post tho, almost as nice as the logic on all of it

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I believe the biggest issue is, we have no clue on what he fully did, what had to be trashed, what ion/blizzard denied and so on. I highly doubt hes fully responsible for everything myself since theres always someone higher up.
So I personally dont hate holinka even if I didnt rly like him, but thats more because I have no clue what happens in the background so hes more a scapegoat even if some things could be questionable.

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Probably a few, but only 2 of them had the cojones to make their involvement with WoW PvP public.

I just said the guy cared and tried, gave examples of why I think so and reflected back on what we had during BfA & SL, when he was not involved with PvP. If you think a guy that tries his best but fails a few times is worse than what we had during those 2 expacs, which was basically having nothing at all, then that’s fine because you are entitled to your opinion, but I don’t see any logical flaws in that.

However with his departure we will have no one communicating with us ever again. Even if there was someone replacing him, we would never find out about it because the WoW community is a cesspool of weirdos who have 0 social skills and don’t know how to behave. They will bully anyone who puts his name out there out of the job within a week, so no sane human being would make his involvement with PvP development public.

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Eh he was doing his job, tbh I don’t really care who is in charge since as Yojeong said there’s so much involved in the design of an mmo that it’s hard to distinguish who did what. But yeah he definitely didn’t deserve all the hate
I find the anecdote cool though!

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This is prob one of the more accurate sayings, since just looking through the forums every now and then you can see quite the toxicity involved.
They need someone who can take the pressure and the negativity and still be collected and calm which is quite hard in WoWs community.

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I mean it’s impossible to not get sh!t on by the community as a PvP Dev, even if you would be doing a stellar job because the game is perceived so differently, depending on what group of people you talk to.

For example rn we are playing a huge caster meta. Except for very few specs, melees are getting completely roflstomped on high rating. On low rating however you will still find people complaining about melees because they don’t utilize their cc & mobility properly and instead of realizing that it’s a l2p issue, they will go on the forums to complain about it and tweet @PvPDevXYZ.

Also it’s not a requirement to be public in any shape or form, Holinka just chose to do it himself. Therefore it’s a gg no re in my opinion. We will see what the future holds. Maybe they will find another masochist, who is willing to put himself on blast and take the constant abuse.

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Well I do agree they get alot of abuse from ppl, but I havent rly cared much about their twitter activity or w/e.
The issue ive had is when they are silent and dont say anything about “we know xxx and we are looking into how to fix it without breaking it” or anything which they can do while being anonymous. Just like they are doing when they are giving their ideas on why they are changing certain things.
“We have seen ppls issue with rogues/boomies/destros but we do not see that big of a deal” or “we are waiting until AWC before we nerf things further”

Any information, even if its not someone who go public with their name, is still appreciated.

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Cared and tried so much that he revealed that he and the devs actually choose to not communicate with its playerbase because of a few mean words on Twitter. Yeah, truly cares :rofl:

Acting like there is somebody that does that now??? I’d rather have nobody than have somebody that is supposed to, but doesn’t anyway.

They will bully them if they demonstrate blatant incompetence and neglect for their job and playerbase, and I see absolutely no issue with holding people accountable for their failure and incompetence.

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We all know what he posted back then and what ideas he brought. Then when they were liked he got promoted to PvP dev in MoP. Since he took the role MoP was only better so it’s obvious he was responsible for that. I remember season 12 when everything was one shotting when Fist Weapons had less PvP Power than other weapons when BM was bugged like this:

When Arms was one shotting like this:

Suddenly MoP became good.