PVP Dmg Reduction Aura: Feedback

i think its obvious to most of us, at this point that blizzard was a bit heavy handed (or too generous depending on your personal perspective) when it comes to the blanket dmg aura reduction.

i am hearing numbers as crazy as 50% and even some extreme claims of 80% (however i believe the latter to be a blatant exaggeration) and i think most would agree that this is an absurd number.

i am not personally in favor of this blanket fix to pvp as i personally believe its going to cause all manner of problems down the road, but i can acknowledge that something has to be done about the unhealthy burst meta as well, and therefore i will make the following 2 suggestions (these are NOT necessarily related nor dependent on each other).

  1. instead of the 50% number, crank it down to 20% and see what happens.
    1A. put the dmg reduction aura on the pvp gear - not a blanket - 10% for 2-set, and another 10% for 5 set.

  2. change the spirit stat - add spell mitigation by a factor of 0.2% per point of spirit - now this stat might actually have some value in both pve and pvp and serves to take down the casters a notch, because frankly their ability to scoff at armor entirely doesn’t sit well with me (and if you have the games health in your interest it should bother you too).

there is no counter to magical damage other than resistances and that’s a rare stat to find on any noteworty pieces of gear and even if you were to gear for it, you’ll just catch a self-nerf in functionality as you’re just giving up all the other meaningful stats in order to stack resistance (hello nax sapph LMAO).

classes who have no interest in spirit will still be very vulnerable to magical damage (because lets be honest, even with spell mitigation nobody will actually seriously gear for spirit as a priority) as their spirit value will be low, while other classes who might already find spirit to be somewhat attractive will simply benefit from it a tad bit more than they currently do.

sure, my warrior/shaman/whatever melee class will have insignificant amounts of spirit because the mere sight of it makes me go “yuck” but those 50-60 points of spirit would now at least give me 12% spell mitigation which is not significant enough to hinder me being killed by direct spells such as fireball, but might be enough to make something like dots a less oppressive source of damage.

for classes like mage, priest and warlock, spirit would become much more attractive, and serve to keep one another in check… it also makes pretty good sense lorewise that a wizard-type character is naturally better at dealing with magic damage compared to, say, a warrior who has no knowledge of magic.

I think you bring up a great point about magical resistances.

Currently there is just way too little viable gear with magic school resistance.
And the classic implementation is scuffed to the point where dots only have a resistance check on application, and 0 reduction on ticks.
200 shadow resistance? the warlock will not even notice that.

All the magic classes except mages can now reduce an increadible amount of physical damage.
While no one can do anything to protect themselfs against magic.

When players take so little damage, it means non healing classes which are depending on bursting down before they themselfs take too much damage, suffer.

Shaman, Meta warlocks, and Shadow priests still outperform other classes by a mile.

Due to melee being so gear dependent, they either have to go with

  • High damage gear, causing them do die before they can get the kill
  • High stamina gear, causing them to not be able to outdamage heals

very good point about resistance checks only being on application - pretty ancient design and in hindsight very short sighted.

resistances could serve as the “resistance check” while spirit could act as the sheer damage mitigation after the resistance check either fails or succeeds.

resistance check failed; ok, now we apply the spell mitigation from spirit, and send in the spell damage as calculated by that mitigating factor.
aka your 1200 dmg fireball will now do 1056 damage after mitigation is accounted for, after a resistance check fail on your target.

a very reasonable change if you ask me… certainly better than allowing 100% of the damage to go through unmitigated every time a resistance check fails.

i feel like this deserves to be its own topic, but i figured i would lump it in with my feedback on the pvp damage reduction aura, as the two issues are somewhat related.