angryraidleader.com

I’m conflicted when it comes to PvP in World of Warcraft. While I think it can be one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game, I’m firmly convinced that the team that makes all the PvP decisions if composed of people that used to ride the short bus to school. I’m not going to get too deep into this topic, or I would end up writing some 400 page manifesto about how fucked up WoW PvP really is. So I’ll just talk about four things that I think are glaring mistakes:

1. WoW shows almost no signs of any kind of long term planning. Some of you may not have been playing long enough to remember this, but when WoW launched, PvP consisted of 2 or more flagged players bumping into each other. The honor system (which has been overhauled more times than I care to count) wasn’t even added until patch 1.4 and you had to be insane to want to spend the amount of time PvPing that the best gear required, WSG and AV were added in 1.5, AB in 1.7, followed up by some boring world pvp objectives added in 1.12 just before Burning Crusade hit. BC looked to have promise. They completely reworked the honor system and added arenas. But then they dropped the ball.
2. Over powered gear. You can argue until you are blue in the face that PvPers deserve gear just as good as raiders, but your words are going to fall on deaf ears. I have one character I raid with who I occasionally PvP with, and then I have another character that I only PvP with. It seems strange to me that one character would put in 15-20 hours a week raiding, while the other spent one hour in arenas, and maybe did a couple of daily battlegrounds each week, but they were for a very long time pretty equally geared. In fact the only big difference between them was that on my PvP toon, I could raid and put out just as much damage in my ‘PvP’ gear as all the geared raiders, but on my raiding character, if I tried to PvP in my ‘raid’ gear I’d get smoked by people wearing gear that took them a fraction of the time to get. To be competitive, I had to get a complete set of pvp gear on top of my raiding gear. When did PvP become the special fucking olympics of WoW. Everyone wins! Everyone gets a gold medal for showing up! You suck at PvP, but at least you tried! Wouldn’t it be great if raiding worked that way. Like every time you wiped to a boss you got half of his loot. “Hey man let’s go let Archimonde kick our ass, I need to get my Tier 6 helm!”
3. Resilience. This stat seemed like a good idea to me when they added it in. It was intended to give everyone more survivability. And it did, if you define survivability as being completely impossible to kill if you are one of the lucky classes and specs that are overpowered in PvP. In retrospect, I don’t see how they failed to realize this would break the game. MMO combat is made up of three things: damage, healing, and defenses. Damage kills you, healing gives you back health and removes effects, and defenses keep you alive. But when you change one of these drastically without balancing the others, you wreck the system. Resilience makes some characters able to survive so much damage, that as long as there is some source of healing, they’re almost unkillable. And we’ve all fought those characters….
4. Rock, Paper, Scissors. You’ve probably heard that term applied to World of Warcraft PvP. And while it works, I think it’s a flawed metaphor. As anyone who has fought a resto druid/MS warrior team in a two vs. two arena match can attest, it’s more like Rock, Paper, COBRA WITH JEDI MIND POWERS. Some classes and specs are just flat out broken.

I believe the problem lies with the original developers of WoW. I strongly believe that either PvP was never intended to be a major component of the game, or they didn’t have time to work on it during the games initial development. And anyone with a decent knowledge of game theory could have told them that if you are going to have players comepeting directly against each other, you have to balance them against each other. In other words in a PvP/PvE game like WoW, you don’t balance characters based on PvE, you balance them based on PvP and let the PvE world sort itself out. It may be annoying that that rogue can kill a monster faster than your shaman, but isn’t it more annoying that he can kill you with such ease?

But Blizzard did it backwards. They built the classes around PvE goals, and ever since then they’ve been trying to ‘rebalance’ things with all the finess of a Neanderthal. “Grog make hunters balanced!”

The most annoying part of it is they’ve painted themselves into a corner now. The problem is beyond repair at this point. Players would freak out if Blizzard made the kinds of sweeping changes to character abilities and gear that would be necessary to fix things. It’s ten times easier to give buffs away than it is to nerf them back. PvP has become the sacred cow of WoW geeks everywhere, every time someone talks about fixing it, a bunch of crochety teenagers starts screaming, “OMFG noob! Leave my epics alone! QQ moar! Lol!”

P.S. That reminds me, I have to post about how much I hate the expression ‘lol’.