Earlier we shared our philosophy around some of the changes we are making in Midnight to better target Combat for Everyone.
We would like PvP to be more welcoming to new and returning players while retaining its current skill expression. Tackling this is a challenge we don’t take lightly because to learn PvP it requires learning how all the classes and specializations play which takes effort and patience. Beyond that, you have to track their own abilities, cooldowns, buffs, and debuffs as well as your teammates and enemies in real time in The War Within. This can become overwhelming, and we want players who are interested in PvP to have a welcoming first experience both in terms of gameplay and minimum knowledge for competency.
Some of the fun and depth of WoW’s PvP experience comes from skill expression in playing your class against others in a high pressure environment. Combat mastery continues to be a key skill to PvP success, and navigating your class against others in competition leads your team to victory.
We understand addons have become a vital tool in PvP over the years. A frequent experience of players that want to dive deeper into the higher tiers of our rated game modes, is that they are instructed by their peers to set up a multitude of addons to show important information to increase their odds of victory. We want to add some emphasis on existing UI elements and create new ones, which you will be seeing through alpha that will allow you to track important information in PvP, such as debuffs on nameplates (example shown below) and tracking diminishing returns (this will come in a future update).
We’re eager to hear your thoughts on these updates we’re making in Midnight and we’ll be sharing more information about PvP content in Midnight as alpha progresses.
Another major PvP issue: A lot of buffs are missing from the “enemy buffs” category for nameplates, including Aspect of the Turtle, Evasion, and Glimpse. This is really important for PvP, because it’s really difficult to see some major offensive and defensive cool downs in the chaos of a fight otherwise.
Please do a pass to include all major offensive and defensive cooldowns on enemy nameplates — and please make sure this pass includes PvP talents.
fix pvp modifiers for starters. the stupidest things have been implemented. like warlock had people macro to REMOVE a buff aura. because it nerfed the spell in pvp when it procs. pvp modifiers are the rabbit hole to wonderland.
at one point in WW, slam at 20 rage was doing more than a full 40 rage execute
and other reindeer games. diminishing returns are honestly a meme, the “average” player has other skill issues than diminishing returns. like dpsing into monks karma and no way to intuitively understand that and dangerous spells. mount looks cool but ill never get it unless its in solo queue.
More testing, more problems with nameplates in PvP:
“Enemy buffs” only shows two buffs, and they’re always the oldest two buffs. This means that if someone has, say, Power Word: Fortitude and Mark of the Wild, you won’t see when they use an offensive or defensive cooldown. One fix would be to make “enemy buffs” always show newest buffs first.
As far as I can tell, “big debuff” (which shows CC) currently does not work on enemy players in the open world or in duels.
I also just want to reemphasize that a lot of buffs are missing from “enemy buffs.” As it stands, it will be really difficult to tell what’s going on in PvP without a clean pass on this. The unit frame and ability animations are too messy to rely on them in the middle of chaotic combat.
I haven’t played PvP in a while but I do want to get back into it. The problem is, the lack of participants in BG’s mid-season. Additionally, I wanted to have some fun and level up a character through PvP named after one of the characters my late brother had as a sort of rememberance to him but found literally zero people playing in the low level brackets.
What I found was no one PvP’s mid-season and no one PvP’s in the lower PvP brackets. I know what a lot of people are thinking “Good, PvP at max level.” or “Just wait in queue.” For the first one, this is supposed to be a game about enjoyment in anything you wish to do. It’s an MMO. I should be able to have fun in PvP at any level. For the second, I waited in queue last night until it literally cancelled itself at two hours in queue. I think this is partially due to Level Sync being allowed in low level PvP and level 80’s showing up in low level games and bodying everyone. I don’t know if this is still a thing, I only heard about it second hand from various individuals.
For fixes to this–I recommend watching a video by Mythical about this. I have the video queued at the portion where he discusses it but it’s a good watch altogether and I highly recommend a lot of what he’s suggested. I know it’s probably way too far along in development for Midnight, but it could be introduced in a major patch in the future and I think it’d really help with this problem.
Right now, the diminishing returns tracker only works with arena frames. So what happens in rated battlegrounds or blitz? Or world PvP? Will we just have no idea what the diminishing return on any CC is? Because that’s really bad.
Blizzard should consider to change dampening to either only affekt healers, so dps specs that relay on selfheal as def dont get wrecked compared to other dps - or change it from % less healing to % increase mana cost.
target frame debuff tracking need improvement with big debuffs aswell
I did some testing in duels with someone and though we weren’t trying to specifically figure out too many specifics, these are some things I have noticed:
As noted by others, a number of vital buffs/debuffs are not being tracked on nameplates. CCs on my end as an Evoker like Sleep Walk, Landslide or Terror of the Skies were not visible, and other defensives were not showing up: We had occasions where my friend couldn’t see that I had Precognition, nor could I when they had Spellwarding as a Paladin with not even an animation on the character to be able to tell.
Unless you are using the Default nameplate style, nameplates between friendly and enemy players are indistinguishable: The Default nameplate style will change the color of a player’s name to red on the nameplate if they are considered hostile; however, if you have one of the other styles selected (Modern, Thin, Block of Cast Focus), the names will show up as white regardless of whether they’re on your side or not. I was only able to test this in duels and WPVP, but assuming it’s the same in arenas or battlegrounds, this will be a huge issue as you will not be able to tell who is who if you have both friendly and enemy nameplates enabled and not using the Default style.
War Mode cannot be enabled in Silvermoon: The only eligible locations are still Stormwind, Orgrimmar, Valdrakken and Dornogal.
Make sure to re-evaluate some of the PvP spell modifiers: Some abilities that got changed altogether may have had them reset, and others may have gotten direct base value buffs/nerfs with existing modifiers for PvP not taken into account. We don’t want an accidental PvP modifier resulting in some classes/specs either severely underperforming or just outright nuking people in two hits for it.
I think PvP Trinkets should be equally good as other Trinkets. So that there will be more variety of Trinkets in PvP, adding more strategy and individuality in PvP.
With the latest patch and max-level testing, the UI in PvP still has two big problems:
“Enemy buffs” is missing a lot of major cooldowns, including but not limited to Evasion, Dispersion, and Aspect of the Turtle. It also displays oldest buffs first, which makes it so, say, Power Word: Fortitude covers that a demon hunter just used Blur. Please do a pass to add all cooldowns to enemy buffs on nameplates, and please make enemy buffs show newest buffs first.
We still have no way of tracking diminishing returns for crowd control outside of arenas. Now that we have max-level dueling and battlegrounds, I can confirm this is as awful as it sounds. Please add a DR tracker on nameplates (in the “shared CC” category, maybe?) and/or on target and focus frames.
Something is wrong with Numbers: sometimes you Deal absolut no dmg. Like 1-2% of Enemy hp with skills ( example rip tick for 3k ) , other Games it does 10-12k (seems okay I guess) . Im Not Talking about the 1-Shot stuff from dh/hunt etc…
I tryd to reproduce it but it seems very random. Played with an friend and we Both were affected- then he had to leave and After i got Games wäre I finally could do stuff .
Edit: found the bug: it has todo with PvP trinket give too mich stats.
PvP rewards and such in the past were given to the Honor/Prestiege System Track from Legion and has been the system with minor tweaks since. However, after a certain point, you dont get anything anymore.
I think it would be worthwhile and would love a Renown Track tied to PvP / Honor or Conquest that can rejuvenate this no longer supported system similar to something like the Delve Renown track that resets every season to reinvigorate interest in PVP with additional rewards, cosmetics, toys and other neat things. Maybe even items for World PvP.
Currently, every trinket that I have tested In arena on beta has very broken pvp scaling. the kickball trinket is non critting for ~100k, the ultradon cuirass grants a 10 MILLION hp shield (yes, 10 million), the gladiator’s emblem grants 218 main stat correctly outside arena but in the arena grants ~6,000 main stat, both on-use haste trinkets give 3000-4114 haste, the list goes on. Id love to be able to provide more feedback on the state of balance / the game, however currently the data we are getting from these games is all but irrelevant. Hope this gets fixed quickly so that we are able to provide you guys with a good amount of back end game data. The on-use vers embellishment for jewelry also appears to be extremely broken, however its hard to tell if its disabled or functional w/ broken values since by the time you would get a vers proc you already are almost guaranteed have an emblem proc and have triple the normal main stat and dump truck everything anyway.
With the introduction of our newest epic battleground, it is essential for the development team to address the long-standing issues of queue syncing and faction balance. The current environment is easily exploited, leading to highly disruptive, one-sided games.
A few months ago, an unannounced change was implemented to address queue syncing, appearing to prevent multiple 5 man premade groups from joining the same battleground.
This “fix” was immediately circumvented: Queue sync communities simply adapted by forming multiple 4 man groups instead. The exploit continues with minimal effort.
Symmetry in Premade Group Sizes
The current system needs to move past a simple limit on 5 man groups. The matching logic must strive for symmetry in premade group sizes between the two opposing factions.
The system should attempt to match equivalent group structures:
If the Alliance side has one 5 man group and one 3 man group, the Horde side should have an equivalent combination, or as close as possible.
Specifically, the queue should try to match:
The same number of 5 man groups on either side.
The same number of 4 man groups on either side.
The same number of 3 man groups, and so on.
Implement fully Cross-Faction Epic Battlegrounds
Similar to how Battleground Blitz already works:
Your character’s race/racials remain, but faction is irrelevant for team placement.
This change would not only drastically improve queue times, but it would make coordinated queue syncing virtually impossible to guarantee, providing a healthy, competitive environment for all.
