[Classic] PvP needs some changes

Community WoW Community Council
1

At the rate it is going, PvP participation in WotLK will see the same downward trend as TBCC saw. Let’s go down the list…

  1. Rating requirements on gear

Get rid of it already, it is ridiculous, it is unnecessary, it gives an unfair advantage to certain classes, it creates gatekeeping when you have to beat people with the gear while simultaneously not having the gear to get to the required rating, it has NEVER been a good thing and never will.

Pre-patch should have been the wake-up call that tells you how people will do PvP when the gear isn’t gated behind unreasonable requirements.

  1. Deadly weapons are worthless

Completely outclassed by PvE weapons. Getting a 213 weapon from PvE is extremely easy while Deadly weapon requires a month of arena points on top of a ridiculously high rating to achieve and, still, the best weapons come from PvE with an ilvl of 226. The Deadly weapons need to be increased to 226 ilvl to justify its cost and to prevent PvE gear from outclassing PvP gear for PvP.
Furthermore, Savage and Hateful weapons need to be released.

  1. VoA and PvP gear

Here’s what is probably an unpopular opinion but… Remove PvP gear from VoA’s loot table, at the very least for the season 6 and onwards. It’s too late now for Season 5.

VoA creates a completely unfair advantage to people just for being lucky, giving them an edge in arena early in the season by giving them better gear for free because of RNG. PvP should be about consistency, not RNG drops.

  1. 2s, 3s and 5s points reward disparity

Normalize them. Ever since the formula was changed in Season 4, a 1200 5s rating makes more points than the highest 2s rating. This is simply unacceptable.

Increase the points gained from 2s and 3s to be much closer to 5s. Many of us DO NOT want to do 5s. It can be tedious to get 5 people together for it and it is unfun for a lot of us. Promote diversity in arenas rather than force players to do 5s just for points.

  1. Fix bugs

The gargoyle haste issue was reported in pre-patch and you still have DKs abusing it in both PvE and PvP today. Gargoyle machine gunning people down because of it. Resilience not reducing DoTs crit damage (Apparently this is getting fixed?), pet combat and sap immunity still not working as intended, the list is long.
We need those fixed already.

  1. Bots

They are everywhere in BGs, can we get something done about it?
This thread showcases this very well

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Gonna add another to the list:

  1. Wintergrasp faction imbalance

Don’t allow a Wintergrasp instance to open unless at least 120 people on both faction are queued to enter. It should never be a 5-20 people versus 120 people.
This system of opening more instances to accommodate the faction with more players queuing is not good.

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Can we get some attention on this?
With every week that passes, the average rating in arena goes DOWN when it should be going UP.

This trend means that large amount of people stop playing arenas and it is extremely bad for the PvP scene of classic if nothing is done.

Challenger rating is now LOWER than the lowest rating requirements on the first piece of deadly set (gloves) which are also available from VoA25.

How is it in any ways acceptable that only the top 35% of players can even access any piece of the deadly set outside of VoA?!

This has been a problem since first season of TBCC and the solution is quite literally just to remove the rating requirements on PvP gear to give a reason to people to do arenas for points and massively increase the average rating.

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The current season of Wrath Classic PvP is a season where players who want to participate in PvP have multiple ways of getting their PvP gear, including Hateful Gladiator and Deadly Gladiator gear. With both options available, our intent remains for Deadly gear to keep its rating requirements. We’ve been monitoring players’ rating distribution, and the percentage of players who have reached the rating requirements is much lower than we want it to be.

Over the next day or so, we’re implementing a rating calculation adjustment that will cause a continuous, modest increase of MMR for the rest of the season. This will allow for more players to achieve their rating goals and get more points overall throughout the season. This will also encourage players at the top to keep participating to get their end-of-season awards.

Regarding PvP weapons, in 3.4.1 we have made item power adjustments for both the items that drop from Ulduar and from PvP, and the epic weapons high-end PvP weapons will be at a similar power level to weapons dropped in Ulduar. We are also going to keep PvP items in VoA. This encourages players that might not be initially interested in PvP activities to try it out.

We’re aware of some issues involving Gargoyles, even after fixes we’ve implemented, and we’re still working on it.

Also, if you suspect that there are bots in your battleground, you can now report them from inside the game.

Thank you for your feedback.

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Thanks for the update Deaskis - it’s nice to hear that Blizzard is willing to make changes of this magnitude mid season.

There are some remaining major bugs regarding PvP and arena. Some highlighted ones are:

  • Shadowmeld not properly disjointing spells
  • Pets not receiving their owner’s resilience
  • Vanish not working true to original WotLK behavior (likely due to faster batching). Example - the vanish buff should grant immunity to certain effects
  • Certain races can double jump up to the boxes in the Dalaran Sewers arena
  • Spells that leave areas on the ground linger for far too long when players exit the area, notably flare, desecration, and frost trap
  • Hunter traps have varying times on how long it takes for them to arm
  • Pets are still getting stuck in the Dalaran Sewer arena starting area (clip from beta)
  • Shadow Word: Death recoil damage not breaking CC if CC was applied closely before the recoil damage.
  • Arena point cap should be 10k as it was in original WotLK instead of 5k
  • Grounding totem incorrectly absorbs reflected spells
  • Attacks can occasionally be dodged from behind

There are plenty of other PvP related bugs related to spells incorrectly keeping players in/out of combat, issues with pets and their movement/resources, and just general spell bugs like berserk+tiger’s fury, hammer of wrath, and backdraft. Many of these bugs are, and will continue to be documented on JamminL’s GitHub. We know that Aggrend engaged with the GH a fair amount during beta and we would always welcome more engagement even post-launch to help make Wrath classic the best game it can be.

There is also a >3000 member discord server of players focused on competitive PvP in Wrath Classic, which is where a number of these bugs (and many, many more smaller ones) have been documented. Deaskis if you would like a link to the server, please PM me here on on the CC discord.

In addition, we’ve noticed that sometimes changes/fixes are implemented but don’t make it into the daily hotfix notes. A notable example of this is the recent fix to ghoul corpse explosion and resummon cooldown. When the aforementioned gargoyle changes go in (along with any other changes, as small as they may be), some kind of simple communication letting us know would be tremendously appreciated.

Thanks again!

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Thank you for the response but I feel like this late into the season, the change should be more drastic to help PvP participation because, as it stands, it’s only going to be a fart in the wind for PvP participation.

I understand not wanting to make sweeping changes, but the time for incremental small changes is long gone. We’re already a month and a half into the season, making small changes should be something done from the start and monitored each week but doing small changes after so many weeks is barely gonna make a dent in the low PvP participation.

I don’t think simply doing an adjustement to rating calculation is enough.
Again, rating requirements is unfair to certain classes, especially in an already solved game, and it turns away a lot of players from PvP. There really isn’t a sweet spot for rating requirement that isn’t too high for casual players to bother or too low for its intended purpose.
Furthermore, the grind from 0 to the player’s skill rating they should be at is a problem in the sense that you cannot play with someone who already did that grind because it would hurt their rating to play with someone trying to catch up. This was less of an issue with TBCC because of the fact you could skip 0 to 1000 by joining an already established team, something you cannot do in the case of solo rating.

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Hi Deaskis & Happy New Year.

With Wrath Classic Season 5 concluding in a week, I’d like to reflect on this rating calculation adjustment and whether or not it met Blizzard’s goals.

This change was implemented on Nov 16 where it would “provide a continuous, modest increase of MMR for the rest of the season”. Both your post in this thread, as well as the developer note in the hotfix, cite “not enough players achieving their rating requirements/goals” as the primary driver for this change. My inference from this is that this change was meant to help out arena participants with ratings under 2000, as that is the highest rating requirement for PvP items (sans the purely cosmetic Tabard)

Ironforge.pro has rating cutoff data over time, which is the closest us outsiders can get to actual participation and rating distributions. Now we can’t solely associate any positive trends in MMR with the Nov 16 change; as the season gets closer to its conclusion, competition for end of season rewards increases. Players playing for the highest rated rewards then increase the R1/Glad/Duelist cutoffs from just competition. Thus I’d like to stick with the Challenger and Rival cutoff data, as again those players seem like the population this hotfix was targeting. Also, there’s less of a “end of season push” for these titles which better associates MMR change with the hotfix rather than changes in player behavior.

Looking at Nov 16 forward, we have the following data:

  • US 2v2 Challenger: 1383 → 1414 (+31)

  • US 3v3 Challenger: 1436 → 1472 (+36)

  • EU 2v2 Challenger: 1382 → 1415 (+33)

  • EU 3v3 Challenger: 1441 → 1474 (+33)

  • US 2v2 Rival: 1618 → 1705 (+87)

  • US 3v3 Rival: 1680 → 1760 (+80)

  • EU 2v2 Rival: 1655 → 1759 (+104)

  • EU 3v3 Rival: 1708 → 1777 (+69)

And some brief takeaways from the data:

  • The average MMR increase for the 0 to 65 percentile player was 33.25. The average increase for the 65 to 90 percentile player was 85

  • Neither of these increases are big enough to correspond to an additional PvP item being purchased, as the gaps between pieces at “low” ratings are all 100 or more. An 85 point increase would only allow people at 1950 MMR (Helm) to buy a 2000 MMR item (Shoulders). However, those thresholds are irrelevant for >90% of PvP participants.

  • Over 65% of the player base can still only purchase 1 PvP item. I would guess that of the players who have equipped a Deadly Chestpiece, the majority got them from VoA rather than purchasing them with 1600 rating.

Again, this is only a glimpse into PvP participation because of public API data. I would like to ask Deaskis/Blizzard who have much richer data: from your end, do you think that this hotfix was successful? Are you happy with the current rating distribution? Have more players “reached their rating requirements/goals” as was the original intent?

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