Consumable feedback: Get rid of Gravitational Displacers from pvp

PVP Battlegrounds
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Please never introduce items as busted at Gravitational Displacers to pvp again. With TWW around the corner I feel the need to broach this subject one last time. Ever since we have been allowed to use these in pvp at the start of season 3, displacers have been a plague on competitive team fights. Entire teams in epic BGs wiped out in 2 globals. Fire mages were the worst abusers but the vast majority of aoe abilities rely on damaging/CCing stacked targets in small circles. That’s the reason we tend to stand spread out in pvp but displacers have a 40 yard diameter.

A minute+ fight being reduced to 5 seconds is ridiculous and demoralizing. It has been allowed to go on for far too long. It’s so powerful that if you know about it you are compelled to use it. People don’t get to play the game or react much because there is little genuine counterplay.

Wiping a team with aoe is one use but there are many applications. Like warlock mass teleport the team off a cliff, around walls, to an edge, into a box, out of towers, etc. Pulling the whole team to the edge of a hill and knocking them off to their doom. Trap teams in a warrior spear or balance druid solar beam. This item became stronger than any existing utility move in the game, making some BGs a miserable experience.

I truly hope these will be gone in TWW and fire mages toned down, but this went on for more than 6 months and I hope to never see a repeat of it. If you must make engineering items this insane then do not allow them in even unrated BGs like the disappointing decision made to consumables at the start of DF season 3. Ironically this was our only blue post we got for all of DF in the BG forums.

I hope they were sincere with that last remark about monitoring feedback before making further decisions. I simply wish this had not gone on for 2 whole seasons. There are other issues with the consumable changes, but I’d like to keep the focus on displacers are they are such an outlier. I’ll just say that large list of stuff sharing a 5 min cooldown excludes the use of all but a couple consumables, Crimson Embers are a bit too good, and mana potions seem almost useless.

I will say that they DID make an undocumented change to Sticky Warp Grenade to make it follow some LoS restrictions and no longer able to teleport up to enemy Graveyards. Before you could use sticky warp grenade to get almost anywhere, including outside of BG maps with flags and up to normally inaccessible GYs. So clearly, they are following some feedback - I wish that displacer had gotten the same treatment.

Sticky Warp Grenade was how people did stuff like this.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1158329850998837379/1210111118773592084/image.png?ex=66b11a0d&is=66afc88d&hm=f39f6558aac289952f561c8a4d0ad7bb47c945496a447073e4ac3d49fd7b17b8&

And how I could get on top of buiding in BGs and do stuff like this when testing.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1158329850998837379/1227501237327630418/World_Of_Warcraft_Screenshot_2024.04.10_-_02.11.08.33.png?ex=66b115dc&is=66afc45c&hm=9f8d9e7cb30a3641a8c49abd12afd7560af4ff7e813e5512a75395e1b9a99320&

Here’s some examples with gravitational displacers but they are not hard to find with how prolifically displacers are used, but obviously most instances aren’t recorded. You’ll have to download the discord attachments to view them on a media player. I didn’t know how else to post them.

Alunethmaster has a bunch of clips of him displacing teams into fire mage aoe wipes. Here’s one of them.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bmUaERBqDb0

I displacer leg sweep a team at LM in AB to pest fogger them to their deaths. I’ve done the same thing in eots as well. They really need to change eots design.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1158329850998837379/1234746777362759711/World_of_Warcraft_04-29-2024_23-2-39-136.mp4?ex=66b113cc&is=66afc24c&hm=4fac1527929f6cdda11b2e4c39cb30124d882a0d3735b032afe7ed076a25c577&

Premade vs Premade Fury warrior PoV. At the 2 min mark there is 5 or 6 displacers used in the opening AV fight. Enemy team was stacked over and over as they were slaughtered. Warrior spikes over 4 million dps. This was 5 months ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3thbK4tQm0

Another Alunethmaster clip wiping a group at IoC hangar after displacing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y4er6nGtx8

Deepwind Gorge. Alunethmaster waits invis at the team fight to displacer into aoe that wipes most of the enemy team by himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQSckw5c7BI

Entire pug Horde team wiped at IoC hangar by Alliance premade using displacers and fire mage aoe before Horde can even make it up the ramp leading to hangar. Mage does 18M dps, no joke. This post isn’t about premades in random BGs but they do use displacers more than most teams, to gain additional advantage.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1192328059722944583/1237672602424840242/WoW_the_nukening.mp4?ex=66b12caf&is=66afdb2f&hm=890d852d51f5c21b9fb42f9e9017634309cd2f33ba36f61f1927b9b9228fd91f&

This is simply my death log to a fire mage aoe at the start of a silvermines game. Even in reg BGs fire mages delete teams. This post is about displacers but it is partly a warning to not let fire mage get to this point again. This was one of my fastest deaths and living bomb deleted me along with my team. I’ve seen mages get 20 kills and do 30M damage in only 2 globals in epics comparatively.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/564596751177220118/1269787830490497194/image.png?ex=66b15592&is=66b00412&hm=04c5c46ec17fe7b7373cb7b6535842b661de1244081f30be445bad307a4187ec&

Fire mage has gotten so bad that premade pvpers decided to meme on it by stacking fire mages in epic BGs, but displacers are what enable their combos that delete entire teams and open the opportunity for other aoe specs to contribute far more than they ever should.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=145uoinhiHU

30 Likes
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Excellent post. I hope the dev team is watching this. I’m not a fan of consumables in instanced pvp. but of them, the displacer is the worst. It takes complete control away from the player, dumps 'em into a spot with others and allows for all the stuff you’ve noted and I have seen personally in epics.

It’s bad game play.

4 Likes
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Dave likes fire and this message.

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most op item i have ever seen in pvp.

i really hope this doesn’t work in tww lol.

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Fortunately, it does not work in the pvp content that is being developed.

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Yep. Displacers gotta go, get a level cap applied like a lot of past engineering items, or be unusable in instances.

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+1 displacers gotta go

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New consumables have had way too much emphasis and effectiveness this xpac, especially because of the burst/AoE centric design. Would’ve been better to have kept the usual consumables purchased with Marks of Honor for BGs and have a few new consumables for wPvP. New, impactful engineering items should be usable by engineers only, and they also shouldn’t surpass the impact of actual class/spec abilities.

As usual, blizz didn’t think through their design. The usual argument is “but anyone can use them;” however, those saying that always fail to account for the fact that it’s typically large alliance premades in discord coordinating ‘consumable spec stack plays’ in specific, advantageous locations vs. teams (whether pugs or premades) that are positionally on the back foot due to map design.

Again, I fault blizz’s poor, imbalanced design much more than the players. It’s natural for people to exploit things to their advantage, and they will as long as blizz lets them.

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Fire should not be tuned by epic bgs. Nothing should ever be tuned by it. Stupid item but tuning should not be done

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That’s good to hear. 2 seasons too many. I figured they were going - partly this thread was to emphasis that we don’t want stuff like this happening again.

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I think what Snowcrest is saying here is that it is not usable in Blitz etc…the new stuff. He is being a bit sarcastic, poking fun at Blizz for not being on top of it. Which is valid. I also think Blizz would annouce if they disabled some of these for random/epic bgs in TWW. So, I imagine they will be just as usable in TWW as they are today.

Hopefully, Blizz will see the light here, though.

If I’m wrong and Blizz has disallowed these, fantastic. But I think Snowcrest was making a point of sorts.

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I think he meant Blitz, since that’s the only thing being developed. Which yeah, it’s rated so of course it’s not gonna work there.
We’re still not sure about epic / reg BGs in TWW.

I’m guessing you just skimmed the post. It is not exclusively an issue when coupled with fire mage, and there are also clips of a fire mage deleting normal BG teams with them.

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Consumables only work in unrated matches, it’s basically a step up above world pvp. It’s nice to have some area of the game that has relaxed rules to allow for fun.

I think it’s nice that there’s actually a place where the bombs can shine, along with other profession consumables.

There’s so many things that engineers make that just never see a lick of use, but are supposed to be fun. The bombs are practically designed to be used in pvp environments. In every expansion they are so niche, the demand hits the floor because there’s no application for their use in dungeons, raids, instanced pvp.

In world PvE, every creature has been defanged so hard that you can pull an entire area and kill it in 2 hits without any tricks. There’s no threat that requires or asks more of your character. You pulled more, oh noes it’s dead in 2 seconds or it’s pecking at naught point 0-X% of your health for 8 minutes. No one is going to spend on that

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So you feel that an epic BG spamming displacers makes for better gameplay?

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I would say that getting things like neural silencers or other craft-able goods would be a better solution than deleting fun

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neural silencers do not effect displacers.

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i threw 20+ players off ioc hangar with a displacer + ring of peace last night.

pretty much won us the node and the game lol.

working as intended

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They need to develop counter-play more so than they should just strike things into the abyss. Like my shaman basically gravity displaces people around the map with static field totem and totemic projection plenty. Thunderstorm into the mix on BG’s like Eye of the Storm and I’m happy to oblige.

Seeing a blood dk on Isle of Conquest just AoE Gorefiend gripping people into a number of effects probably makes his day, but there certainly aren’t enough of them in the wild blue yonder of PvP BGs for it to be a concern worth intervention.

If they need more time to do so, and people really are seeing these things wreck strings of games, sure put the consumables on hiatus.

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Make it usable only if the player queued solo :heart:
Boom huge blow to premades

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You’d be surprised. Most of the alliance premades solo queue because no one wants to lead a group.