Feedback: PvP Updates in Embers of Neltharion

In Development Embers of Neltharion PTR Discussion
#1

Greetings PvPers of the Dragon Isles!

In the Embers of Neltharion PTR, you’ll see a number of PvP changes, and we want to discuss and provide context around these changes. We’ve felt that the game pacing in Dragonflight has been close to what we’d like, apart from having health spikes that are too large in burst windows. The changes below are decisions we’re looking to make alongside each other, to move even closer to game pacing that we’re happy with.

Critical Strike PvP Value

At the beginning of Shadowlands, we increased the Critical strike damage and healing value to 175% from 150% in PvP (from the normal 200%). We will be reverting this change, so the Critical Strike value will be 150% in PvP to address our burst concern.

We recognize this will slow down game pacing, and we will keep an eye on it to ensure it isn’t too slow. Alongside class changes, we intend to adjust the primary stat gain from Gladiator’s Distinction as a tuning knob to keep PvP pacing in a healthy place.

Crowd Control

In September, we published a post that both discussed and recognized crowd control continues to be a point of concern for players in PvP. We shared that we would continue to analyze and evaluate how crowd control plays in PvP and discussed some other options for future patches to further address the concern of crowd control, one being adjusting the PvP duration on individual abilities that may have not been changed for years.

In the Embers of Neltharion patch, players will see the first step of this, as we are making targeted adjustments for crowd control durations in PvP. Our general guideline was to reduce the PvP duration of most Crowd Control abilities so that nothing should ever go beyond 6 seconds when modified (except when modified by Evoker’s Oppressing Roar). We want crowd control to remain meaningful when coordinated well, while still allowing for reasonable counterplay opportunities by the opponent.

In addition to the typical crowd control abilities that have diminishing returns, we are adjusting the interrupt duration of some abilities that are not PvP specific. We feel that this change would have minimal impact in other content due to how creature spells are generally designed, as most kicks are spent on spells that have inherent cooldowns longer than the interrupt duration. We will also be keeping extra consideration of these changes for seasonal dungeons.

We evaluated different crowd control types and each ability within each category to determine a healthy duration for them. We do not want all similar crowd control types to necessarily be unified and want to ensure there’s unique flavor to class abilities and what makes sense within their overall kit. We’ll keep a full list of the changes in our PTR Development Notes.

In conjunction with these changes, Gladiator’s Distinction will no longer provide 10% CC reduction and the new season’s professions items will no longer grant 5% CC reduction.

We are continually having discussions regarding crowd control in PvP to make targeted adjustments that will be healthy for the game’s state and look forward to your feedback on this.

PvP Talents

We’ve been excited to watch players utilize the new talent trees that came in Dragonflight. In previous interviews, we hinted at a PvP talent refresh in Dragonflight similar to the refresh that occurred in Shadowlands’ Chains of Domination update, and you’ll see the start of the refresh in the Embers of Neltharion PTR. Our goal with this update is to bring new and exciting talents into the game and also revitalize existing talents that may be undervalued as the game has evolved.

In this week’s build you’ll see new PvP talents and changes to some existing ones; over the coming weeks you will continue to see more updates to PvP talents. Keep an eye on the latest PTR Development Notes for details of the changes.

Precognition

In Dragonflight, we introduced a new PvP talent, Precognition. We have been happy with how the mechanic has played out in practice. However, we feel that taking one of the three PvP talent slots has been too expensive. To solve this problem, we are removing Precognition as a PVP Talent and we’re going to be making it available as an Optional Reagent that can be used to apply the Precognition effect to crafted gear. This Optional Reagent will count as an Embellishment.

We recognize it has been challenging to play a healer in PvP, and we think the Crowd Control and Precognition changes are a step in the right direction to make playing healers a more enjoyable experience for the average player.

We look forward to seeing how the above changes play out and are eager to receive feedback on them throughout the Embers of Neltharion PTR cycle. We’ll have a Play with the Blues event later in the PTR cycle, for more focused playtesting, so keep an eye out for communication about that soon.

Thank you for all of your testing and feedback.

12 Likes
10.1 massive PvP changes
10.1 pvp design intentions
These CC Changes... What were they thinking?
Precognition as baseline 10.1, good or bad?
PvP Play With The Blues 3:00 p.m. PDT March 31
#2

Precog being baseline is gonna be crazy. On one hand I really liked using it on my healers, but I felt there was a trade off. Hope it doesn’t get too crazy with everyone having it.

6 Likes
#3

So setup comps are basically dead? Embrace the zug zug meta in every bracket.

On a more constructive note, rogues (especially assa) being powerful this season is not having a 8 sec cc ability but the excessive amount of healing reduction effects in play. No reason to nerf such an iconic cc ability to ground but leave all the crazy mortal strike effects in pvp. IMO nerfing healing reductions is much better than nerfing the interrupts and CC’s. I’m afraid overall these changes are not addressing the root of the “bad” meta in DF.

I really hope devs consult with top players on each class about these changes. At the end of the day, they’ve played the game for years and have a better idea on in what direction wow pvp should be evolving in.

29 Likes
#4

Wow, this is a lot of changes.

I’m not really sure about the across the board tweaks to CC.

7 Likes
#5

I’m concerned about Precognition becoming more easily available in conjunction with the interrupt duration nerfs with regards to DPS casters. I agree that making healers better to play is a good direction to take, but classes like Mages, and Locks already abuse Precognition and having multiple spell schools to play around kicks. Part of the difficulty (and reward) for playing a DPS caster is having to play around interrupts, just like how melee have to focus more on positioning and mobility. My concern is that we’re gonna end up with a similar situation to the Shadowlands trinkets that got abused by casters to basically become unstoppable when combined with their other tools to cycle through and I think it might be worth considering making Precognition only work for healing specs. When the reward for landing a kick is a 3 second single spell school lockout, but the punishment for missing it is now dealing with a fully CC immune DPS caster for 4 seconds (not even at the opportunity cost of a PvP talent anymore) it doesn’t really feel like an equal exchange.

23 Likes
#6

everyone back to orc lol

28 Likes
#7

Not gonna lie, the change to Succubus seduce is absolutely terrible. The 8 second seduce was literally THE ONLY THING keeping Succubus BARELY viable in pvp. Reducing seduce to 6 seconds instead of 8 is actually the most troll thing you’ve done so far and I’m not even memeing

4 Likes
#8

CC is already not impactful enough and these changes double down on this PvE in PvP playstyle that plagues the game right now and lowers even more than what -15% bonus was lowering.

I’d much rather see tuning around removing the third DR and have it just be full/half/immune or tuning the knob on making drs reset at 20sec rather than 18 or both these types of tuning together.

Also Orc is a big part of balancing too and must be considered for on any changes and needs to be completely disabled or reworked if CC’s are lower and orc ends up bringing them even lower than what it wasn’t able to stack with the set bonus.

Precog is also very very strong and just needs a flatout rework. It could afford as strong as it is as 1 of your 3 honor talents, but getting it nearly for free as an embelishment is waay too strong especially in the risk reward of kick durations being shorter.

Also if streamlining to a more narrow audience/making the game more accessible the UI overhaul of dragonflight has really missed it’s mark on adding new features. The default arena frames should really include diminishing returns without needing an addon like gladius or sArena. Could also add other features for teaching people the game like proving grounds for pvp to learn how to CC/fake interrupts.

Lastly, 175% crit modifier is much better for the game than 150% when you can tune down outlier offensive cooldowns separately instead of across the board. This also helps bridge the damage between cooldowns instead of spikey cooldowns having the same issue regardless of where the crit modifier is and damage just feeling even lower between cooldowns.

84 Likes
#9

These changes are absolutely amazing, rogues having their cc reduced has been like 15 years in the making. Nothing should have 5 cc abilities and have them be longer than 5 secs.

Great work!

16 Likes
#10

Please do not go through with these CC changes.

First off, Orc will absolutely be dominate again with these changes.

Second, these CC changes do nothing to solve the problem players have with CC. The main issue is an abundance of micro CCs. With these changes, you can still be triple DR’d on multiple CC categories and experience a long period of lockdown. Except now you are also killing setup and skill based comps because traditionally longer CCs will be too short to be meaningful.

Currently, the arena meta already feels very “PvE” like, where most classes triple DR every CC in the game while spamming the most damage as their main win condition. These changes only serve to reinforce that type of gameplay and homogenize win conditions across classes in arena.

I like Nahj’s idea above to remove the 3rd DR much better. That would reduce the amount of times a player is micro CC’d while also cutting down on longer CC chains without killing them outright.

19 Likes
#11

Will there be any plans for the Orc Racial after 20 years??

16 Likes
#12

Terrible changes. This is what happens when you listen to low rated players and not the pros.

29 Likes
#13

CC in wow pvp is my favorite aspect of the game cc already felt pretty useless at -15% and pve design has overtaken the pvp parts of the game that used to take a lot of finesse and was very punishing if you misplay any part of the match (similiar to my view of competitive fighting games and what can make them great.) there are cooldowns, cc, positioning, trinket, outplaying opponent etc. all of them have many different punishes or cc plays can have counter cc plays theres so much that makes wow a great pvp game. nerfing cc any more than a baseline 15% sounds absolutely horrible and I would not continue playing anymore as dealing consistent damage would become more important and positioning would also be less important. there would be overall less punish for misplays and creates a rather soulless dps race. I get theres growing pains with this expansion but this is not it and I’m losing faith fast

15 Likes
#15

this is not a good change in my opinion and is moving the game in the wrong direction. The easiest part of wow PvP is optimizing your damage rotation. Part of the complexity of wow PvP is how to use your CC in impactful ways. And when CC is stronger it rewards players who know how to use their CC properly. Please consider not implementing this!

15 Likes
#16

Just nerf Orc racial, make it dr instead of cc duration on stuns.

I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE ROGUE TEARS, THEY FEED MY SOUL!

10 Likes
#17

As an arena healer, I welcome almost all of these changes, but I’m concerned that with the removal of the 10% CC reduction from the Gladiator’s Distinction, and the removal of the 5% CC reduction from the seasonal PVP item, you’re essentially strongly encouraging (or mandating) everyone to go back to Orc now, which is disappointing.

9 Likes
#18

So many bad changes. Nerfing spriests yet again when spriests are so low down on the rankings AFTER the nerfs and continue to fall. No nerfs to the classes that need it either.

I might honestly quit because of how out of touch devs are in this game, just think that you only got a customer for 2 months and they left because your devs are so bad at pvp design and you ignore so many other avenues of the game entirely.

10 Likes
#19

Are you serious

3 Likes
#20

So you guys are buffing mage sustain dps right?..right??

6 Likes
#21

best pvp changes in 15 years

14 Likes