Fixed stats and weaks attacks: Why even PvP in WoW?

Community General Discussion
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Hey guys, not trying to start a flame war but I am really curious about the strange state of PvP gear and PvP’ers in WoW today.

For background, I used to love PvP and arena back in Wrath-Mists. I found it a lot more enjoyable to fight other players in an MMO where I wasn’t fighting a character with fixed moves/stats and each encounter was bound to play out different. On the flip side, it was also cool to build my character how I wanted so I could be a different warlock than the next player (say I built haste heave instead of crit).

There was one aspect of PvP I didn’t like: Resilience. Being robbed of customization, which in WoW is secondary stats and gear augmentation, just to stay alive longer in PvP was crap. So what if I die quick, let me build a glass cannon. This problem obviously got in worse in Mists, then came to a head in Legion where PvP was treated like a side activity you couldn’t earn any gear from.

Fast forward to today and I see that PvP gear now does the WoD system where it jumps up ilvl in PvP combat. Great solution imo. Now I can customize my gear right? Appearently not.

In addition to that, every single minor or major patch iteration that’s come out in DF has nerfed PvP in some way, and people seem oddly happy about it? Like, is it not fun to be strong?

I guess my geniune questions is; do people want WoW PvP to play like Mortal Kombat or something?

My read of this weird push towards nerfing everybody so everyone hits super light in PvP and not allowing players to decide their own stats on PvP gear is that people seem to want it to play like a competitive fighting game. I hope thats not the case, because WoW should never be treated like that imo. It’s an online, class based RPG. The whole reason to play is to build your character as strong as you want in whatever way you want. Duh, people are always going to create a meta but in an RPG of all things shouldn’t I have the choice to ignore it?

If I’m not getting paid for this, and I’m not getting gear I want from it, why play?

I don’t know, maybe I’m alone on this but I feel like trying to balance WoW arena around a choose-your-fighter console fighting game really takes all the fun out of it. I just want to be able to play the game how I want and get gear I want from it.

Side note, I love fighting games and I understand PvP will have seperate balancing, I just don’t want WoW to be a game like Street Fighter where I pick a pre-determined character and compete for cosmetics.

TL;DR How do you guys feel about WoW PvP? Do we want it to not be an mmo-rpg and be more like a classic fighting game? Or is there anyone else who wants to earn player power from doing this particular end-game activity?

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I’m not really sure what you’re asking here. I read your whole post and not sure what your issue is in PvP. As a warrior, I don’t feel like my attacks are ‘super light’. You crack someone with a 90k+ MS or Execute, that’s not light especially if you fire them consecutively.

Is there an issue with the gear? I feel the scaling and progression with your gear based on your rating is fair. So what’s the main issue here?

1 Like
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Hey Ginzo, I probably could’ve been clearer. The point to address is that PvP gear always has fixed stats and you have no option to choose what secondaries you have. In addition to that, it seems like 90% of PvP notes I read are making a move function differently in PvP or weakening CC. The question I’m proposing is do you want more class customization in PvP? Or do you think the path the Devs seem to be heading down with “character templates” is acceptable?

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I think Devs should make the potential builds equitably viable. For example, as an Arms Warrior, I like the idea of having a pure bleed build, but sacrificing other talents to do that is not feasible.

Now, while that is a result of the Devs design, a Player is going to make the ‘character template’, not necessarily the Devs. That’s a player driven thing. It’s more nuance in PvP too since it’ll depend wholly on the player skill/ability.

So in short, I’d like more elements of what’s available to be equitable to others. Most don’t see the point of taking something like Rend and would bypass it altogether.

I think this is more about counter play. CC should not be a perpetual buffer to keep someone safe. If there’s a counter to a CC, then it should by all means be played and applied. Almost every class has some sort of gap closer, root, stun, etc etc… counter play to CC is important.

I don’t worry about it as much as most gear appears to be favorable to the class anyways. Having more crit for example. However, it goes back to the flexibility of the talents. If Haste affects bleed/dot output, then I would take more Haste if a Bleed option was applicable. But it’s not so I’d probably look for crit gear than haste.

That’s my thoughts at least as a pleb pvp’er.

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Not seeing how this is the case.

Every piece of PvP gear has vers on it; that’s a given, no getting around it, it’s the modern resilience. Beyond that, for each slot there is (I think) always a choice between a crit/mastery/haste item as the second secondary stat. Beyond that, you can use those great vault token thingies to add gems and slot in even more of whatever specific secondary you want.

This, coupled with the WoD style scaling system, coupled with keeping the gap between honor and arena gear at 13 ilevels, results in likely one of the better PvP gearing systems they’ve ever cooked up.

What, exactly, do you want?

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I think we are passed customizable play styles. 90% of the play base are meta slaves and the first thing they do when reaching level cap is copy and pasting in the same meta build as everyone else. This isn’t new to DF but has been very big for most of the games existence. It just feels that while up through cataclysm it feels like maybe 40-50% of the players were meta slaves today it feels the overwhelming majority of wow players are competitive e sports types who are meta slaves.

I’d like customization too but frankly the talent trees they’ve introduced in DF don’t really add anymore customization than we had with the old trees and the main reason is that we have to select our core abilities as “talents”. Customization would be passives primarily with a few capstone active abilities that DRAMATICALLY alter our gameplay.

As is, it’s basically right side is ST, left is AoE.

An example of engaging passives - multi shot now hits a single target multiple times if there are fewer than three targets.

Your critical strikes now deal 250% critical damage

These can shift rotations and also change stat priority depending on build

The only class that comes to mind for me atm that even has minor customization of play style is unholy death knight and your options are essentially:

AoE
Rot build
Big burst build (wounds)
Pet build

Oh and only one of these builds is viable in PvE according to the meta slaves (which dk is bad class rn btw)

Some of my more out there ideas - a tank spec based on parrying and dodging. Talents to purely increase dodge and parry chance but also say a talent that gives you added benefit from say haste to increase parry chance that no other class has. Imagine a survival hunter build such as this that gets big crits on mongoose bites used after a successful dodge or parry. There was even a class mentioned in the WoW RPG books known as a “primal” where the line between man and beast was blurred. Perhaps the survival hunter can sacrifice its pet to take on some of its attributes similar to warlock tome of sacrifice.

Sacrifice a bear 20% HP, 10% Armor, a cat bonus dodge and attack speed etc. this could be used to make a truly unique and customizable play style

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Crafted PvP gear in 10.1 can have whatever stats you prefer. You can craft haste mastery gear with PvP ilvl.

If your point is that versatility is a meta stat and you don’t want to give it up… well your argument is just kind of nonsense then. What’s considered meta is based upon on what is useful and versa is always going to be useful in PvP by nature.

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I’m a PvP’r and I have no idea what you’re rambling on about, are you under the impression we use stat templates or something?

this is still a thing.

Lol this tells me you clearly haven’t played PvP in Dragon Flight. PvP right now is insanely bursty.