I don’t understand why PvP isn’t very well balanced.
They have the tech in the game to tweak abilities, from Damage, Duration, Cooldown ect. Examples would be Touch of Death having the tooltip “Reduced against players”, Another would be Corruption, infinite duration in PvE (talented) Reduced to X amount in PvP.
They used to have stat templates for PvP in Legion.
2v2 is a joke due to them not caring to balance it. 3v3 is the closest thing you can get to competitive PvP.
Battlegrounds are “fun” and not really used for much other than to unwind, Rated battleground are heavily limited to Class/Spec (demon hunter flags, blood DK point holders)
They have all these tools that would allow them to work to remove frustrating situations and add counter-play.
If PvP is a backburner to the real game, why even support a dev team for it if they’re held back by PvE changes or and aren’t even allowed to use tools to separately balance PvP.
It’s just like, the game now has the ability to add the dials to improve how PvP feels but the PvP dev team is either held hostage and can’t do anything or they basically just catch a free paycheck every month since there are so many pain points when playing anything that isn’t casual BG’s.
I don’t believe the designers for PvP are the responsible party when it comes to many of the spec specific tuning. Like, if Fire Mages were budgeted around combust I don’t think they’ve got free reign to just change that for PvP only.
Whenever changes are made though they’ve gotta feel good to use everywhere not just one queue type. You also have to consider how the gameplay feels outside of places where honor talents are involved. Specs can’t be drastically different in raids vs arenas.
I don’t think they’re “held hostage” as much as I think it’s just a challenge making things work for such an old game with so many diverse player crowds but I’m not seeing things from the same perspective as them.
Wait there is a PvP Dev team? Where? Who? When? I will believe it when I see it. People say Bigfoot exist but think there isn’t enough evidence. Just like there isn’t enough evidence for me to believe we have PvP Devs.
Stuff has been broken for months. Who is supposed to fix that? No one ever does.
What’s mind boggling and hilarious to me is the decision making regarding hotfixes/nerfs. Like resto druids were nerfed basically instantly before people even had azerite traits figured out and have been garbage tier all season, and they weren’t even god tier when the nerfs hit. Meanwhile, shamans are allowed to play all season with their infinite toolkit when they are clearly the strongest, most versatile healer and have a divine shield totem on a 1 minute cooldown, end every game at 90% mana, and nothing changes. Heaven forbid Rdruids be strong, but 60k starsurge crits are fine, no need to hotfix that. It’s just so inconsistent and unjustifiable.
I don’t agree with this as they have the capability to tune all talents and abilities specifically for PvP.
They also have the PvP talents which have significantly altered play styles for specs in the past (for example see current Fire Mage, Frost Mage from Legion, Destro from Legion using aoe incinerate build, etc.). Basically the PvP devs can do whatever they want for PvP now. They are not limited by anything.
The only times I could see them waiting on changes due to PvE is if an upcoming PvP change will solve a PvP issue so rather than make 3 changes (change in PvP, changed in PvE, changed again in PvP) they’d just wait for the PvE change. For example in the past Feral needed a Brutal Slash nerf in PvP but nothing was being done about it. But about a month later a 30% PvE nerf rolled out which fixed it in PvP too. However stuff like that is only ok if it’s a ~month. It’s not ok if a change is 3+ months out to just leave something broke in PvP to save some time.
I mean they don’t even have to be intelligent. They could just semi blindly tweak damage/healing values weekly based on normalized arena representation until things even out.
That’s essentially what Dota does. Hero X is underplayed and at 45% win rate, let’s buff damage values by 5%, reduce this cooldown by 2 seconds, and see what happens. Constantly iterating.
It doesn’t introduce new abilities that radically change the game, playstyles remain intact, and the delta between specs slowly shrinks. Then save the bigger patches for new mechanics.
Can literally be done without even playing the game, just by analyzing data and trends.
[They] can make a case that “x ability can’t be removed” and I think that’s why the honor talents have kind of become the playground for that type of development. That much I know. The other stuff I’m just not sure about. If they had free reign then why, when it was known, did they allow windwalker to remain in a state where all the damage was budgeted into ToK/ToD? I see the nerfs that happen extremely quickly but never anything else. Not until a major patch anyway.
Well that’s the question we all have. Why do they allow things to be broken for so long when they now have the ability to do PvP specific tuning. Their ability to tune PvP and PvE separately isn’t even in question as they have stated they can going into Legion and we have seen numerous examples of them doing so (even in BfA). The question now is why don’t they do it? And for that none of us have an answer hence this thread.
Yeah, at the start of BfA, we saw a lot of changes that would say, does % less when engaged with enemy players. Now we don’t see that for some reason. Like when they buffed Fire Mages, for PvE reasons but didn’t need it in PvP, they didn’t do the % less and they became wayyyyy over the top, and have been for months.
That’s why every chance I get I bug the relevant people for developers notes on changes. So we’ll get some answers. I just wanted to share what I did know though