Cloth PvP Survivability (Source)First, I think the warlocks would disagree pretty
vehemently about their survivability. This message comes up pretty
regularly on the damage forums.
Second, we know it's posible to make very tough priests, because Disc
priests were exactly like that in later seasons. It took a high amount
of resilience gear and some specific talent choices, but they could
take a lot of damage and heal themselves through a certain amount of
it.
I agree we have some work to do on Holy priests in PvP.
I think the concept of a cloth class without a lot of mobiliy that is
supposed to just heal itself through damage would be a pretty hard
sell. But we try to address it on the mitigation side for priests (and
the occasional fear bomb doesn't hurt).
Damage/Healing or Survivability: Your Choice (Source)
I understand your point, but we actually do ask
players to choose between more damage or healing and survivability. It
is supposed to be an interesting decision. When you really want a
talent because it is really useful for PvP and that prevents you from
getting another talent that you also ideally want, you can argue that
means the talent trees are actually working. One of the things I like
about PvP specs is they do place a lot more emphasis on hybrid builds
in order to pick up certain talents, while a great many PvE specs
choose one tree and try to max it out.
I am probably taking the mob example far beyond what you intended, but
I think it is actually illustrative. You are going to defeat, by a huge
order of magnitude, most of the mobs you meet. In many examples it
won't even be a challenge -- you will two shot them. If the PvP
matchmaking is working well, however, you will lose 50% of every match
(and that assumes classes are perfectly balanced, which I won't pretend
to claim). It is much harder to feel like a hero in an Arena because we
aren't trying to make you feel like a hero. Psychologically, I think
that is a bigger deal than a lot of players realize.
Crown Control in PvP (Source)
Players complained endlessly about being chain feared and stunlocked too. Still do. It's the reason there are so many ways to break CC in the game now. You can't pretend that crowd control was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
Damage in Arenas: Higher than TBC? (Source)
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but no, this was not the intent.
It is hard to nail the sweet spot on Arena balance, and what that sweet
spot is depends a lot on what role you play. At times players have felt
that they couldn't prevent someone from healing, which turns the entire
fight into mana draining, silence and crowd control, since nobody ever
dies. Damage-dealers were frustrated because they felt like just
beating on someone (which their entire spec may have been designed
around) was ineffective. Currently, the opposite is true, where players
can be beaten down very quickly and healers tend to wonder why they
should even bother trying to heal.
Resilience will make a difference - remember that not only is PvP gear
itemized for resilience, but it uses up points that would normally be
spent on +dps. The defenses are not only higher, but the offenses are
lower. Furthermore, once players can survive for a few seconds, it
tends to force everyone to worry about defenses once again. Will
resilience make enough of a difference? That is something we are
discussing right now.
We hear and understand all of the concerns. I don't have any
announcements to make of changes at this time, and honestly changes of
the magnitude we're talking would not be the kind of thing I would just
casually drop as an answer to a forum thread like this. But we do hear
you.
Player Numbers versus Blizzard Numbers: The Nerf Game (Source)
It is challenging to compare our numbers to those
that come up from the community. Since I have been doing this gig,
there have been plenty of times when players will say "Yeah, we figured
X was overpowered," but that is almost immediately followed by "but the
nerfs were too much." I have honestly yet to see more than one or two
players ever agree that the magnitude of a nerf (any nerf) was
justified. I'm just sayin.
We have to rely on our testing more than the community. That's just the
way it has to work. Your numbers, however, are a useful reality check.
In situations where the community consistently finds different numbers,
we might go check our numbers again. We will do so in this case.
Something else worth pointing out is the whole concept of "your mileage
may vary." Not every player has the same timing, gear, situational
awareness or even rotation. In many cases our calculations are based on
the higher ends of the spectrum -- the damage potential generated by
the best players in ideal situations. For a class like the hunter that
does require a fairly high amount of skill to master that may mean that
your damage didn't drop as much (because you weren't using a technique
that the experts were using to coax every bit of dps out of their
attacks) or your damage may drop a lot more (because the experts are
able to switch to other sources of damage more readily than a less
skilled player).
All I'm saying is that WoW isn't such a simple game that a 10% buff or
nerf done on our end will automatically result in a 10% buff or nef for
every player out there in every situation.


