Arena changes incoming : Hotfixes and you

With the release of this movie and it getting widespread attention as of yesterday, here's a recent patch note:

10 Man Zerg Freya Hardmode
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuvKiJsG9Mo

So as you can see it's a pretty blatant fix for a fairly certain group, but let me ask you how many raids can pull this off and should it be nerfed for this reason alone. I think when you give a boss a heal that drops you have to expect someone tries to damage through it. Especially when the requirement was only a little above 6k DPS per 8 DPS in the 10 man raid (If the numbers quoted to me are correct). I've got to say personally I think if you can coordinate this and keep the entire raid alive and you wipe it everytime you get a snaplasher cause that **** just isn't happening... Well good job you just beat hardmode Freya you'd probably have an easier time doing it properly.

Arena Changes

Well there has been a slew of comments posted by blizzard rep's stating that "Burst is too high" but the fix can't be to lower burst because then healing potential becomes overdone, so in order to balance all of this out they need to change some major things. RMP is over represented but at the same time nerf RMP and watch double cleave take its place. I like hearing these posts because it reminds me that every once in a while the dribble I hear spilled by the average player of this game isn't actually taken too seriously because they think of the entire problem instead of just a quick fix like "Nerf DK's and ret pallies". So personally I started trying to think of how I would solve this dilemna and an old time solution that I've ranted about for a good chunk of time now came to me.

Arena water: Lets face it, this is what makes mana pointless, very few teams or I should say very few games end with 0 drinks going off in 2's at least. 3v3 a lot of games are bursted really early, but try to use mana burn, or any mana efficiency to win the game and it really doesn't matter. I mean I'm not going to start going on innervate right now which has some ridiculous regen, but possibly taking out the unlimited mana concept they've implemented could be a nice start towards pushing for a game to end from mana pools instead of requiring stupid high burst to win.

Take out burst, and you make rogues, warriors, and hunters 100% necessary because 50% healing is effectively halving healers, which means good luck winning a mana game when you heal twice as much as the other team, we're all aware of this but this games balance is kindof stupid, so I suggest everybody take a step back and imagine the larger picture of things before jumping to quick conclusions, but I am curious to hear what the higher end players think of solving this Burst vs. Survivability vs. Manapools issue. Because frankly I have to agree with the comments Blizzard has posted (soon to follow) that healers are just too damn good if you remove being able to burst somebody down.

Here's the post:
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Rogue Mage Priest
We'd prefer to see other comps as dominant as RMPs in 3s. The problem is if we nerf RMP without making other changes, then double melee teams would likely just take their place. The public perception is that at least RMP requires more coordination and finesse than double melee (though we also think there is validity to the claim that just because you have the option of crowd control doesn't mean that bursting someone down makes you somehow more legit.) (Source)

PvP Issues
I'll be very brief, but here are the problems we see in PvP right now.

1) Too much emphasis on Arenas and not enough on BGs.
2) Too much emphasis on 2s and not enough on 3s and 5s.
3) Not enough class / spec representation in Arena. Warlock, hunter and shaman numbers in particular are too low, but they're not the only ones.
4) Too fast-paced.

Let me explain this last one in more detail. Some people in the community think that burst dps is too high. We disagree, and the reason we do is that healing is also very powerful in Arenas, to the point at which not having a Mortal Strike debuff may be a huge liability. If you can't burst someone down when wounded, they just aren't going to die unless the healer is mana-drained or chain crowd-controlled, neither of which are overly fun in the extreme case. You can have too much damage, too much healing or too much crowd control.

But when you consider specific matches, particularly of the highest rated teams, those guys are using their full toolbox. The problem is that the windows in which to use those tools can be very small. When you are injured, you might have a global cooldown in which to respond. If you make it, you might very well be fully healed in the next cooldown and "reset" the match. If you fail, you're dead and the match may be over. We'd like to add an extra GCD or two to many of these situations.

Now there still are extreme cases of burst in some specs that need to be chilled out. However, if we just lower burst damage across the board we're concerned people just wouldn't ever die and only specs with multiple forms of crowd-control would be considered viable. (Source)

[...] I probably should have added an additional bullet, which is that in the previous season, starter resilience gear was either too hard to get or sacrificed too many stats. We want resilience to be attractive because of the survivability it brings (and I think that part is working), but we started players too low. You need like 500 before you start to notice its effect and 800 to 1000 before you actually live long enough to respond to attacks (though as I suggested above, perhaps not long enough). (Source)

Burst damage in PvP
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that burst is too high. Imagine we made changes such that getting an 8K crit was almost impossible and 3K or 4K hits were more common. Now consider what would happen. You hit someone. The healer heals them. You keep hitting. The healer heals them. Two strategies then rise to the top as the only way to win a match: keep the healer crowd-controlled forever or drain her mana. Yet not every class has the same amount of crowd control and very few have mana drains. We don’t want every class to have those abilities because then every class feels alike. Furthermore, playing a healer that never gets to, you know, actually play because you’re always sheeped / cyclone or OOM isn’t much fun either.

In the current game, imagine a mage getting beat on to the point where he is near Execute range. He decides to Blink. If he gets the Blink off, he might have just won the match because he can get healed to full before the melee close again. If he fails to get the Blink off, he’ll probably die in the very next GCD. He might have a window of 2 seconds max to win or lose the game. If you have those situations every now and then you end up with a nail-biter match. That’s cool. However, if every single encounter with the other team is like that, it’s just exhausting. Many fights will end in just a few GCDs. Others will go on and on, at least until the healer runs OOM, which is unlikely to happen with abilities like Innervate and Divine Plea. It’s just too extreme in both damage done and healing done. (Source)

Arenas and grinding for rewards
I think some players like Arenas because they are quick, easy to organize (relative to a BG), often have fast queues, and / or they just enjoy the “purity” (for want of a better word) of just trying to kill the other team without having to worry about flags, reinforcements, bad players not contributing to the war effort, etc. However, a lot of players who may not really like Arenas get drawn into them in order to procure the best PvP gear. This second issue is something we’d like to fix, but we need to develop a way to reward good gear through BGs that isn’t based on endless grinding. (Source)
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I'm also very curious to see the results of battlegrounds awarding top end gear based on skill not grind time. It's kindof like how some players dont like dedicating all their time to Raiding so they made heroic gear on par with ulduar 25 man. Yknow because we all love playing with retards in greens so we can get our stuff, somebody mail me a bot I need more honor gear.