Community Manager Lore stopped by a thread on the World of Warcraft forums that discussed what good changes will be coming to PvP in Warlords of Draenor. He gives us a lot of solid information that helps clear up any misunderstandings players may have and reassures us that WoD will be one hell of an expansion for the PvE and the PvP players!
He first goes on to talk about (Marked in blue) some of the features and changes that will be happening in Warlords of Draenor while reminding players that this is just what has currently been revealed and discussed and more will come as development continues.
CC Disarmament: there’s a lot fewer CC spells, especially instant and auto cast CCs, and more shared DRs among the ones that remain.
Health and scaling rebalance: means little to no Base Resilience or Battle Fatigue are needed, and classes that aren’t as reliant on gear to perform. Also does wonders for PvP class balance.
Ashran: our new open world PvP zone, which we’re not quite ready to share details on yet (but what I’ve seen so far looks awesome!)
Skirmishes: unrated Arenas that can be queued for either solo or in a group.
Spectator invites & Tournament gear: additional tools to allow tournament organizers to run high-quality tournaments without needing direct intervention from Blizzard.
Our new built-in Group Finder: much easier way to find party members for rated BGs or Arenas.
All of the current features sound great, CC is being toned down so that an arena match doesn’t consist of one person being unable to control their character for a prolonged period, making CC more of a tactical decision instead of players just using it when it is available. Base Resilience is being scaled down as well meaning that the games gear, hp and damage is a lot more balanced in Warlords which is always great news. Ashran is going to be an ongoing PvP world zone unlike that of Tol Barad or Wintersgrasp the fight will never actually end and a player will be able to make a difference to the overall battle depending on their contribution! Skirmishes return, this is a feature players have wanted back for a long time and it allows you to queue into unrated Arenas with either a premade team to test out a certain comp etc or be matched with a random player just to practice and play for fun. The Spectator mode is one that has me very excited, I enjoy watching communities and fansites setup PvP tournaments but the game currently makes it very difficult to do, with the changes anyone would be able to setup a PvP tournament which will help the PvP community overall, so I can’t wait to taste this feature out in the WoD beta. Finally their will be a Group Finder for Arena and RBG’s, for those players who find it difficult to get an arena or RBG team can now queue for rated PvP and get matched with random players. Obviously not many of the more series players will use this feature but I feel its great for those who haven’t had the chance to do rated PvP due to not having experience in rated PvP.
Lore then goes on to talk about how current gear and stamina scales in MoP
Currently, in Mists, level 90 characters have a relatively high amount of base health, and a relatively low amount of base damage or healing on their abilities. As a result, your health from Stamina doesn’t increase as quickly as your damage or healing from Attack or Spell Power. To use some made up numbers for perspective, your gear might account for 80-90% of your damage, but only 40-50% of your health. That’s why, as the quality of your gear increases by hundreds of item levels over the course of an expansion, we see such a high swing in damage output compared to health pools.
For Warlords, we’re simplifying that by making health and spell effectiveness scale a lot more linearly. Base health is being lowered dramatically (and the effectiveness of Stamina increased) to the point that as damage or healing goes up, health pools go up alongside them. That lets us ensure that PvP game play at low gear vs high gear feels relatively similar.
On top of that, we’re increasing health pools in general — they’ll be much larger in comparison to the damage players are able to deal to each other than they are today. Resilience and Battle Fatigue were added because without them, an attack or heal would account for massive chunks of a player’s health bar. With higher health, that same spell doesn’t have as big of an impact.
Here he was asked about scaling WoD as currently in MoP we have seen huge jumps in damage and healing outputs as players advanced in gear. Currently our damage scaling is higher then our health pool is scaling which is why base resilience and battle fatigue were brought into place as a current fix without having to change the actual stats we are getting on gear. Although not perfect this solution has helped keep it in check for the most part although by what is said things will scale a lot smoother in WoD due to the overall stat squish!
(It’s worth noting that all of this is after the item squish, so it’s all relative. The actual numbers, including health pools, will end up much smaller compared to how things are today.)
That’s exactly what I meant when I said we’d be increasing the effectiveness of Stamina. You will get significantly more health per point. I don’t have the exact amount per point handy, but the jist of it is that the Stamina on your gear will be enough to increase your health pool at roughly the same rate that everything else increases your damage/healing output
Players then become concerned with how this will affect geared veteran characters and freshly dinged 100 characters as it could go both ways, the geared character completely overwhelms the fresh 100 due to the stat difference or the fresh 100 can put up a close fight against the veteran player.
Here are shades of grey here. Of course, someone who is fully kitted out in Conquest gear should have no issue taking out someone whose first action at level 100 was to queue for a battleground. Building up and improving your character is an important part of World of Warcraft gameplay, including in PvP, and we have no intention of changing that.
However, the player who immediately queues for a battleground at level 100 is probably pretty excited to get into PvP, and it’s heartbreaking to suddenly find out that you’re not just disadvantaged, you’re completely ineffective. The level 100 shouldn’t be on equal footing with players that have spent time and effort gearing up, but they also shouldn’t feel like they can’t contribute to their team’s success — and their teammates shouldn’t feel like they’re essentially down a player.
A fresh 100 should absolutely, categorically, 100% be completely aware that they’re going to need better gear to go toe to toe with the big cats, but they shouldn’t feel like litter in the meantime. Follow?
Lore explains that a new 100 character won’t feel completely useless and burden to their team by taking part in PvP which is how it currently feels in MoP if you have entered a BG on a low geared character you feel pretty helpless. While he does say that geared veteran character won’t feel they are on equal grounds with the fresh 100, they will beat them with ease unless they play badly or have no cooldowns while the fresh 100 has everything ready to go is the general vibe I get from Lore’s explanation!
Overall PvP in Warlords of Draenor feels like it has been given a lot more focus then in previous expansions which is great as WoW maybe arguably a PvE game, it still has a huge PvP community and I feel solid changes to PvP will be welcomed.