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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said. (Less so on that developers are intelligent part.)

Look, this is the first major change WoW has seen since Arenas launched. At the beginning of BC nobody was quite sure what to expect. Classes and gear and even the Arena rules evolved since that time, but we still have seen nothing on the scale of the class and gear changes that occured when Lich King went live. We've done our estimates and players have made many predictions and we are all going to know a lot more about the true state of things in a few weeks here. Sure, I'm nervous. The forums and perhaps even the actual game are going to be pretty crazy for a few days. If the past is any indication, there will be at least one or two huge issues that nobody predicted while some of the things we were all worried about will end up being not that big a deal. But you have my word that we will keep making adjustments until things feel fair.

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Is the sky still falling?

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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said.

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Well, this part isn't entirely right:

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Well, they could just nerf all damage classes, or buff resilience (if people were resillience capped, they'd take less crits and burst damage), or buff healing... but any change they make is going to have possibly large effects on PvE (can't kill bosses 'cause all your DPS classes suck, healing trivialized and healers won't die in PvP while warlocks get steamrolled, etc).

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A reduction of the coefficients of MS and wound poison would have no effect on PvE.

An increase to player stamina by 20% would have little net effect on raiding if it was compensated for by a little adjustment to each tanking spec, as people other than tanks don't much gear for stamina or care about it that much in PvE raiding anyway.

Restoring bonus armor to PvP gear would barely effect PvE if not subject to armor multipliers like those of bear tanks.

Causing stuns to break after some large figure like 10000 damage (still way above the damage cap for other CC) wouldn't have to affect PvE, like diminishing returns already sometimes function differently in PvP versus PvE.

Enough little changes like those examples in combination could greatly help the PvP issues while not ruining or even much changing PvE.

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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said. (Less so on that developers are intelligent part.)

Look, this is the first major change WoW has seen since Arenas launched. At the beginning of BC nobody was quite sure what to expect. Classes and gear and even the Arena rules evolved since that time, but we still have seen nothing on the scale of the class and gear changes that occured when Lich King went live. We've done our estimates and players have made many predictions and we are all going to know a lot more about the true state of things in a few weeks here. Sure, I'm nervous. The forums and perhaps even the actual game are going to be pretty crazy for a few days. If the past is any indication, there will be at least one or two huge issues that nobody predicted while some of the things we were all worried about will end up being not that big a deal. But you have my word that we will keep making adjustments until things feel fair.

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So healers, especially priests and to a lesser extent druids, will be almost unplayable in arena until S8 when itemization allows them to reach the resilience cap - and that's alright with you?

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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said. (Less so on that developers are intelligent part.)

Look, this is the first major change WoW has seen since Arenas launched. At the beginning of BC nobody was quite sure what to expect. Classes and gear and even the Arena rules evolved since that time, but we still have seen nothing on the scale of the class and gear changes that occured when Lich King went live. We've done our estimates and players have made many predictions and we are all going to know a lot more about the true state of things in a few weeks here. Sure, I'm nervous. The forums and perhaps even the actual game are going to be pretty crazy for a few days. If the past is any indication, there will be at least one or two huge issues that nobody predicted while some of the things we were all worried about will end up being not that big a deal. But you have my word that we will keep making adjustments until things feel fair.

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I can understand there's no point in making sweeping changes without definitive data and time will tell who's right, but from a mathematical perspective I'm thinking the people that are saying resilience can't compensate for the current situation may be right. If resilience can't be used as the 'fix everything' stat, then what happens?

Edit: I should mention that when I started playing in TBC (I was late to start because I quit playing for a few months) I didn't think resilience gave enough benefit when compared to +healing. One day I 'just tried' it by crafting and gemming a few pieces of gear for my priest and could notice a difference. Then I started collecting the BG gear and by the time I had 4 pieces gemmed and enchanted it was a drastic difference. So, 'the math' floating around may not be the best indicator of how things will work.

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So healers, especially priests and to a lesser extent druids, will be almost unplayable in arena until S8 when itemization allows them to reach the resilience cap - and that's alright with you?

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I sure as hell am not healing the gankfest to ensue....

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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said. (Less so on that developers are intelligent part.)

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You need a raise.

Arena burst will favour both burst classes and classes that have an immunity ability (such as pally shield, iceblock, evasion/CoS to avoid said burst) in S5. As people gain resil and stamina, heal classes/comps will become more viable as will classes that rely less on crit to do damage (due to the nature of resilience). This is similar to burst in S1 arena in TBC and its evolution over the seasons. Healers will surely get their day as resil and stam scale - even if that day isn't S1 - but that gives the burst class a chance to do fine for 1 measly season until they become obsolete again.
The problem I see with buffing resilience as it stands is that for classes whose mechanics benefit most from crit - resilience becomes a much larger nerf than it does for classes crit benefits less. If Blizzard starts to consider measures to add survivability in the face of massive burst damage - I hope they look at a straight-up player vs. player only damage reducing talent, debuff , new stat similar to resilience, or an overhaul of resilience to be purely damage and not crit based else the same classes that shined in S4 will reign supreme again in later arena seasons for WotLK.

Plan B = Morning After Pill!

I know lots about this on my mage, where my Blastwave accidentally "knocked up" other players, spawning many children in game.

=(

Basically it boils down to:

Play a dps class

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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said. (Less so on that developers are intelligent part.)

Look, this is the first major change WoW has seen since Arenas launched. At the beginning of BC nobody was quite sure what to expect. Classes and gear and even the Arena rules evolved since that time, but we still have seen nothing on the scale of the class and gear changes that occured when Lich King went live. We've done our estimates and players have made many predictions and we are all going to know a lot more about the true state of things in a few weeks here. Sure, I'm nervous. The forums and perhaps even the actual game are going to be pretty crazy for a few days. If the past is any indication, there will be at least one or two huge issues that nobody predicted while some of the things we were all worried about will end up being not that big a deal. But you have my word that we will keep making adjustments until things feel fair.

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Tthis is not entirely a just an across-the-board issue of damage outscaling healing. While all healers are dealing with the excess of damage output on varying levels, survivability is much more of a problem for some healers than others. These issues are entirely separate from the overall "damage > healing" issue, so will they be addressed?

Thank you GC, this is the type of response we've been screaming for I think, even though some people may not agree. We've been saying "WTF! HEALERS SUCK IN PVP!!!! WHERE IS OUR RESPONSE?!! Even just to say FU, PvP healing is dead!" Well, there we are folks, we got our response. Thanks GC for taking time to respond to our concerns, even if some may not like or distrust what you say. At least we got a response :D. Keep it up bro, you're efforts are most appreciated.

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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said. (Less so on that developers are intelligent part.)

Look, this is the first major change WoW has seen since Arenas launched. At the beginning of BC nobody was quite sure what to expect. Classes and gear and even the Arena rules evolved since that time, but we still have seen nothing on the scale of the class and gear changes that occured when Lich King went live. We've done our estimates and players have made many predictions and we are all going to know a lot more about the true state of things in a few weeks here. Sure, I'm nervous. The forums and perhaps even the actual game are going to be pretty crazy for a few days. If the past is any indication, there will be at least one or two huge issues that nobody predicted while some of the things we were all worried about will end up being not that big a deal. But you have my word that we will keep making adjustments until things feel fair.

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Why cant you just allow a bunch of premades on a PTR for testing? I thought PTRs were for testing, not live servers? Instead it seems you are wanting to hear what the players say in week(s) of time. Will you believe us then when burst classes can still kill people that can even react, do damage, or heal?

And what do you expect cloth classes to be able to do in the period of week(s)? They wont be able to get hardly any arena gear lol.

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But you have my word that we will keep making adjustments until things feel fair.

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So youre going to remove all arena gear acquired earlier in the arena season, reset all team ratings, reset all arena/honor points, balance all classes, balance arena, then re-open arena? That would seem fair to me.

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I agree with just about everything Lissanna said. (Less so on that developers are intelligent part.)

Look, this is the first major change WoW has seen since Arenas launched. At the beginning of BC nobody was quite sure what to expect. Classes and gear and even the Arena rules evolved since that time, but we still have seen nothing on the scale of the class and gear changes that occured when Lich King went live. We've done our estimates and players have made many predictions and we are all going to know a lot more about the true state of things in a few weeks here. Sure, I'm nervous. The forums and perhaps even the actual game are going to be pretty crazy for a few days. If the past is any indication, there will be at least one or two huge issues that nobody predicted while some of the things we were all worried about will end up being not that big a deal. But you have my word that we will keep making adjustments until things feel fair.

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Making arena points a requirement for almost ALL gear is suppose to makes things balance faster right?

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Making arena points a requirement for almost ALL gear is suppose to makes things balance faster right?

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It could. It will certainly force more people to do arenas, so more people will be able to witness first-hand the situation, so more people will jump on the forums and complain about it, encouraging them to fix it sooner. Hmmmm, I also made it to the end of typing all that without laughing.

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Edit: I should mention that when I started playing in TBC (I was late to start because I quit playing for a few months) I didn't think resilience gave enough benefit when compared to +healing. One day I 'just tried' it by crafting and gemming a few pieces of gear for my priest and could notice a difference. Then I started collecting the BG gear and by the time I had 4 pieces gemmed and enchanted it was a drastic difference. So, 'the math' floating around may not be the best indicator of how things will work.

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The resilience math appeared wrong to you because almost everybody fails to calculate the combined effect of the old PvP gear armor in combination with it.

Two-thirds of the perceived total incoming melee DPS reduction came from the PvP gear's armor, not the resilience alone, especially as the level 70 cloth & leather PvP gear had extra bonus armor. Of course, that's greatly nerfed now, with less than half the armor percentage mitigation on season 5 gear against level 80s that the old gear had at 70.

Now, when DPS has gone from 1000 DPS for new 70s in TBC to 3000-4000 DPS already for new 80s, it won't be enough to get even 1000 resilience, which reduces by 18% the average DPS of a 35%-crit-rate melee attacker.

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The resilience math appeared wrong to you because almost everybody fails to calculate the combined effect of the old PvP gear armor in combination with it.

Two-thirds of the perceived total incoming melee DPS reduction came from the PvP gear's armor, not the resilience alone, especially as the level 70 cloth & leather PvP gear had extra bonus armor. Of course, that's greatly nerfed now, with less than half the armor percentage mitigation on season 5 gear against level 80s that the old gear had at 70.

Now, when DPS has gone from 1000 DPS for new 70s in TBC to 3000-4000 DPS already for new 80s, it won't be enough to get even 1000 resilience, which reduces by 18% the average DPS of a 35%-crit-rate melee attacker.

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That makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to post :-)

The glass is half empty again :-(

As the previous poster pointed out, armor based damage reduction hasn't kept up. Everyone is more susceptible to melee damage now than they were at 70 because of the armor scaling formula and the lack of +armor on gear.

Burst damage on the whole has gone through the roof and health, despite being a fair bit more than you'd see on people in TBC hasn't scaled as well.

Classes have gained more forms of CC's and interrupts and ways to deny others the chance to actually play the game (being denied the chance to do anything but tank damage be it out of your control, i.e. someone has stunned you or in your control, i.e. Dispersion and Deterrence etc) and yet survivability options haven't noticeably increased for a lot of classes.

There's *still* no workable solutions for some ranged classes to escape from melee range against melee classes. And yet every melee class has some way to snare, root or stun others or some other way to get into melee range. If you want all fights to happen within melee range so that melee classes can do DPS, then don't pretend that casters are supposed to stay at range, and give us the tools necessary to actually defend ourselves while in melee range.

There are some classes and spells that suffer far more from resilience on other players than other classes. Some spells are being penalised *twice* by Resilience, like for example all of a Shadow Priest's DoTs as they're effected by both the lowered chance to crit (which directly lowers their DPS via the Shadowform talent) and they're also effected directly because they're damage over time spells. If it wasn't for the fact that Shadowform buffs all shadow dmg by 15%, against a high resilience target a Shadow Priest would probably get more DPS from their DoTs while *out* of Shadowform than in it because of this oversight/bug.

As for healers? You can't heal if you're crowd controlled or your target dies in under a second. And yet there continue to be added new ways to lower how much healing can be done (witness Blood Plague).
Again, mentioning the Shadow Priest (I am one obviously), it seems like it's sort of assumed that a Shadow Priest because they have the ability to shift out and heal that it's okay that they have no *effective* ways to defend themselves. But with 71 talent points in the game and the specialisation that brings and utter lack of synergy between deep Shadow and healing, then sure, we can heal, and with the spell power changes we heal for "decent" amounts but we lack all of the necessary tools to be able to make use of it. Not to mention we've got so much tied up to being *in* Shadowform that being forced to leave it is in most cases a sure fire way to lose. At least with 3.0.8 we don't have to shift out to Abolish Disease which is a very welcome (and long overdue) change.

Going from my experience in TBC (not a high level arena player by any means, just from a long time playing the game) and from what I've seen so far, here's my predictions for WotLK pvp:

Season 5) There will be a limited role for healers at the start and any class that lacks burst DPS or has high survivability will be very hard pressed to do well in Arena. There'll be a big influx of people wanting to try out arena at the start but interest will wane a bit when some classes realise it's not worth their time except for whatever is needed to get the low hanging fruit gear. At the start resilience will be somewhat scarce obviously and it'll all be about burst.
Blizzard will suddenly realise what people have been telling them since beta is actually true (just like so many other things) and they'll probably find some way to lower burst DPS and maybe DPS as a whole in PvP. Maybe (given so many other "will never happen" things that have happen) they'll go with the -X% damage taken from PvP combat "buff" that some other games have.

Towards the end of Season 5, when more people have level 80 resilience/pvp stamina and with some adjustments to burst DPS, we'll begin to see more balanced play. This will lead onto:

Season 6) Much like Season 2 in TBC, everyone know will pretty much have good resilience and stamina. They'll have reached the "baseline" for level 80. Coupled with the previous nerfs to burst damage it's possible this season might show a repeat of the WLD style outlast comps of season 2 where healers actually get a chance to heal and games aren't usually over in the blink of an eye. Good CC combinations and putting pressure on the healers will probably matter more again this season, and games might go on a bit long with some comps. However with the general experience Blizzard have gained more classes and comps might be viable than the usual WLD/PMR we saw in season 2 and in all the tournies that used season2/tier 5 gear in TBC.

Seasons 7 and 8) The defensive increases on gear will probably still be somewhat static compared to the previous seasons and so it'll be again all about the increase in DPS. And once again, those class