Ghostcrawler’s Blog

The balance of the PvP side of World of Warcraft may leave a bit to be desired at the moment, but the developers haven’t forgotten about the players that love BGs and Arenas and changes are coming.

The full blog, available here addresses a wide range of balance concerns for both PvP and PvE. The overarching trends aside from balancing out damage seem to be a reduction in the duration of crowd control, particularly AoE CC. The most obvious culprit in this area is Mages’ new Ring of Frost ability which is spectacular to say the least.

There is also going to be a general reduction in burst damage. How much of this will come from resilience is unclear as of now. The majority of PvPers have at least partially completed their blue item level 352 set of PvP gear and have at least some resilience, but until everyone is rocking 3000+ resilience which appears to be around the ‘intended’ value, it’s hard to properly judge game balance.

It's coming... soon?

Ghostcrawler focused particularly on a few outlier classes that most people already knew were going to receive nerfs or buffs. Priests of the healing variety are due for some significant buffs, these poor specs are practically extinct in competitive PvP due to their ineffectiveness. Discipline Priests seem like the most likely candidate by far for receiving buffs in the near future.

Death Knights, Warriors, Feral Druids, and Frost Mages are the “big four” of imbalanced DPS at the moment if the general consensus is to be heeded. Necrotic Strike and Feral bleeds were singled out as likely candidates for nerfs. Warriors and Mages in general seem completely overwhelming in many respects, so the changes to those classes will likely be more thorough and affect more abilities.

Offensive dispels, which I singled out in my last State of PvP, were also targeted for nerfs.  Judging from Ghostcrawler’s comments it seems like Priests are going to keep most if not all of the utility on their offensive dispel, but Purge is on the chopping block as is Spellsteal.

Finally, Drain Mana is being removed from the game. Rejoice!

Rated BG Queue Times

Cataclysm’s release has been a resounding success overall, but the biggest flop by far has been the release of Rated BGs. In the run-up to Cataclysm players were promised a vast region-wide player pool as well as the ability to fight against their own faction to facilitate fast queues like the Arena system has.

The region-wide battlegroup is in place, but the same faction brawls never materialized. On North American servers players on Horde side are having to wait in queues that are sometimes upwards of 45 minutes to do a single Rated Battleground.

It’s difficult enough to get 10 or 15 PvPers together to queue, but the prohibitive queuing times are really killing RBGs for Horde players. The obvious fix would be to allow Horde on Horde action, but there has been no word on the issue so we’ll have to wait and see.

Tol Barad ‘Fix’

The new outdoor battleground area Tol Barad has been the subject of much angst in the WoW community of late. The battleground is wildly imbalanced in favor of the defenders, and Blizzard unfortunately doesn’t seem to have any idea how to fix it. In all fairness I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to balance it myself!

In response to the widespread protest over the balance of the area Blizzard added a hotfix last week that changed the Honor gains from victory on offense and defense. Defenders still get 180 honor for a defensive victory, but the big change was the whopping 1800 Honor that the offense got if they managed to pull out a win.

Now, you’re thinking what kind of fix is this? Offense still hasn’t got a prayer of winning without the devil’s luck. That’s true, but World of Warcraft is a social game. Enterprising players on the forums of many servers immediately suggested a system of “win trading” in which the defenders (or at least enough of them to tip the scale) would allow the offense would win in exchange for reciprocation when their faction happened to be on offense. Tol Barad is now changing hands like clockwork every two and a half hours on a huge amount of servers as Alliance and Horde work together to farm copious amounts of Honor in no time.

This bridge is the closest many players get to the Tol Barad battle due to 1:1 queuing.

Tol Barad still has a hard cap on how many players can enter, and is also balanced so that there’s a 1:1 ratio of Horde to Alliance in any battle. The offending faction has another way to get around this via the “Bridge Jumping” tactic.

Bridge jumping entails running back and forth along the Tol Barad bridge between the Peninsula and the Battleground and trying to be in the Battleground area when your faction wins. If you succeed then even if you weren’t invited to join the battle you’ll still receive the full 1800 honor! Beware though, if you stay on the bridge for too long without ‘resetting’ at the peninsula you’ll be teleported away and lose your chance.

Since then there has been another subsequent hotfix reducing the Honor for winning on offense to 360, essentially removing any incentive to collude to trade wins. Tol Barad is now back to it's previous state of defenders zerging nodes and the zone is rarely lost by the defending faction. Blizzard is also in the process of fixing the bridge jumping 'exploit'.

Many players are once again frustrated by the fact that Blizzard has chosen to revert the zone to it's previous terrible state without addressing any of the reasons why it is unfair and unfun. We'll just have to wait and see what comes next in the saga of disasters that is Tol Barad.