PvP in Mists of Pandaria

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

Now that Mists of Pandaria has been out for a few weeks, we wanted to talk to you about what we think works in PvP, what we want to improve, and possible ideas for the future. I'm going to break this post into three parts: an analysis of the matchmaking or search index (MMR), our concerns about class balancing, and a quick look at some of our plans for PvP.

Search index

As you probably know, the idea of ​​the search index is to match players based on their ability. This is done by using a number (search index) that is adjusted based on the relative search index of the opponents you beat or lose. Matching players based on their effectiveness or performance helps ensure that less experienced players are not always bullied by expert players, and that competitors of any level win their victories against players of roughly equivalent ability. The search index is not intended to be a "PvP score" - its primary purpose is to match games. We've seen a lot of players asking for a search index reset, and to be honest we already had one in mind, and we even announced it beforehand. Some of you may be concerned that high-rating players don't have a reason to play and can just rest in their prime positions, perhaps even reaching Gladiator without facing any opponents. While we believe this concern has some basis, we do not consider that restarting the search index is the appropriate way to straighten out the issue.

Since the search index gives an idea of ​​your performance as a player, we do not think it makes much sense to restart it at the end of a season or expansion. Your ability is not likely to atrophy considerably more than your competition between seasons, so recalculating it is not going to do much good. If we reset the search index, there would most likely be a handful of uneven games in which expert players would abuse weaker players until the search index was recalibrated. It's a lot of hassle for a relatively small profit, as the search index is likely to be the way it was after all. It is important to remember that the Conquest Point Cap, Elite Rewards, and Gladiator Titles are tied to the Equipment Index, and not the Search Index. Your gear rating goes up and down as you win and lose, and it's really the most important figure when it comes to PvP in arenas.

However, we take a good look at how we calculate team ratings, and we conclude that our formula is not sufficient to properly calculate the potential for improvement over the course of a season. While your skill may not necessarily improve over the course of a season, your team clearly will, and that should affect your team's relative power. We are currently working on a change that allows team ratings to increase faster over time, as long as you keep playing. We can't share the details yet, but this fix will have the added benefit that players who keep playing will be able to achieve higher team ratings, and thus access more potential rewards, than someone who stops playing and rests on their laurels.

As a potential example, let's say that Fat Kid Steaks have an equipment rating of 2.700 and Mushan's Tongues have an equipment rating of 2.500. The Fat Kid Steaks decide that their team rating is high enough to rest for the remainder of the season. Mushan's Tongues continue to play every week, their team gradually improves and they win many of their matches. Because of the new inflation factor, your team rating increases by, say, 300 more points to 2.800. They are now higher ranked than Fatty Kid Fillets. If the latter decide to return to arena matches, they may also benefit from inflation, but they must play and win to catch up with the Tongues of Mushan. It is not going to be a system where you have to play every day just to defend your rating, but it is clear that it will not allow you to scratch your navel at the top and then collect your rewards at the end. We will provide more details on the exact operation of the system when it is close to commissioning.

We believe that this adjustment in the team index formula will provide a benefit similar to the "index deterioration" that some of you have asked for, but that it will be perceived as something more positive: instead of having the feeling that you have to always give that I'm hitting you simply to keep you up (that is, to keep your current score), players who continue to participate will be rewarded with higher team ratings. This will also make the highest groups in principle more active as the season progresses.

To consolidate this change, we are expanding the Patch 5.1 feature of upgrading the item level of your armor and raid weapons through Valor Points, and will now also include points of Justice, Honor, and Conquest. Now a Gladiator who has bought all of his conquest gear will have a good motivation to keep playing at 5.1, as he will be able to upgrade his set by using conquest points.

Concerns about class balance

We now have 34 class specs in the game, and the idea here is not to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Instead, I'm going to talk about the ones that players seem to care about the most. It is basically my point of view, so I apologize if you think I left something behind. Also, just because something is not mentioned here does not mean that it is not being considered. You can study some of the specific changes we are testing in the 5.1 patch notes.

Hunters with Beasts - We agree that accumulating too many cooldowns to blow someone up is not interesting, skillful or fair. (I also want to make it clear that in the face of all these incidents we do not blame the players for using the tools we provide them; the fault is ours). We are carefully studying the cooldowns of the various hunters with the intention of reducing their peak. Hunters will receive a benefit in that they no longer need to toggle between Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Fox. We also hope that these changes will help us see a greater representation of hunters with Survivability and Marksmanship.

Warriors - We do not think that the peak of the warriors is as uncontrolled as that of the hunter. It is possible, that yes, that the combination of the control and the peak of the warrior is too difficult to counter. The changes we are considering consist of reducing both the peak and the control. The Gag Order glyph in particular is too powerful for PvP. We believe that if you can keep a warrior at a distance, you should be able to shake off a spell (and if you are a warrior repelled by the very idea, you can always specialize in Storm Bolt). Shockwave, Avatar, and Recklessness are also mentioned often, and we are studying them as well.

Rogues - We think the damage of rogues in PvP is appropriate: the damage that other classes deal is too high, and we want to adjust those cases before fiddling with other things. We still like the rogue's set of tools and abilities, but we get the feeling that perhaps some of these mechanics have been overshadowed by newer, newer versions. We are considering improving rogue mobility and control using conservative methods.

Magi - We are going to tone down the burst and control the wizards. We were hoping that passing more of their control to talents would force some exclusivity into crowd control options, but it wasn't enough. We significantly increased the cost of Steal Spell to encourage strategic use instead of people stealing whatever was available. We've also tested changes to Deep Freeze, Frost Bomb, and Pyroblast to reduce spike and control.

Monks - We know that some players are concerned about the viability of Windwalker in the sands. The monk's class has a high skill cap, and we think it carries a certain learning curve. The PvP bonuses for Windwalker are also quite powerful and are still not fully utilized by players. We really want the newest of the classes to be popular, but at the same time we intend to be moderate and try not to repeat a situation like when the Death Knight dominated in PvP and PvE at the beginning of its launch. We want to give the monk a few more weeks to see how he is doing, yes, but we are very attentive to how things develop.

Healing - We agree that healers who do not correspond to your specialization are too much competition for dedicated healers. Specializations like Shadow, Elemental, and Balance are supposed to provide some healing (it's one of their benefits), but they shouldn't replace a dedicated healer. The change we are going to try in this case is to make the PvP power benefit either your damage or your healing depending on the specialization. We're concerned that the healing may be too high even for dedicated healers, especially the Restoration shaman and Holy paladins, who seem to be incredibly powerful in PvP for now. Once we've lowered some of the Hunters, Warriors, and Mages peak damage, we may try the PvP healing debuff by 30% instead of the current 15%, but that won't happen until we've resolved the damage issues. .

Mass control - At the moment we are satisfied with the state of crowd control. We are careful not to add new forms of crowd control stacking to any specific spec, but because players have so many crowd control options (like choosing a stun instead of talent braking), the overall number of spells has increased. crowd control that a PvP player must learn. There is more to choose from. We know that some of you are worried about that, and we will be pending.

Pico - Except in the case of hunters and possibly warriors and mages, we do not believe that the peak is out of control. Other specs players mention are Destruction and Frost Death Knights and Shadow Monks. Rest assured that we have them on the radar, but at the moment we do not have any changes to announce.

PvP at a glance

We have a lot on the development team, and we are usually reluctant to discuss ideas that are not yet fully implemented in the game. Despite our warnings, ideas that are delayed or canceled tend to turn into "broken promises." With that in mind, we ask you to understand that you may not see some of these ideas in the next patch, or the next, or maybe never. They are just ideas that we are considering:

Loss of control UI - This is a feature that we have wanted to include for a long time, and we are finally close to it. If they fear you, surely you will realize that it is because your character runs like a madman with a chattering skull on his head. However, if they leave you stunned, silenced, or disarmed, you will generally not notice it right away and will keep pressing keys without anything happening, resulting in the game appearing to be unresponsive. Thanks to the loss of control user interface, you will know when something is preventing you from using your abilities. It also has benefits for solo and room play, but it's basically a PvP feature.

Rewards for participating in rated battlegrounds - If you've been in PvP for a while, you've been in one of those encounters where the bottom line is so tight that you're one breath away from victory. When we do our job well and give you one of those really hot games, it is a shame not to get a reward for participating, so we want to offer a small prize. Rewards will be based on final score so as not to encourage abuse.

Arena and battlefield maps in the dungeon guide - Although veteran PvP players already know all the arena and battleground maps, we think the dungeon guide is a good way to introduce the basic objectives and map overlay so that newer competitors don't drown while they learn to swim.

Improved scoreboard - To some it may seem silly, but we believe that the small details are important. Right now, the way we end a battlefield has hardly changed - it's a bit archaic and not very exciting. We want a "You won!" Cheer, followed by a more interesting scoreboard.

More uniform groups on the battlefields - We now have the technology to mitigate player items in challenge modes, and you may have noticed that during our beta raid tests we boosted them. We'd like to use the same mechanics to empower lower-party PvP players. For example, in the group of levels 15 to 19 we could make all the characters behave as if they were level 19 for the battlefield. If this idea works correctly, we could hypothetically condense the lower tier groups and perhaps reduce queue times.

Game allocation - Our battleground player assignment system hasn't changed much since its inception and it still doesn't enjoy many of the advancements we developed for the Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder. The original queuing system for battlefields was designed with speed as a priority because it only had a single realm of candidates. By incorporating new technology that we develop, we can help ensure a certain number of healers per team, or at least a good distribution of classes.

Honor and Conquest Item Improvements - We've talked about how we're going to allow players to upgrade raid items with Valor Points. As we said before, we will let PvP players increase the item level of their Honor or Conquest team by spending Honor or Conquest points, respectively.

Adding Small Groups to Rated Battlegrounds - We still inadvertently allow solo players to queue up to access rated battlegrounds because it would go against the objective of a PvP for coordinated groups, and because in that case they would become mere normal battlegrounds that reward better team. However, we have listened to your comments that gathering at least 10 players queuing for a battlefield would already provide a good challenge. Our idea is to allow a group of 5 players to queue together, and then pair them up with another group of 5 players. We believe that this can also lead to a relatively balanced and viable team. One of the craziest ideas we were considering would be to convert some of our smaller battlefields, like Gilneas, so they have a 5v5 option.

Tol Barad and Conquest of Winter - We are discussing the possibility of making level 90 versions of these PvP zones, which players could access for honor bonuses.

As I say, this is a dump of many ideas that many different developers are working on. This is not a list of patch notes, and not all of them may turn out to be true. Give us your opinion, tell us if you think we are on the right track, or if you think that we have missed any important issues in PvP. Balancing in PvP is always highly subjective, and while such a balance is desirable, continually rolling out buffs and debuffs that don't solve problems can be worse than the imbalances they're trying to correct.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. He has NEVER posed as a woman in the game to get loot.