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Five years ago, I received a phone call from Blizzard offering me the chance of a lifetime—a position on the World of Warcraft team.
Simply put, this is my favorite game of all time, and working on it these past five years has been a dream come true. I have learned so much from the women and men who make it and everyone who plays it. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on a game that so many people around the world are so passionate about. A few weeks ago, I was offered a new opportunity at Blizzard that I’m really excited about. Tomorrow is my last day working on World of Warcraft. As a longtime player, I couldn't be more excited about what the future has in store for World of Warcraft. In particular, the PvP team remains hard at work on some incredible plans. I fully expect that the best years of World of Warcraft PvP are ahead of us. Thank you to everyone involved with World of Warcraft, from the development team to the players, for letting me be a part of this game's community. I consider it a great privilege. Brian Holinka |
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Five years ago, I received a phone call from Blizzard offering me the chance of a lifetime—a position on the World of Warcraft team.
Simply put, this is my favorite game of all time, and working on it these past five years has been a dream come true. I have learned so much from the women and men who make it and everyone who plays it. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on a game that so many people around the world are so passionate about. A few weeks ago, I was offered a new opportunity at Blizzard that I’m really excited about. Tomorrow is my last day working on World of Warcraft. As a longtime player, I couldn't be more excited about what the future has in store for World of Warcraft. In particular, the PvP team remains hard at work on some incredible plans. I fully expect that the best years of World of Warcraft PvP are ahead of us. Thank you to everyone involved with World of Warcraft, from the development team to the players, for letting me be a part of this game's community. I consider it a great privilege. Brian Holinka |
We understand a lot of people enjoy using many of these items in battlegrounds and we didn't intend to make them unusable. We have a fix in testing and hope to see it pushed out soon. After the fix has gone live, if there are items that used to work but no longer do, please let us know. Thanks! |
Thanks for the post about this. We understand your concern. Tanks in PvP are a real design and balance challenge for us and it may take time for us to get it just right. Unlike other PvP games (Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm for example), tanks in World of Warcraft are not tuned or designed around tanking other players. World of Warcraft tanks are primarily designed to withstand the onslaught of raid bosses, which do considerably more damage than players. While tanks have a lot of active mitigation buttons, they also have a lot of passive mitigation and survivability. During beta, we applied a lot of spell multipliers to tank active mitigation abilities while leaving their passive mitigation alone for the most part. But this approach has a side effect that a tank's active mitigation buttons don't feel like they're doing anything in PvP. The 25% increased damage from players is our first attempt at decreasing tank passive mitigation in PvP. Consequently, we will be relaxing or removing many of the spell multipliers we've made to tank mitigation abilities. That is a change we'll be making alongside the class team's upcoming tuning changes. We're often asked, "what is your vision for tanks in PvP?" First, if you enjoy playing a tank, we want you to feel like you can provide value to your team in some way. But, we don't want that value to be "I can never die." A tank should be harder to kill then a DPS, but not by a wide margin. Likewise, a tank should do less damage than a DPS (and preferably far less burst damage) but not damage you can simply ignore. We want a tank to be able to go into an arena with their friends, compete, have fun, and earn rewards. We're much more hesitant to say we want tanks to be viable in arenas at the highest level. However, in rated battlegrounds, we would very much like to see tanks at the highest level, not only as flag carriers or point defenders, but as target callers and frontline disruptors. We think that is a fun place for tanks to live in PvP. We don't think we've arrived at this vision by any means and it may take some time and iteration before we do. We appreciate your impassioned feedback and hope you'll continue to give PvP a try on your tank. Thanks! |
The original vision for the Prestige system was to create an extended progression system with a high cost that was purely optional and felt special. We wanted you to see someone with a Prestige badge and think, "Wow, that guy or gal did a crazy difficult grind to get that badge." To make that progression feel good, we added a lot of rewards along the way including artifact power, artifact appearances, mounts, toys, titles, etc. We did receive feedback, both internally and externally, that losing your honor talents didn't feel good and would be a significant impediment to particpating in Prestige. We were willing to live with that downside in order for Prestige to feel more exclusive and special. We try to get everyone honor talents quickly so they can feel competitive. But this also means you can work through the honor system quickly, arriving at level 50 with no where to go. So, we realize that more people will have more fun if they can continue to get rewards from PvP, even if Prestige loses a bit of its luster. Thank you all for your feedback on this issue. We hope you continue to enjoy Legion and PvP! |
Quick followup question if you have a moment: Excellent question. Yes PvP spell multipliers work in WPvP. |
This is a fair critique but there is a fundamental difference. With PvP item level on gear, you must acquire the gear to have its ilevel increased. With PvP stat templates, you do not need to acquire any gear. A player in quest greens would have a PvP stat template activated. |
Yeah, that meeting probably could have been rescheduled. For what it was worth, it was about how we're handling cheaters, so it was a worthwhile meeting. |
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Hi, this is Brian Holinka and our good folks on the community team asked if I could help address some of your concerns. I understand that it's frustrating when you feel your question didn't get addressed. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we weren't able to address every question that was sent our way. But, we did answer over 25 questions that were submitted on the forum and over twitter. I know people feel like we were repeating information at times, but keep in mind, all of these questions were submitted to us. Someone out there did not know the answer and asked. While many community members are in tune with everything going on in the Legion Beta, a lot of other people are not.
I'll do my best to answer the questions below that you felt were very important but we didn't get to.
I think it's fair to say we haven't been as active on the PvP beta forums as many people there would have liked. We certainly visited the forums quite a bit, reading the forums as a part of our feedback process. We frequently used information there in our internal discussions and adjusted a number of honor talents as direct result. But it's true that we didn't post there that often. We'll discuss with community how we can better manage that experience for you. We just got really focused on making the game.
There are a few reasons it feels like PvP tuning has been slow. The primary reason is bad communication on our part. We've made PvP specific adjustments to over 80 spells and adjusted the PvP templates on every spec. But we haven't kept everyone up to date on what's been changing. We should have done a better job. The second reason is that our PvP systems are new in Legion. As an example, our PvP stat template system wasn't properly granting the extra stats casters get from their weapon. Unfortunately, this is part of the game development process. Things aren't always working as expected in Beta. Regardless, communication was our primary failing here and we will do better. With respect to melee mobility specifically, we did discuss that at 1:10 in the interview.
There is a tradeoff to using fixed ratings for rewards and one of them is that each season ratings are different. We have always seen this across regions. For example, Korea and Taiwan are far smaller than North America and Europe. Achieving high ratings in some brackets there is extremely difficult. For titles like Gladiator, we always use percentages to ensure the prestige of the reward remains the same. But the primary purpose of the rating gated rewards like the Elite gear set is to give players immediate rewards for hitting specific rating milestones. The upside of this system is you can get the rewards immediately, which feels great. The downside is that sometimes those rewards are harder to get. We think it's an acceptable tradeoff. Looking at the current season data and comparing it with the past two seasons, I don't see the drop off in rating you're talking about. Perhaps some brackets have fallen 50-100 points, but by no means has anything fallen 500 points. That's just not accurate.
Before the Diminishing Return (DR) system was introduced into WoW, "stunlocking" was a common phenomenon. DR prevented "stunlocking" but it feels crappy to use ability only to see "immune." DR categories were added so a class can use their different crowd control spells to full effect at least once but repeated application would not result in "stunlock." Over time the number of categories increased to 12 which we consider an unacceptable number. In Warlords, it was reduced to 5 categories: Root, Silence, Stun, Disorient and Incapacitate. Roots, Stuns and Silences are fairly easy to recognize as their behavior is generally the same across all spells. There are a number of spells in the game that remove player control but break on some degree of damage. We did not want all of these spells on a single DR category. For example, Fear, Cyclone and Dragon's Breath are on the Disorient category while Polymorph, Sap and Freezing Trap are on the Incapacitate category. It is not necessary that all of the spells on each DR category are thematically or functionally the same. We primarily placed these spells in their respective categories for gameplay reasons. In some cases it is meant to allow a class to use all of their spells without overlapping DR categories. In other cases, it is meant to disrupt synergies between classes that can chain to much crowd control together. In the case of Dragon's Breath, Mages have Polymorph which is an Incapacitate. Dragon's Breath is a Disorient so that you can cast those two spells one after the other and get their full effect. We're satisfied with the current assignment of crowd control spells to their respective DR categories, but please let us know if you have any feedback about them.
If you'd like to see my answer to this question, it was addressed at 42:50 in the twitch interview. The short answer is that some stat combinations are problematic for PvP gameplay and we'd like to be able to reign them in. We also feel like Honor Talents can fill the customization gap that has been lost. But we're also open to introducing Honor talents in the future that offer some stat customization. Let us know how you feel about that idea.
I apologize if there was some confusion, but I did not make any such promise. I just rewatched the interview where I first discussed the PvP templates with Bajheera during the third NA qualifier cup last year. During that interview, I laid out the system as it is today in Legion including that higher ilevel gear would offer more power and that higher rated players would receive higher ilevel gear. I'm sorry if that message got lost along the way, but I certainly have never misrepresented how the system would work. Here is that interview for reference: https://youtu.be/zhj3bJofjE4?t=436
I discussed our reasoning behind why PvP templates do not activate in the world at 40:55. In short, the two reasons were that they would provide a significant power increase for ungeared players and we'd like there to be a place in World of Warcraft where balance is far less structured. I hope this helps fill in some gaps left by the interview. We tried to answer some questions that weren't really favorable to us like "why aren't you making new battlegrounds?" and "why is all the gear coming from strongboxes?" Many consider the directions where heading on those issues controversial so we wanted to explain our reasoning. Thanks again for your passion for World of Warcraft and PvP. |
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We'll miss you tremendously. Thanks for everything you've done for the Blizzard community. It's been a pleasure to work with you.
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Bashiok,
It's been a pleasure to work with you over the past 3 years. You're a righteous dude and I wish you nothing but the best of luck in the future. P.S. I'm sorry for rocking you so hard at Dance Central at PAX East (at least that's how I remember it) |
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Since we started testing the new patch on the public test realm, we’ve taken a lot of time to read a great deal of your feedback on PvP, with a lot of focus on how Versatility items are being handled in Patch 6.2. We want to make sure we’re making our intentions clear regarding Champion’s Strongboxes.
First, it’s important to consider what isn’t changing in the next season. Like any other season, players will be able to acquire a full set of Wild Gladiator gear, including their weapons, by doing nothing more than competing in the Arena and then going to the gear vendor. Play Arenas steadily, and you’ll earn a full set of gear at the maximum ilevel possible for PvP. This ensures that a player can be competitive at the highest levels without ever worrying about Champion’s Strongboxes. At the same time, when a player wants to pursue a very specific set of gear, we want Patch 6.2 to have some new avenues to do so. We’re making some items obtainable exclusively from Champion’s Strongboxes, and there are two ways to get them. The first way you can earn a Champion’s Strongbox is by winning 3 rated battlegrounds in a week. Before Patch 6.2, you had a chance to win an item for each of your first 3 wins, but in Patch 6.2 you’re guaranteed to get an item after your third win each week. You can also earn an additional Champion’s Strongbox each week by completing the weekly quest Ashran Dominance. We’ve heard loud and clear that some players take issue with the fact that Champion’s Strongboxes are only available from Rated Battlegrounds and Ashran. We feel that the unique nature of the reward lends itself well to being obtained via PvP content that is exclusive to an expansion, as Ashran is for Warlords of Draenor. We also like it when a reward like this requires a higher degree of player organization, like Rated Battlegrounds do. As always, our goal is to make it possible for players to acquire the gear they need to compete and enjoy PvP in WoW, while bringing some variety to the acquisition process. Overall, players will be receiving more gear next season than ever before. We appreciate your feedback on PvP, and look forward to seeing you out there. |
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Sounds like a cool idea. Can't wait to watch!
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Thanks for the report guys. We have a hotfix in testing to change this.
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