Rasen

There is not enough macros, there needs to be more space, both on character specific and general.

Wintraders, DDoSers and Boosters still got their titles.

[Note: Read the thread fully before replying, keep it constructive and civil, if you can't argue your point without either, than your point isn't worth being read.]

Why do I make these threads? Because I believe that WoW PvP is not fulfilling it's potential, I believe that Blizzard are missing a major opportunity with WoW PvP and that bothers me. So I want to do what I can to improve it, I want the community to help.

So I've made a similar post to this before but it was in other threads, I decided to make this thread as this issue deserves it's own recognition. It also means that if you post regularly on this forum, you've probably read a few of these points before from me.

So people really play PvP for generally 2 particular reasons, fun and competition. Being capped by gear hurts both.

I play PvP for both, fun and competition however if I take time off from the game or start a new character, than my ability to both be competitive and to have fun is severely limited.

This is made even worse by the conquest point system, which limits your ability to gear up.

The game has moved on from Vanilla WoW, gear is no longer exciting enough to attract people to play PvP and it should never be a deciding factor in PvP at all. If I'm a vastly better player than someone, but I'm in Ruthless gear, I shouldn't be losing to someone worse than me because I'm playing an alt which has only been 85 for a few days. My ability to play my class, my teams ability to play our comp, should be the only factor in deciding whether we win or lose.

So firstly, allow me to explain why the current system doesn't work.

Considering the ease at which gear is obtained in WoW now, it's no longer the exciting prospect it once was, in Vanilla getting some "epic l00t" actually took time and effort, I remember back in Vanilla WoW grinding the Earthstrike trinket in Silithus when the patch came out, I spent 2months farming this trinket, farming those mobs to get the text to hand in for rep as well as doing AQ20, I was really happy when I got it. I was not so happy when TBC came and I replaced it a few hours later with a quest item, but that's another story.

The allure of getting epics has long gone, long gone, it's no longer a big enough attraction by itself to get people to do PvP. Even though I started playing this character again about 2months ago? I haven't capped points in like 3 weeks, because it's boring, haven't logged on in awhile either.

And I'm the type of player who cares about min-maxing, I'll farm something for a 1% increase because I've always been that type of player. But I no longer bother, because it's not interesting for the 11th season in a row.

Let's add on-top of that that leveling alts has become so easy that people now have upwards of 3-4 level 85s, unless you religious gear up all 4 of them, then deciding you want to play a different one today can be a pain.

Myself as an example, I've never had a max level of any class bar Warrior until Cataclysm. And now in Cataclysm I have 2 85 Warriors, 85 Mage, 85 Lock, 80 Druid, 80 Shaman, 80 Paladin.

My decision to play a class for fun, shouldn't have to take into the consideration "Ah but that character only has Ruthless gear atm, so I know it's not going to be that fun :/"

So how can we change this?

My solution is this:

1.
Pre-set gear in Arena

This means that you choose the gear set you want to use, the example I've given before was having an additional character frame, much like the character tabs we have ingame now (Character, Reputation, Currency), there would be another one just called "Arena Setup" or something like that where you choose the gear set and even spec that you want to play Arena with right now.

So why this? As I've said, gear just is no longer a big enough attraction to get people playing PvP. So instead of forcing people to do something that they don't find fun, let them have fun as soon as they hit max level.

The benefits?

a. You'll have a much happier community. The top level PvP players don't care about gear farming, everyone will have full PvP after a month or 2, the only gear that effects the top end is PvE gear.

For the community that isn't at the top of Arena? Takes them longer to gear up, but in the end it's not that big a deal. The real problem comes when people want to play new classes/characters. You often have to play against teams with much higher level of gear, it's not really that fun, you get frustrated losing because of it and alot of times those players just stop playing that character.

It's unreasonable to expect people to wait weeks before they can have fun with there characters.

With the points earned through Arena, those could be used to buy the gear still for use outside of Arena, for say Battlegrounds or World PvP, that means the gear-farming aspect, which there are some people that still like it, would still exist.

b. This is also a good way of dealing with balance issues. With the way WoW is, where you can go from being a god in one season, to a pauper the next, you're asking people to spend weeks to gear up, than they realise that there spec/class isn't that great now. For the average player, they will not succeed playing spec/class which is weak, more often than not they will want to try a new class or spec. Now they have to wait more weeks in order to gear up to a level where they can start having fun.

Example:

Druid plays Resto in one season, he/she enjoys playing the spec. The next season comes around and Druids got a nerf, the spec isn't as good any more. They aren't having fun any more. He/she wants to try Boomkin? Now he/she has to go to Battlegrounds to farm a whole new set (of last seasons gear) for Boomkin, before he/she can play Boomkin in Arena to start gearing for current season gear.

All the while everyone else is farming Arena for themselves, so this Druid is getting even further behind everyone else.

And unless you are the type of person with a lot of time on your hands, it can take some people weeks (or longer) before they are fully geared in last seasons gear.

So if people were able to change their specs much more easily (without the need to farm gear), then balance problems would be less serious, people are willing to forgive balance problems if they are still able to have fun.

c. You'll also see a massive reducing in people botting. People only bot because farming gear is boring.

This is not fun for the people who play Battlegrounds for fun, because every game has botters.

It's not fun for the people botting because they'd rather be playing for fun.

So the community would be happier as there would be less botting, less joining a BG which has 3 bots and because of that you're probably going to lose.

2.
Cosmetic Rewards.

I've talked about this before, but because gear isn't a good enough reward any more for PvP, then other rewards are necessary.

In the form of cosmetic rewards, people love cosmetic rewards. People will farm old content for months on end to get a particular weapon.

I myself have farmed Stratholme about 50 times recently because I want the sword from the last boss (which has below a 1% drop rate).

I'm talking about tabards, trinkets, gear re-colourisation, mounts and so on.

This is how you attract people to play, not by offering them a 1% DPS increase which most people generally don't care about.

A sidenote: With the increase in player-ran tournaments and other player-ran events. PvP is not the "mini-game" that it used to be in WoW, there are a lot of players who only play WoW for PvP, there would be many many more if the community was treated with respect by Blizzard.

PvP is it's own stand-alone part of the game now, it deserves to be treated as such. WoW is a game that will eventually be survived by it's PvP community, up until the day the servers are turned off.

As ever, keep it constructive.

This is just one of many changes that PvP needs in WoW. I outlined others in this post for those that haven't read them.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3553418473
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3483961360

If you agree, please support this post in the MoP Beta forums; http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3554368437

[note: this is an 3v3 Arena thread, so keep that in mind when you make your posts and I request that if you want to talk about other forms of PvP than to make a new thread about it, I implore you to read the thread fully before making any posts/keep it constructive and no trolling please.]

Firstly a bit of background information on myself, without trying to sound egotistical or anything, I've been 2900+ before, which is probably in the top 20-30 world wide highest ratings, I've been Gladiator from S1 to S7 including 3 R1 titles (this isn't my only character), so I believe I'm capable of making a post which highlights major issues.

I think the vast majority of high rated (and I imagine a lot of lower rated players) would agree that the state of Arena has been in decline for some time now, certain changes by Blizzard have caused massive imbalances, both on purpose and by accident.

In the past Blizzard could ignore it, the PvP community is obviously smaller, the Arena scene even more so but in the light of recent subscription loses and upcoming release of major PvP-related games could see (and has seen) even more people leaving this game if Blizzard don't stop treating us like second-class citizens.

Now enough of that, I don't really want to go on any more about that, I want this to be a constructive thread about what we can do moving forward to improve the game, and make it into the game that it used to be.

Firstly the Arena system needs to evolve, or most other changes would be largely meaningless. I made a post about this a few weeks ago which highlights the changes I believe need to be made which a CM posted in and I felt we made good progress in it, so I'll just put it here if anyone else (including any Devs which are potentially going to read :|) to give it a read.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3483961360

Secondly, Blizzard needs to change it's philosophy on PvP balance. In the past Blizzard liked to mess around with the balance, it was a belief that by changing the game every couple of months it would make the game "feel fresh"/wouldn't go stale and people would continue playing longer. This however is starting to backfire. Most people have played the game longer enough now that this tactic no longer really works and instead are becoming more and more frustrated with their favourite classes going from being overpowered one moment and broken the next.

Me for example, i've played the Warrior class since 2005 for the past year I've genuinely started hating it (not only has a lot of changes Blizzard made in my humble opinion been incorrect and made the class horribly boring to play) but we went from being braindead faceroll (overpowered) in Season 9 to being still braindead (because the changes have made the ability to play the class well significantly reduced) but also extremely unrewarding to play.

If I want to play Arena, I want to play my favourite class, I don't want to have to roll a different class in order to be competitive, by competitive I mean for the top ladder spots, but that's me personally for other players competitive might be 2200 rating or 2000 rating or whatever their intended target it. A ret Paladin wants to play a ret Paladin, not having to change his class because Blizzard decided to roll the dice and they were unlucky for this next 5 months.

Thirdly certain abilities need to be greatly reduced in effectiveness. Specifically I'm talking about instant abilities. Instant CC, Instant damage and Instant healing have gotten out of control, and is making it more and more difficult for better players to seperate. It gives the lower rated player less people to "look up too" so to speak, I'm sure many people who do/love Arena watch a lot of PvP movies and most can agree that in TBC/WotLK they were at their most epic and inspired a lot of people to get better. Cataclysm has been a big disappointment in this regard because the ability to seperate yourself from a lesser skilled player was diminished.

Instant CC abilities should never last longer than 4-5 seconds, they should also have medium length CDs such as 35-45 seconds (or longer, up to 1 minute).

Instant Healing abilities should never be able to heal as much as caster abilities and the same goes for Instant Damage as well, they should at most be around 30-40% effective compared to casted abilities, abilities like a 3 holy power WoG crit Healing someone for over 100k is just plain absurd, it's a mechanic that most ret Paladins don't even like because it means they can't be given proper defensive abilities while they have mechanics like this, makes them very cheesy.

This is why there is a difference between Instant and Casting, Instant is easier and has very little risk. Casting has more risk (it takes longer, can be Line of Sighted and can be interrupted via interrupts/cc/stuns etc). An ability which poses more risk SHOULD have a bigger reward.

There are too many interrupts, too much CC, too many roots in the game right now. I'd almost go as far as saying the entire system for CC is wrong, DRs being at 15 seconds is not enough any more because of the sheer number of them, most teams will have at least 2 different classes with seperate DR CC.

This is also creating a balance problem as in some seasons classes without CC almost become meaningless, Season 8 is a good example, if you take away Shadowmourne than if you weren't a caster in Season 8 (because of their often spammable CC than you simply weren't a viable class, I don't have a perfect way to fix this yet, it requires some brainstorming by smarter people than me and extensive testing, my only real idea for this would be to somehow make DRs more intelligent, for example if you go through 2 CCs of 1 DR school (for example lets say Fear), and is then hit by a 2nd CC school (such as Polymorph) that Polymorph should start on the duration that a 2nd DR would be on.

Hypothetical example; 1st Fear lasts 8 seconds, 2nd lasts 4 seconds, Polymorph ontop of that lasts 8 seconds, 2nd 4 seconds = 24 seconds of not being able to do anything, add a Blanket Silence if it was on a Healer (which I'll get into later) another 4 seconds of being unable to control your character.

My change would be.
1 Fear lasts 8 seconds, 2nd lasts 4 seconds, Polymorph ontop of that lasts 4 seconds, next would be 2 seconds = at most 18 seconds (most good teams don't use their 3rd DR on CC (especially if they have a 2nd CC class with them) because it doesn't last long enough to have any significant advantage but also makes it longer til you can CC them properly), but now that player is immune to both sets of CC for 15 seconds, almost as long as he was CC'ed for.

This would have any effect in solo PvP, so it wouldn't require any rebalancing there, but would help with the issue of being too much CC, like I said this might be a bad example and maybe a smarter person than me can come up with a better idea; but I think the current system isn't working well any more, it was designed when far far less CC existed in the game, the 8 second dispel coming into MoP will only make this a bigger problem unless something is changed.

Onto blanket silences. These just plainly need to go, there isn't anyone playing the game (I can safely say I speak for like everyone) that likes blanket silences, they reduce the skill cap for everyone, they reduce for the person using it because it's an easy way to use your interrupts, it requires the skillcap for the person it's used on because they can't do anything to prevent it. This type of mechanic is just not good for the game, there is no risk in blanketing someone and a lot of reward you might even just accidentally get him when he casted.

A wishlist of mine; abilities having different effects in PvE and PvP. This one probably will never happen, it's a wish of mine but I find it unlikely that it's going to happen. You've done it before with Colossal Smash, which has a 50% effect in PvP and a 100% effect in PvE.

Why not do this for more abilities? Or make abilities do more damage in PvE so that they have the DPS to take down bosses with 100million HP but then don't have the same DPS vs players with 150k HP.

One thing about this, Blizzard said they didn't want to do this because it would be "confusing to the player base". Frankly I find this insulting, and a cop out. We've the most adaptive part of the community by far, we have to adapt to a lot of changes, we can adapt to this, and it would help make both communities happier.

PvE gear in Arena has to go. No IFs. No Buts. What's the point in balancing something only to ruin it with trinkets or weapons that are just insane? A good example is the Dragon Soul trinkets which you had to nerf because they were too good in PvP, you made both communities unhappy because you had to change this when nobody who does PvP wanted them in the first place, the nerf didn't make us happy because they shouldn't be there in the first place.

[Note: I've tried to be as unbiased as possible I ask that people posting try to do the same, this is a guide mostly aimed at newer players, so if you're an experienced Arena player this probably won't have much for you, I'm also going to avoid talking about specs which don't really have a place in Arena, such as Blood Death Knight, or Holy Priest]

This is an 3v3 Arena guide for people who want to know what class to roll, this will try to be as un-seasonable as possible, ie a general view of Arena not about what is strong or weak now.

Obviously the class or comps you should play; should be determined by what you have the most fun playing, whether or be a Healer or a DPS, a melee or a ranged and so on. This guide should only be used to help you choose the class which fits your desired role.

Lastly before we start I'll be giving people a comp suggestion along with each spec, this isn't set in stone, some comps can work well with either specs and often it can just come down to what spec that particular player prefers playing; for example Ret/DK/Priest works with either a Frost DK or an Unholy DK, Mage/Lock/Druid works with a Fire Mage or a Frost Mage and so on.

Starting with the Death Knight:
Frost
Frost is a cleave spec; and by this I mean it's a spec best suited for melee-cleave style comps like DK/Ret/Healer or DK/Rogue/Healer. This is because Frost has no "ramp-up" time in order to do damage, by that I mean you don't need to spend time hitting someone before you can do maximum damage, this is ideal for melee-cleaves who often need to win in the first 1-2minutes or they generally lose.

Comps: DK/Ret/Healer, DK/Rogue/Healer, DK/Enh/Healer and Triple DPS (Ret/Rogue/DK)

Unholy
Unholy is the more "cultured" spec for Death Knights, it has the higher "skill cap", it has more tools than Frost does and this gives it more room to have an influence on the game outside of raw killing power, it has higher survivability than Frost and more utility in the forms of Unholy Frenzy (this can break CC on you or your partner(s) and keep them out of CC for awhile), AMZ (A defensive anti-magic zone), AMS which although Frost has as well Unholy can spec it (and usually do) into 100% anti-magic damage/CC. The Death Knight's pet also has more abilities and allows for great usage, such as a 4 second "Gnaw" stun and when it's been transformed (Dark Transformation) has a Charge stun as well.

Just a sidenote: Although as I said Frost is better for most cleave style comps, this is mostly true for all except TSG (Warrior/DK/Healer), this is mainly because of Necrotic Strike and the additional control that DKs bring which Warrior's generally lack, and Warrior's also have a "ramp-up" time, so not being able to do maximum damage instantly isn't the biggest problem.

Comps: DK/Ret/Healer, Shadowcleave (Death Knight/Affliction Warlock/Healer), TSG (Warrior/DK/Paladin) and PHD (Death Knight/Hunter/Paladin).

Druid
Boomkin

Is generally not a strong Arena class, has only really been viable in the last 2 Cataclysm seasons and generally only as "LSD2" (Affliction Warlock/Boomkin/Resto Shaman) although in Season 11 people also started running "Spicy Chicken Cleave" (Fire Mage/Boomkin/Disc Priest).

Comps: LSD2 and Spicy Chicken Cleave are the strongest currently for Boomkin.

Feral

Feral has been a strong Arena class for a long time now, ever since WotLK was implemented Feral has been more than viable, it had a short time during Season 8 where it wasn't that great because Feral has a weakness to Spell Cleaves (which is double caster healer(example Frost Mage/Affliction Warlock/Resto Druid)), which were very popular in Season 8, up until Cataclysm however it was widely considered that Feral was only really viable in Melee Cleave-style comps (such as Kitty Cleave (Warrior/Feral/Healer), however in Cataclysm comps such as FMP (Feral/Mage/Priest) and FLS (Feral/Lock/Shaman) has changed this view.

Comps: Jungle Cleave (Feral/Hunter/Healer), FMP (Feral/Mage/Priest), FLS (Feral/Lock/Shaman) and Kitty Cleave (Warrior/Feral/Healer).

Resto

Restoration has been one of the consistently strongest healing specs through Arena, it's currently not as strong as it has been in the past, but it can be successful still with the right comp. Throughout Season 2 to Season 4 in TBC, Season 6 to Season 8 in WotLK; Druid was the most dominant Healer, however as said Cataclysm hasn't been kind to the Resto Druid. However Resto has always been (in my opinion) one of the more involved Healers since Resto's healing power isn't solely reliant on their Heals, because Resto Druid's have the best CC of any Healer in the game (arguably any class in the game) they also need to use their CC to stop the opposing team doing damage as well. This is where the average player falls short as they often don't understand this or can't pull it off.

Comps: Shattreeplay (Frost Mage/Shadow Priest/Resto Druid) and MLD (Frost Mage/Affliction Warlock/Resto Druid).

Hunter
Marksman
This is largely the only "real" viable Hunter spec, the other 2 never really convinced me of being well designed, especially for Arena, both Beast Mastery and Survival have had their moments of Arena glory but these were often condensed into 1 season. Marksman has very good damage and excellent control; with Scatter Shot, Frost, Freezing and Snake Trap as well as Monkey Stun (Pet ability) and Silence Shot they are one of the most unique classes in the game, it's also one of the only specs in the game which can (albeit for a short period of time) CC multiply players at once. In my opinion, especially now, it's always been one of the most devastating classes in the hands of a great player.

Comps: PHD (Death Knight/Hunter/Paladin), Junglecleave (Feral Druid/Hunter/Healer), Ret/Hunter/Healer and Triple DPS (Ret/Rogue/Hunter).

Mage
Fire

Fire is new to the Arena scene, it's not always been a strong spec for Arena and has only really seen viability in the past 2 seasons (Season 10 and Season 11), it's strength is Dots, Instant Damage and CC. Putting up Living Bomb, spamming Scorch for instant Pyroblast procs, waiting to time Combustion; great CC (a lot of it Instant) such as Impact, Ring of Frost and Dragon's Breath, that combined with Mage's traditional CC of Polymorph makes a Fire Mage able to control a whole team on his own. Fire was traditional seen as a weak spec mostly because it was considered that the spec lacked survivability, that Fire Mages were easy to kill. However with Blazing Speed and Cauterize I'd rather try and kill a Frost Mage than a Fire Mage (from a Warrior's perspective).

Comps: Fire works in numerous comps, RMP (Rogue/Mage/Priest), Shattreeplay (Mage/Shadow Priest/Resto Druid), Spicy Chicken Cleave (Fire Mage/Boomkin/Priest) or Fire Mage/Warlock/Healer.

Frost
Frost is an iconic Arena spec, it's been around since S1 and it'll probably be around until the end of World of Warcraft. It has great control and burst damage, it's a great counter to melee classes/cleaves in general, although has a weakness to dispels. It's usually the most important member of a team; if a team has a great Mage then they can be very successful, a team with a bad Mage will generally not be. In my opinion it's not a class for the beginner, it's a class for those who've played Arena before and understand how it works, which can bring the full potential of this class out.

Comps: Frost Mage can run almost anything, RMP (Rogue/Mage/Priest), MLS (Mage/Lock/Shaman), Shatterplay (Mage/Shadow Priest/Shaman), Shattreeplay (Mage/Shadow Priest/Druid) amongst others.

Note: You're welcome to disagree with me, but no trolling please, let's have a reasonable discussion that the Blizzard Developers can read (hehehe) and understand what the community wants going forward into MoP.

There will be exceptions obviously.

But I think the majority of people who play Arena can agree that it's been getting less and less fun as time has gone on.

There needs to be a large overhaul of the Arena system.

Firstly, the whole "play to gain gear" from Arena is obsolete these days, however since it's an MMO, obtaining gear is always going to be a driving point for a lot of people and something Blizzard won't change.

So what should happen is that when you join Arena you get a full set of Gear and when you leave it, you no longer have that set, the points you gain can be used to buy that set so you can use it outside Arena, for example for BGs and so on.

This improves the competitiveness of Arena already, because people that only care about getting gear from Arena do not make it competitive.

You can have incentives for gaining rating, like cosmetic changes for your character at x ratings, as has been shown a lot recently, people are more than willing to try to earn something which only gives them a cosmetic change to their character, hell people are even buying such things (like mounts from the Blizzard Store).

But the reality is, if people do not want to play Arena for fun/competition than these people shouldn't have to play Arena, nor should we want them.

Secondly, seasons need to be much shorter.

This is what happens in your usual Arena season.

First 2months a lot of teams are playing, people push up high early on to get a higher cap/2.2k weapons.

Next 3-X mounts (X being the last month before the end), most people stop playing a significant amount, you'll get sporadic games here and there but really most top players will do about 70~ games during this time period, which works out around 1 game per 2 days ~ish.

This basically means the entire mid-season is pointless and it's boring for most people, the only thing this does is make people wanna quit the game, the only thing is does is make people unsub.

So much shorter seasons are far more likely to keep people interested and playing.

I would personally say that 1 month seasons would be ideal, but 2months shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Thirdly, you have to start giving our desire-able rewards.

When I play a new seasons I don't get exciting about a 10th recoloured mount, I don't think the majority of players get excited about gaining the same title they've had multiply times over (this goes for Challenger, Rival, Duelist and Gladiator).

Cosmetic items, tabards, mounts, pets, special trinkets (that don't have stats or anything like that, example would be Sylvanas' Music Box, not that item, just something long the lines of that) and cycle through items like this, like 1 season you get a pet, another you get a tabard and so on.

And only give 1 chance to get these items, if you didn't get it then too bad, try harder next time.

The Arena scene is becoming very stale, it needs new life breathed into it.

Lastly, you've gotta stop messing around with Balance, the age-old Blizzard way of "let's change everything so people don't get bored with the same-old" isn't working anymore.

People are tired of their favourite classes being overpowered 1 season and broken the next.

Let people choose what they want to play, without having to worry about this.