Wednesday, July 29, 2009

PVP vs PVE

Several nerves and buffs are going out again for patch 3.2. And several nerfs are once again trying to balance PVP versus PVE. I know my class is being nerfed because of PVP, not because of PVE. But the change does hit both playstyles.

Every time I read this sort of stuff I wonder if there's not a better way. I mean there must be a way to separate PVP balance from PVE balance. Because it seems to be impossible to balance all of it. And to be frank, balancing for PVP seems a lot harder anyway, since players will just sit there for hours on end and figure out how to fight against every other class. There's no way Blizzard can do this much testing internally. So the end result becomes that half the balancing are reactions to the testing done by players inside the game.

With the dual spec in, I wonder if players should be given compeltely separate PVP talent trees. This would not be your normal talent trees. It would be a completely new combination of talents specifically designed and only usable in PVP (or while PVP flagged).

You would switch to these talents in PVP situations (or on PVP servers this would be your main) and it would be balanced completely differently than the PVE talent trees. To go with what I know best. In the PVE talents you would for example be able to take casting time off penance, whereas in your PVP talents you're simply not given the option to take that talent.

When stepping into a raid, or not being flagged in any way you would work with the PVE talents that you can take.

It would of course still require the base talents to be the same, but by forcing the use of specifically balanced PVP trees and PVE trees Blizzard would be able to control so much better how to balance in these two hugely different situations.

I know they're trying to do this with resilience, but that's onviously not working.

And now they're trying to make resilience more important it gets even worse for the starting PVPer. Because these people don't have resilience to start with. Or at the start of a new expansion healers would just have to sit through a hundred games being one or two shot before they've managed to get the gear to stay alive a bit longer.

If you would have forced PVP talent trees (again, same trees, just different balancing) you could build in resilience talents. Or hell, the whole resilience thing would no longer be needed, since the player can only chose from talents that are balanced specifically for PVP.

I have no idea how this would work technically, but it seems possible. And it would be so nice to not see classes being nerfed because of PVP and then hurting in PVE, or the other way around.

What do you think?

4 comments:

  1. It drives me nuts when PvE takes a hit for PvP, or vice versa. For the record I hate Resilence worst state ever. I feel it's blizz way of saying, we really don't know how to balance stuff, lets create a new state to buffer some of the idiocy.

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  2. I just wish they would stop letting people eat / drink in arena.

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  3. Despite one nerfing the other at times, this is rarely actually the case of what is occuring. Resilience is how Blizzard is sticking with its main goal of not having to give certain abilities different effects in arena's/bg's and in pve. All in all, its pretty impressive that all classes have at least 1 tree that is pvp viable. Sometimes it might not be the tree you want to pvp in, if that's the case, prepare for L2play comments from people who don't understand why you would want to nerf yourself in pvp by playing an 'inferior' spec. In reality, almost every spec is at least somewhat pvp viable, to me, that's pretty impressive. I know there are a lot of complaints about seals nerfing trash dps, if your guild cares about that, find a new guild. Especially since the new instance has no trash. I know, switching targets is where the dps loss is coming from, ever so slightly, but the changes to crusader strike are actually a buff, since they are an increase in damage.

    All in all, what I'm saying is that Blizz tries hard to make the game balances at all levels, and they do fairly well. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, everyone knows that, but if they make a 'nerf' to something in pve because of pvp, generally they make up for it elsewhere. It's pretty impressive that you walk into an arena with the same set of skills that you have outside when so many other games can't accomplish this.

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  4. Well, I think the problem is not that players can't get resilience, because there is craftable resilience gear, not to mention you can get some pvp gear through badges. Top that off with gear you could get through Vault and you're getting a fair amount of resilience to begin with. The biggest problem is experience in pvp, and after that it's the amount of damage/healing in that gear vs. the people who have the better tier of pvp gear.

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