Is arena gear too easy to obtain?
Ming's latest entry touches on the subject of how PvE gear is going to play a larger role in this upcoming arena season; this was probably inevitable. I remember when the PvP crew in TBC was complaining how eventually PvE gear would ruin arena blah blah blah -- it hasn't happened yet, and while tier 6 gear is strong, it isn't as big an upgrade over what season 2 is theorycrafted to be as old r12/r13 gear to Naxx gear.
What interested me was that Ming said, "Arena gear is EXTREMELY easy to obtain, in fact they have the lowest number of hours per epic in the game." I've sat on top 5000 points with nothing to buy since before the qualifications for the end of season tournament as have a lot of players on teams that spent most the season in the top 5 -- in fact, there were weeks when I didn't reach 30% and still it was no problem, if you're a top 5 team, you earn enough points to buy everything twice over at least. (I guess some classes have multiple sets!) Generally speaking anyone who finds 4 other people to enter a rated arena game with him every week from season start to season finish is probably going to wind up with a full set of gladiator gear, even if they never advance significantly in rating.
Why is PvP so friendly to handing out gear to anyone who participates when PvE remains quite exclusive? In a few months, you'll be able to count how many players are using the staff off Illidan, but there will be thousands and thousands of players with the season 2 arena staff.
Perhaps the point is that PvP is about PvP and not gear -- maybe? Drastically increasing the arena point cost of the gear would definitely distribute the items more selectively, but is this what we want? I don't want to outgear my opponents in arena; I just don't want to be outgeared either. I think the idea of arena gear is probably okay as it gives incentive to playing throughout the whole season.
Would it make sense to add some other outlet for arena points? Arena gems perhaps? Or is the idea that players who want to have every extra edge in PvP are forced to go PvE?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
24 comments:
I dont think its going to be nearly as easy with the changed arena points formula, certainly not for top rated teams, nor do I think Blizzard intends to run seasons for as long as they did this time.
You are so right about that raddy. Other mmo's with excellent pvp systems like DAoC did well because they weren't as geared based. Blizzard has latched on to the "Diablo" mindset of gear being your character's entire strength, because it is so much more addictive in many ways (hence more $$$ for blizz). If arena pvp suddenly made it hard for all but the best teams to get gear, then what is the point? If you don't make high ratings in the first week or two of the season, you get left behind for good. The longer you stay down, the more geared up your opponents and no amount of skill will make up for it after a point.
hey raddy this might be a off-topic thing but i arena 5v5 with priest pally warrior hunter and mage and i play the mage (doh!)
our hunter is marksman spec so im considering between 17/44 arcfrost and 33/28 arcfrost (or 40/21).
which would fit our matrix better? and how should i go about playing whichever build is better? we have hit a hall at 2050 rating and cant seem to progress i wish to know how a typical 5v5 arena mage (17/44 or 40/21 or 33/28) should be playing? for example, what he is thinking and what he should be doing and his priorities?
i am 17/44 at the moment and what i do is i get my pet out, sic my pet on main assist and polymorph warrior. side track here but another thing is i tend to panic once the enemy warrior goes immune. should i sheep a healer or a damage dealer? i know it will depend on enemy matrix but i hope u can shed some light on this issue for me on common matrixes.
after putting my pet on main assist and sheeping the warrior i usually get hit so i cant really cast any frostbolt which means my pet is the only thing doing the dps really. i also try to cs every heal i see from the paladin and call for burst.
am i doing the right thing? i have tried both 17/44 and 33/28 for 5v5. for 33/28 my damage overall seems really low and i dont know if this is bad playng on my part coz i really cant get a frostbolt off with the warrior on me. for 17/44 my overall damage is so much higher.
also could you enlighten me on things like if i should appomfrostbolt immediately or ap and chain cast or say nova first then ap?
i know this is a long post sorry and thx for reading!
im the same guy as above just wanted to say that i meant "hit the wall at 2050 rating"
also as 33/28 i feel bad at times when my damage pales so badly in comparison to the hunter and the warrior. like only 10k+ damage as compared to maybe warrior's 50k and hunters 30k+. this is one of the reasons i specced 17/44 so my overall damage is about 30k too.
i dont know sometimes when we hit 2.1k and drop back down i feel its my fault coz the target is always at low hp but we just cant get it down. i think it could be my fault if i was 33/28. help!!
in a pal/priest/war/hunter/mage matrix your role is not damage. ap/frost is far better suited to it, and your priority should be primarily controlling enemy dps so you dont lose people early, and contributing to dps if you think you can.
the only time your damage matters is when your team needs finishing power in the form of your iwin macro, or when you want to put pressure on them to force their priest to heal or something.
deep frost _does not work_ with hunter fotm setups.
me shifting from 17/0/44 to 33/0/28 took our team from ~2100-2200 to 2400+ and we're pretty much the best team in our battlegroup now.
really sorry for triple posting but i cant edit and whats this poly juggling i have been hearing?
do they mean just keep switching targets and polymorphing non stop?
i tried this once long back @ about 1800s rating but my warrior said my damage was far too low and i was not doing my job so i switched to more frostbolts (although i could hardly pull off any in a fight with a warrior on me)
any info on technique could really help sorry for the triple post again
ok im the noob thats stuck @ 2050 rating and made those 3 posts just decided to put my name so i dont get confused with other anonymous
hmm but im having a hard time convincing my team members mainly my warrior that my role is CC rather than damage. he insists that i am churning out pathetic damage every fight before i was 17/44 and i tried explaining i was keeping ppl sheeped / kiting warrior but he said no excuse for only 10k damage whole fight.
i dunno man any help would be appreciated we've been stuck at this rating for a month and its frustrating too even though the season is ending 2050 is a disappointment for us all
Movie of mine will be out soon enough displaying how to run a hunter fotm setup with ap/frost against shaman fotm teams and various other setups.
tell your warrior to shut the hell up ;/
with that setup you aren't supposed to kill anything until the other team is oom, frankly, and you're supposed to control them so that they run oom before you do. I've gone through 10-15 minute 5v5 games without doing more than 15k damage, and those tend to be the ones we win most.
If he wants you to do damage, tell him to get rid of the hunter and bring a shaman.
@ the helpful anonymous replying to me
thanks man. i would really love to see your vid to get a good idea of what to do. ure at 2400+ rating right? any idea on more specific stuff to watch out for?
and should i ap pom frostbolt or ap and chain cast? and should i cs every heal i see or only when the "burst" is called for.
even with AP i feel my damage isnt really cutting it (im sitting @ 730 spell dmg unbuff with icon of the silver crescent). i mean i pom a frostbolt and its only about 1.7k damage. throw in a fireblast thats close to but not even 3k damage if nothing crits. thats kinda weak for a burst right? and its hard to chain cast too with a warrior consistently on me.
and you said this setup was supposed to oom other teams? man i donno but my whole team (myself included) thought this was some team where we dps hard and burst in for the kill when they get low kinda. gonna have a hard time telling my team that we should oom esp my warrior ><
zzz this sucks, first i stopped doing the cc and tried to do more damage, then i specced 17/44. this whole stuck @ 2050 thing seems to be my fault QQ
watch some vids and tell your hunter that 2400 rated teams told you to do such and such and that you're going to try it. if things go right (the big if), your rating will start climbing and he will have to shut his face. of course, if you are playing correctly and rating still doesn't go up, maybe it isn't you. could just be that your team just doesn't work together at a 2400+ rating level. this is a bell curve after all, not everyone can get to the 99th percentile.
well, I talk all this crap about being 2400 and then we have the single worst arena day ever, so now I'm 2330 or so, but movie is rendering as we speak.
to answer your questions in series:
firstly, as to chain casting vs pom bursting - it really depends what you think you can do. There's a fight in the movie where I cs the paladin, fbolt, blink to get into range again and then blow the ap macro, but sometimes you're going to be shouted at in the middle of spam polying a war/shaman and you just have to find the guy and blow the macro and get back to keeping your people alive.
also, pom a fireball. fbolt crits for ~300 more and hits for about 500 less than an ap untalented fireball, because of coefficient nerf, and you are NEVER going to be trying to get it off onto shatter, with maybe one exception per month.
also, dont use cs proactively like that. wait for your warrior/hunter or yourself to notice someone is low, THEN cs the heal, then dump everything you can. dont worry about your damage at any other time than that - I dont honestly think I do over 20k EVER.
Its not you, nobody can get consistent casts off with a warrior right on them. fake poly to draw a pummel, then poly him, or just cast fbolts till he pummels then poly him and try to get away. Also, if a warrior is following you religiously, pull him out of los of his dispellers, sheep and detect magic and he's out for ~12 seconds.
I think that people are too worried about gear. If arena gear is not too hard to get, then the gear factor in matches will not be that high between similarly rated teams. Since PvE gear=good for PvE and PvP=good for PvP (well, supposedly) then the reason people would raid is because they find it fun, or perhaps so that they can get the best items for those slots that arena/pvp gear does not fill.
Many raiders complain about how arena gear is so much easier to obtain, but why should it matter so much to them? Arena gear is made so that it cannot compete with PvE gear in raids, so the raiders have nothing to fear about PvP geared people taking their raid spots. Even if a particular arena item is very good for raiding, then they could just get that item since it's so easy to get points.
Since I've quit the game, I've began looking at gear differently. Too many people see gear as something that is worth more than fun, or balance, or platinum.
I don't see how it would be fun to 5 shot someone significantly less geared than you, or at least how it would be fun for a long time. Like Harry said, a MMO that has a large PvP portion should have not gear as the defining factor. Even in PvE it shouldn't. It's much more fun (for me at least) to be able to kill a major boss because of the raid's skill, not because they have shiny epics.
My issue with deep frost in a hunter matrix is it adds marginally to the strengths of the setup and leaves the glaring weakness as weak as it was before - burst.
Sure, deep frost has burst in the sense that IF you can get off a fbolt + lance onto freeze combo you do easily as much/more than an ap pom fireball/lance - but it is far less consistent, for one, and has 2 other major weaknesses: 1. It requires you to cast, which you cannot do under any kind of pressure. 2. It requires you to cast, which means your burst is effectively no longer reactive, and is instead proactive - and as such is far weaker.
When I was deep frost (and believe me I tried to make it work) with the hunter fotm matrix, we either never killed things except via luck - or if I went dps mode, our priest/paladin/hunter died. It is far more difficult, and, I believe, less effective, to juggle cc/dps roles with deep frost, as going for burst dps as frost entails a major cooldown investment in the form of water elemental - while going for sustained dps as ap/frost entails no such investment. I say burst in the case of water elemental and sustained in ap/frost's case because that is what the tertiary role is.
Movie ended up at 824mb, found out I'd duplicated a clip in it, its still rendering -.-
thanks for this blog by the way raddy. so far it hasn't turned into the flame/retard fest that is ming's blog. i swear, video games bring out the idiot in people like nothing else. intelligent discussion is more my thing :)
Also, I think you disregard or underestimate the ability to 'punish' teams for leaving you alone by pure poly spam.
I'm beginning to lose count of the times I have rendered an entire bloodlust useless by spam polying the war/shaman, which removes the vast majority of their sustained dps, and removes their burst, leaving my priest to deal with basically a mage's damage, and this is without even blowing CS on it.
If you choose to blow cs on something other than a healer (which I actually recommend if you're losing people early) you can _completely_ shut down opposing dps single handedly for 10 seconds at a time - which is an obscene ability to have and basically forces teams to either rely on luck (hi chain lightning crit into windfury into ms crit into fbolt crit) or put pressure on the mage, and/or treat the mage as dps and attempt to shut him down via poly.
All of the above has happened to me, and many times when I am given a hard time we have a much harder time.
Also, raddy, where do you idle on irc so I can come and bother you when I have random thoughts -.-
So it seems i should be focussing more on the CC role than the dps role.
so the idea is to poly juggle their dps while my pally is able to solo heal and priest/hunter burn the enemy's mana?
pretty much.
add dps if you can, but dont do it at the cost of someone's life.
finally, movie uploading ~~
As for IRC, I'll have to get back to you with that info when I'm not at work as I don't remember at all where FH's IRC is at -- though I haven't hung out there in quite a while actually, maybe I should.
Any ideas on how to structure this blog more intelligently so that discussions like this aren't bumped into oblivion? I don't really like the whole forum setup for something like this, but discussion is important and is definitely something that people who just read the headlines are TOTALLY missing out on. =\
I was curious as to some thoughts on mage/ele sham/br priest/pal/war builds. Which spec would you choose to run with in this matrix? 33/0/28 or 17/0/44? I've switched back and forth between the two, we are currently stuck at 2059. We just get slammed by double Warlock, or cyclone spam/demon lock teams it seems.
I'm normally poly juggling and trying to flip on the shatter combo when I squeeze out the chance with 17/0/44 however, I catch myself using the WE nova in defense of our Priest all the time!
I assume on that ele shammy team your typically ignored as WE. I think WE is pretty good for that matrix, because of the heroism stacking, but also consider even trying AP/fire. You have the healing for it, and really punishes being left alone.
If you're going to ap/frost, I'd take it all the way to 40/21.
If you're playing WE, it should be a universal rule to never use pet nova defensively. You really need to save these for your offensive shatter combos or you simply don't do enough damage to be a real threat. Protect your priest with poly and personal nova. Better yet, heroism early and put their team on the defensive. 2.5 healer teams are stronger when that .5 healer is on the offensive and just lightly healing during spell locks etc.
Post a Comment