Friday, March 2, 2012

Ditch The PvP Gear Already

The worst thing that ever happened to the world of PvP is resilience and soon we will be saying good bye to it.  Or that is what blizzard is trying to make people believe.

They are renaming resilience PvP defense and telling people it is different.  I know I am usually the first to say that the majority of the WoW player base can barely tie their shoes themselves, but does blizzard really think they are that stupid?  I say it as a sarcastic joke but blizzard really seems to believe it.

So they plan to replace resilience with PvP defense and PvP power.  Maybe there is some factor I missed with breezing over it quickly but it sounds like they just turned resilience into two stats instead of just one.  How is adding more to it removing it?

I believe that it would be better for everyone involved if there were no such thing as PvP gear at all.

I like the idea of the 30% built in resilience for all characters.  I also think this is an incredible idea for helping them balance PvP.  Say holy priests are seen as too squishy they can up the base resilience of priests that are speced holy to 38% or 40% or 42% or whatever as needed until they feel that priests are more in line with everyone else.  Say they think that blood death knights are too durable, they can lower their base resilience to 15% or whatever is needed to keep them in line.

They can tweak the base resilience on a class and spec basis and that would be amazing in helping them create balance.  But will they do that?  I doubt it.  A design like that is way to intelligent for their design team or they would have come up with it 8 years ago.

There is one problem I can see if they remove resilience on gear as a stat.  PvPers would feel the need to PvE to get gear.  Again, that can easily be addressed to some extent.  Just make conquest and valor mean the same thing and buy the same things and justice and honor mean the same thing and buy the same things.

Of course this would not address the issue with items that are not for sale in the valor vendor, so add them to the valor vendors.  Having to save up 2000 valor (which at 100 per boss in a raid is 20 kills) to buy the item you want is a lot more "fun" then killing a boss over and over for weeks on end hoping and praying it drops and then hoping and praying you win the roll.  So adding every single item that can drop in the raid to the valor vendor is not a bad idea.  All it does is remove the luck factor for those that are unlucky.

Which brings us to heroic gear, how would that be handled.  It wouldn't.  Remove heroic gear completely.  Heroics are there for the challenge, the achievement.  You want a challenge, do it in normal gear.  There is no need for heroic gear.  If anything, just make it that heroic boss kills do not count toward your weekly valor cap, so if someone is downing heroic bosses they can go over the 1000 weekly cap because no heroic kills count toward the cap.  The prestige, the titles, the achievements, and the extra valor would be heroic raiding benefits.  Gear is not required.

Not to mention the wonderful side effect of removing heroic gear, it would remove another level of gear each raid tier which in effect removes a nice little chuck of the stat inflation.  Also, it would make tuning heroic raids easier because they would just tweak the normals to have higher numbers on everything instead of having to redesign the whole heroic tier with heroic gear in mind. 

So now PvP gear and PvE gear would be the same thing.  It would be attainable in the same way no matter which way you play the game and the classes could be easier to balance for both PvP and PvE because people will always be wearing the same gear for everything.

It is about time blizzard, you are making changes, make them right.

Changing resilience to PvP defense and PvP power is not removing resilience.  It is making it two stats instead of one.

There would be a lot of good side effects to this change too.

More bag space.  No longer will my shaman have to carry a resto set, a resto PvP set, an enhancement set and a enhancement PvP set.

No longer will PvPers get the easy route to buying all their new gear the second they hit max level (377 set for example) whereas a PvEer has to work for their items (378 for example) to be roughly in the same ballpark.

No more people complaining about people PvPing in PvE gear and no more complaining about people PvEing in PvP gear.

No more people spending time trying to decide if wearing the 390 PvP helm is better then wearing the 378 PvE helm.  You did say you wanted to make peoples choices easier right?

It would make it easier for a PvEer to start PvPing because they can switch at any time and have the gear already.  Same goes the other way around as well.

Removing PvP gear just makes sense.  Lots of it.

If they are redesigning all the stats and redesigning how resilience works then now is the time to make this fix.  Now is the time to set everything straight.  Do the right thing blizzard.  Fix it now while you are fixing it.  Don't compound the error by removing one problem and replacing it with two.

Ditch the PvP gear already.

3 comments:

  1. According to http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2012/03/pandaria-stat-changes.html
    the changes are that the pvp stats no longer use stat budgets. The effect will be that pvp gear will be somewhat weaker than pve gear but still viable (maybe like blue quality pve gear) and then pve gear with its higher stats might be somewhat viable in pvp.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Having to save up 2000 valor (which at 100 per boss in a raid is 20 kills) to buy the item you want is a lot more "fun" then killing a boss over and over for weeks on end hoping and praying it drops and then hoping and praying you win the roll.

    You mean just like earning a regular wage is more "fun" than winning the lottery? o_O I thought that removing RNG from so many of the holiday events was terrible, now they are all just identical token grinds. I used to be able to participate in them casually and maybe get lucky once in a while, but now it's always just a choice between grinding ALL the things or getting nothing at all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maybe it is my consistently bad luck with rolls and drops but I would rather work to earn my gear then leave it up to luck to decide if I should get my gear.

      Delete