Shield spell effectiveness reduced in PvP
by Matthew Rossi 
Feb 4th 2010 at 7:00PM
I'm kind of on the fence about this change. On the one hand, man, as a warrior I hate beating on a shield in PvP. Hate hate hate. It does seem odd to me that we moved resilience to reduce all incoming damage and then reduced all healing to match, though. It seems somewhat like a complicated way to do nothing at all. As someone who sometimes goes resto on my shaman for PvP, I don't really look forward to having my heals heal for less, especially since it's a penalty that will hit me immediately while farming up honor for PvP gear to get resilience will take me time, time my healing will have been adversely affected throughout. How about you? Happy or unhappy about the latest changes in PvP?
Bornakk says:
After further observations of the recent changes made to resilience and healing in PvP, we have made an additional change via an in-game fix so that the PvP healing debuff in Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Wintergrasp now also lowers the effectiveness of Power Word: Shield and Sacred Shield by 10%. The majority of other strong shields or damage absorption mechanics are already affected by the healing change, so we feel this new adjustment is an appropriate step in balancing the effects of resilience versus healing. The ultimate goal is to find a better median between PvP encounters feeling too quick from burst damage, or too long from heals, shields, and absorption effects. We will continue to monitor the way these changes play out and let you know if we feel any further changes are needed. As always, feedback based on your PvP experience with these new changes is welcome.
Filed under: Paladin, Priest, Analysis / Opinion, PvP
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Mognet T Feb 4th 2010 7:03PM
As a Frost Mage, I do not like this.
t0xic Feb 4th 2010 7:08PM
As long as their PvP changes don't affect PvE I don't really care what they do.
Mognet T Feb 4th 2010 7:11PM
True. Too long has PVE suffered from PVP changes.
MusedMoose Feb 4th 2010 7:12PM
I'm with you both. I've seen a lot of calls on this site for Blizzard making PVP-specific changes, and I think it'd be great if they went in that direction. This could be the start of something nifty.
Natsumi Feb 4th 2010 7:32PM
As a Warrior, I fully endorse this change. :) Death to the Squishies!
Wreckage Feb 4th 2010 7:32PM
I always hear people whining about a lack of healers in PVP.. looks like this'll really get 'em flooding through the gates.
My disc priest will continue to not care, and announcements like this only make it less likely that I will do any pvp at all.
Sandslice Feb 4th 2010 8:50PM
@t0xic "As long as their PvP changes don't affect PvE I don't really care what they do."
Considering that the change is being specifically made to the anti-healing PvP aura to include bubbles, I'd say that this has zero effect on PvE, unless you are eternal farming in Wintergrasp.
Kakistocracy Feb 4th 2010 10:32PM
I never understood why Blizzard stoutly denied that they did this sort of thing when CC has always functioned differently against players. It's nice to see that they are embracing the simplest and most way to change pvp without messing up pve.
Lemons Feb 5th 2010 3:02AM
Frost mages have needed some kind of nerf for a while...if it comes as a byproduct of a resil buff/healing nerf I don't really care.
Squirr3llywrath9 Feb 4th 2010 7:12PM
I would really like to know how long they expect pvp encounters to last. They buff resil then say it was because fights were too long. Then they nerf heals to end things a little faster. So how exactly do they determine what is just right.
Edge Feb 4th 2010 7:49PM
Wait what? They buffed resilience because fights were too long. I think you may have it backwards there. They made resilience prevent MORE damage, thus making it harder to kill someone, thus making the fights LONGER, not shorter. Then when they figured out that the resilience buff was making it easy to heal someone back up to full after getting pummeled forever, they then nerfed healing.
This makes complete and total sense, and they were not in essence "doing nothing", they were extending the length of fights and reducing the usefulness of burst. That's it, simple, and it doesn't affect PvP, so yeah I think it is perfectly fine.
Edge Feb 4th 2010 7:50PM
Doesn't affect PvE I meant to say
Squirr3llywrath9 Feb 4th 2010 8:16PM
My bad didn't proof read. Ment for it to say "They buff resil then say it was because fights were too long that they nerf heals to end things a little faster."
Mindaika Feb 4th 2010 9:13PM
To clarify: the resil changes were intended to make fights last longer than 1.5s - haste. The healing changes, and the shield changes, were to make it so that healers were unkillable.
Wyred Feb 5th 2010 5:46AM
Personally I'm still seeing huge burst in pvp. Went into a skirmish the other day as a shadowpriest, got a rogue partner. Came up against a feral druid and a BM hunter, they got the drop on the rogue and blew him up in 3 seconds. 1-2 seconds after that the BM hunter was dead. This resil change is possibly too minor, people weren't dying in deep freeze in a way where if they'd taken 10% less damage they'd have survived, they were getting nuked with cd's to spare and plenty of overkill. Still seeing people dying within a deathcoil, counterspell or getting ripped to shreds with a bladestorm+sweeping strikes, and weapon upgrades are only going to make the melee stronger.
Redielin Feb 6th 2010 5:29AM
The problem isn't size (of heal/of damage) its speed. Nerfing incoming damage is not the exact opposite of nerfing healing, so much so that they cancel each other out. Instead, what it means is, it will take longer for you to whittle someone down through all that resilience, making it much harder to kill someone inside a global cooldown. However, that must be balanced with the fact that it now takes longer to heal someone back up.
The key word here is *longer*. As in, an increase in time. PVP is getting to be so fast paced, that certain abilities and even classes are having a hard time keeping up, and must be either buffed into odd places (since when does the DOT class do more burst than anyone else for two seasons?) or risk being completely sidelined. If you simply nerf damage, healing becomes overpowered (remember season 4 resto druids?), and the winner of a match is the team that can outlast the other team's healer's mana pool. That trivializes strategies based around timing abilities and synergies together with a bit of CC in order to get a kill - you might as well just wail on your opponent like a PVE boss because either way he's not going to die and is going to get healed to full.
the opposite is also true - if damage is crazy high, but healing is nerfed, healing becomes worthless and everyone should become a DPS character to up the RNG chance of killing someone in 2 seconds. (remember season 5, when the only classes who could arena were those with burst and immunity abilities?)
Putting both together should (hopefully) allow matches to go a little longer, and for Arena PVP to reward smart, intelligent, and strategic play - not instagibs. More importantly, it will allow players to notice what is wrong with their current strategy more readily (because they aren't frantically hitting survivability cooldowns), and to adjust mid-match. This should make for much more interesting arena bouts.
Bikhai Feb 4th 2010 7:14PM
Seems pretty crushing for disc priests, seeing as most all of their survivability is tied up in shields. No me gusta, even though my main is a warrior who, much like Mr. Rossi, has had some wonderful adventures with dmg shields in PvP.
Mike Feb 4th 2010 7:15PM
I'm just excited to see a balance change based around PvP that cannot possibly affect PvE. We need more of these.
Also, the healing nerf counteracting the damage nerf is only a complicated way to do nothing at all in pretty much only situations where you're guaranteed to have a healer - ie, arenas.
Animalis Feb 4th 2010 7:31PM
The change is bringing the focus off of healing and onto survivability. making the players need less heals and relying less on there healer. Its a shift to the player being geared and less on there healer.
Aedilhild Feb 4th 2010 7:41PM
Agreed. I'm surprised to see a spell-specific debuff, as I thought the practice ran counter to Blizzard's design philosophy.
Certainly, the devs can monitor changes in Season 8 to prepare for Cataclysm -- but if they can sequester PW:S and SS, they can conceivably increase warrior tanking DPS through select talents/abilities and nullify affects entirely in PvP.