Filed under: PvP

Blizzard Community Manager Daxxarri has taken to the US and EU forums to explain a temporary issue that has led Blizzard to temporarily disable the Conquest quartermasters for both factions.

Daxxarri

The achievement, Tyrannical Conquest, is only intended to be awarded when players earn 25,000 Conquest Points. Due to an issue that was not detected during the PTR testing process, the achievement could be awarded much earlier than intended. We are currently in the process of working to resolve the issue.

In the meantime, we've applied a hotfix that temporarily prevents players from purchasing gear from Tyrannical PvP item vendors.

source

This achievement required a hotfix back in patch 5.2, too, as it was incorrectly calculating the points required. It seems that, with patch 5.3, things have gone from bad to worse. The reason this is an issue is that the achievement's completion, at 25,000 conquest, now allows players to purchase conquest gear with honor. Allowing players to purchase that gear with honor at a far lower points earned level than intended was clearly a bit of an issue! Hopefully the developers will be able to implement a fix very soon, so that PvPers can continue to purchase their gear.

From a PvP perspective, patch 5.3 is one of the biggest patches in a really long time. A really, really long time! WoW Insider has been covering the changes from a PvP angle to a pretty reasonable extent, from the first moment the resilience changes were announced, through the new arena and the new battleground, right up to the more recent alterations to tank damage and the like. All our coverage is collected in one easy place, so do check it out if you're searching for more information.

So we've struck upon a few changes already, but let's dig into the patch notes and provide some additional clarity. I've pulled out the PvP-specific items from the patch notes, but if you want to see them in full, that's absolutely fine too.

It's been a little while since I last did a PvP mailbag, and the emails have been piling up! So, if you have PvP questions, do drop me a line, I will do my best to respond to them, possibly in columns such as this one, or if I can fire off a quick email I will. Do note that I'm far from a PvP specialist in all the classes in WoW, and PvP questions which are class-specific would probably be better directed to the relevant class columnist.

Janrana wrote:

Hi Olivia, since reading about it a while back in one of your columns I've been a big fan of SpellAlerter, but it doesn't seem to have had any updates in a long while and is a bit broken for me. It doesn't seem to have all the spells any more and it also causes some errors to appear when it's on. Do you know of any alternative?

As it happens, I do! First and foremost SpellAlerter is alive and well... ish. It was updated for patch 5.1, but hasn't had any further updates since then. It still works at least fairly well, but I wouldn't rely on it completely. At least, it still allows you to set up custom alerts, so if there are spells it's missing you can add them in.

The latest PTR build has brought with it a change to PvP Power, as MMO-Champion reported earlier today. The change was to the amount of points of PvP Power that it takes to push your percentage up by 1%. The number of points for a 1% increase in PvP Power went from 265 to 400. Currently, if you have, say, 12,000 PvP Power, on live servers you would get around +45% damage from PvP Power, and 22.6% additional healing from PvP Power.

On the PTR, however, 12,000 PvP Power will only give you an extra 30% damage from PvP Power, and, at current numbers, which are still fairly fluid, around 30% extra healing. Of course, don't forget with those healing numbers that Battle Fatigue has been increased to a proportionate level.

This change was a little surprising, so I did what I always do now, tweeted Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka to get his input on the change. He tweeted the following shortly thereafter:

Not too long ago it was announced that there would be an Ask the Devs dedicated to the patch 5.3 PTR changes. Now, it's here. If you're dying to know exactly how all these changes are going to play out, this is the Q&A for you. Some highlights:

A forum thread was created earlier today by a concerned agility trinket user, talking about the changes to their preferred piece, the Shado-Pan Assault trinket with the agility proc. This has been the subject of a lot of complaints from PvPers, as the proc is so incredibly strong that it's easily the best-in-slot for agility classes in PvP. There are also similar changes being made to the strength version.

Basically, in a similar vein to the usual PvP proc nerfs, they have altered the effect of the trinkets to be half as potent, and last twice as long. But, fear not players who are using this for PvE, as Nakatoir clarifies, the change is only applicable in PvP environments. The tooltip hasn't yet been updated, as this requires a client side patch, but checking your character sheet while in a battleground or arena will reveal the change.

These changes will also be impacted in patch 5.3, when item level downscaling comes to PvP situations, as Nakatoir calculates, saying that "the value of the stat proc in 5.3 will be approximately 3454, with Superluminal lasting 40 seconds and Surge of Strength lasting 30 seconds". Players have still been asserting that this trinket is one of the best available, so it will be interesting to see if any further alterations are made. Nakatoir adds that the devs don't intend to prohibit PvE gear in PvP, so maybe there will be no further changes.

The most recent batch of patch 5.3 PTR notes caused quite the stir thanks to one particular bullet point referring to PvP. WoW Insider thought this merited some clarification and background, and, it seems, so did both Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka, and Lead Systems designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, as both made an effort to clarify the change on Twitter. The change reads as follows:

Blizzard

Picking up the Alliance or Horde flag while in a Rated Battleground now increases damage taken by 50% for characters in a tanking specialization, and increases damage taken by 20% for characters in a non-tanking specialization.

source

To be completely clear, in an effort to avoid confusion, this change is currently only active on the patch 5.3 PTR, not on live servers. What's more, it only relates to Rated Battlegrounds. This is not applicable to random battlegrounds.

With that housekeeping out of the way, there's something else that everyone should know when assessing the weight and purpose of this change, which Brian Holinka clarified via Twitter shortly after the patch notes were released.

The battleground is set in a relatively large map, reflective of its 15v15 size, with three mines in a north-south line across the middle. From the top to the bottom of the map, they are the Pandaren Mine, the Center Mine, and the Goblin Mine. The Alliance base is at the eastern end of the map, with the Horde starting at the western end. There is only one graveyard on either side.

As can be seen from the screenshot in the header image, there's a pretty open central run from the Alliance to the Horde bases, both of which look down on the Center Mine, which is indicated by the vertical beam of light in the middle of the image, and in the middle of the map!

One interesting change to be added to the patch 5.3 PTR is shown in the above screenshot: role check. It will be familiar to any player who has previously used the Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder tools, with the three available roles that we're all used to.

So what is it doing in the battleground finder? This is all part of Blizzard's renewed efforts to bring much-needed changes to PvP. The plan behind this alteration is to balance the number of healers on each side of a battleground, to within a tolerance of one, as Blizzard PvP Designer Brian Holinka clarifies on Twitter. What does this mean? The plan is that, while there's no set number of healers for a battleground, there should never be more than a difference of one healer between two teams in a random battleground. Gone are the days of four healers on one team and none on the other, now, if one team has two healers, the other will either have one, or three. If one team has five healers, the other will have either six or four.

While my PTR shaman can't choose it, the tank selector is still active, for now at least. Certainly, there are several battlegrounds in the random queue where a tank isn't really a useful addition to a team, and so far we haven't seen any specific mention of an attempt to balance tank numbers, but it's possible that, in a flag-capture battleground like Warsong Gulch, there is an attempt to get each team a tank.

If you're even remotely interested in WoW PvP, and aren't yet following Brian Holinka on Twitter, you really should be. We've been talking about him quite a bit lately here at WoW Insider, as he's the main agent behind the huge PvP changes coming in in patch 5.3. He's also incredibly responsive, open and helpful on Twitter, and seems to set aside a huge amount of his free time to respond to players' concerns, and hold open and constructive discussions, while not being afraid to fire out some sarcasm crits on the trolls that often haunt those in his position.

He's previously tweeted about the return of the skirmish system, and has been very responsive indeed about the 5.3 changes, and lately he's also been discussing some more confirmed and potential changes in patch 5.3 and beyond.

Now, please do take these changes with a pinch of salt, these aren't even PTR patch notes, but potential changes, some of which are being tested and appearing on patch notes, and some of which are just in the pipeline for the future.


Potential Battleground Changes

One thing that caught our eye here at WoW Insider was a very recent tweet regarding some changes in the the larger battlegrounds such as Isle of Conquest and Alterac Valley.