Posts with tag PvE

Mists of Pandaria is like playing in a field of daffodils while drinking from a mug of stout. Very little to complain about, if you don't mind the eternal dailies. But even with the household chore of doing your dailies, there's one element I still miss from previous expansions: Wintergrasp. (Or Tol Barad, if you prefer).

While Wintergrasp and Tol Barad both had their design challenges, always revolving around that unpredictable critter called human behavior, these World PvP Zones provided dynamics to the game you can't reproduce with queued BGs.

It was a place to play with your server mates, matching your own PvP skills against other folks from your server. While you might run across a familiar face in the regular BGs, Wintergrasp and Tol Barad were the best places to get your home server action happening. These days, Alliance vs. Horde guild rivalries feel a little silly. You don't see each other to have a real feud, unless you're on a PvP server.

The fight timing of the zones lent itself to "WoW breaks." Busy cleaning the house, studying for a test, and otherwise being a productive member of society? Well, trotting off to Wintergrasp or TB when it was up provided a nice, occasional timed break. That probably seems like a minor thing, since you could just do the same as with a BG, but the game's enforced timing gave that work-break-work habit a more natural feel. And the Pomodoro Technique of productivity is effective for a reason. This was the Wintergrasp Technique.

Are you ever curious as to which specs are the most popular for raiding or PvP? Well, GuildOx has you covered. Both for PvE and PvP in fact. There's a lot of interesting things to pull out of this data. For starters, just looking at the PvP data, where are the rogues? Seeing rogues so low in PvP (an area they've dominated as recently as Cataclysm) is kind of a shocker. Frost mages, shadow priests, arms warriors, beast mastery hunters and frost DK's are the most dominant non-healing specs in PvP right now.

Over on the PvE side of the fence, (drawn from the top 5% of raiding characters) we see that Blood DK's and Guardian Druids are the most popular raid tanks, but that all tank classes are fairly close together save for brewmaster monks. I don't know why but clearly they're not taking off as tanks yet, perhaps due to entrenchment. Most raids tend towards established tanks, after all. For DPS classes, fire mages and shadow priests are the most popular, followed by beast mastery hunters and affliction warlocks. This is interesting when contrasted with the actual state of DPS classes in normal and heroic raiding atm. Rogues are interestingly split between assassination and combat, keeping them from challenging any of these classes. As for healing, restoration shamans and druids and holy paladins seem to be on top, but discipline priests look strong as well, with mistweaver monks trailing behind.

You can head over to GuildOx and dig around for yourself.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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The Korean World of Warcraft community site has published some interesting news regarding the future of raiding in patch 5.1. An update posted earlier today states that 10 and 25-man lockouts will not be shared. It looks like this change will apply to Korean realms only (for now). There's no mention if this change is going to affect realms in other regions. The item levels of loot in 25-man raids will be increased with this change. For example, Terrace on 10-man would drop ilevel 496 items whereas the 25-man would drop 504.

As a 25-man raider myself, I am greatly interested in this change. It's challenging to maintain a healthy 25-man raiding roster. While this change would benefit 25-man guilds, it would also have an impact on 10-man raid groups. Equal item level rewards meant that most players would choose the quickest and most efficient route.

What do you guys think of this as a possible solution to the whole 10 vs 25s issue? If you're raiding in a 10-man group right now, would this cause you to look for and apply to a 25-man guild?

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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This ugly subject inevitably comes up: "I do bad damage in PvP, but they can't buff me because of my high PvE damage." Spend enough time around MMOs, and you'll hear that line with nearly the same regularity that the cock crows each morning. That statement leads to this one: "Spells should work differently in PvP and PvE. They're two different games!"

They're not, they shouldn't, and please, no. Ghostcrawler himself just hit the forums to point out a few good, solid, technical reasons. To sum up his excellent explanation, Blizzard can't just duplicate all the spells and make them work different in PvP and PvE because that multiplies the level of complexity in the programming. The more complexity you add to the system, the more likely you are to see bugs and exploits sneak into the game. Not to mention, on the other side of the fence, the PvP dynamic itself is so complex that you can't just assume "low damage" is a function of the game itself. It can easily be due to the metagame, not to mention each player's performance.

Ghostcrawler's logic seems to be a slam dunk, but I've had the misfortune of playing in a few games that did use different rule sets for PvP and PvE. It's a nightmare. City of Heroes was so clumsy in its divisive handling that I still wake up at night screaming, "That was my power move!"

WoW isn't an either/or game. You don't tend to completely eschew PvE when you're playing PvP, no matter how much we wish you could. Dailies, raids, and other circumstances force you into the world. Even dedicated PvE players jump into the BGs occasionally. Separating the rules between the playing arenas creates yet another barrier to playing the entire World of Warcraft. Not to mention, if those different rules are different enough, it ends up feeling like you're running two different characters. Is that really the game we want?

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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I play the only class with a damage-dealing ability that works differently in PvP. Colossus Smash is apparently so potent in PvP, entirely because yet again it's reducing armor, that it has to function differently there. Now, in response to a forum thread asking why all spells aren't balanced separately for PvP and PvE, Ghostcrawler responds.

Ghostcrawler - Why are we not balanced this way?

We do this already. Look at abilities such as Colossus Smash and even the concept of PvP CC durations, which has been in the game for a long time.

It's not our option of first resort because it's not intuitive for players and it means anytime we want to make balance adjustments, we must change two sets of numbers.

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This leads me to consider: Should it be more common for abilities to work differently in PvP and PvE? I'm sure we all agree that the other guys' abilities should, but once I start mentioning an ability that you actually use in PvP, you may suddenly feel differently about it. I'm not going to pretend I loved the Colossus Smash change, but I understood why they did it.

Daxxarri took to the forums to clarify for players that the world will not end when the relative items levels of PvE and PvP gear change in the next expansion. Players have been confused as to what Blizzard meant when it indicated that PvP gear in Mists of Pandaria will be a lower item level than its PvE counterpart but more effective in PvP because of the addition of a free stat to the item's budget that boosts its effectiveness against other players.

Blizzard is making this change for many reasons, one of which is to stop player abuse of PvP gear's item level to inflate their scores to enter dungeons via the Dungeon and Raid Finders earlier than they should. Resilience is being changed to a PvP-centric stat that does not cost anything in an item's budget and enhances the item's effectiveness in PvP. The item's effectiveness in PvE, however, would be that of similarly leveled PvE gear.

This turns the best PvP gear into relatively decent PvE gear with a lower item level. The highest tier of PvP gear will still be the best gear for fighting other players because of the new stat that the highest tier of PvE gear is lacking, regardless of item level. If you PvP, wear PvP gear. If you PvE, wear PvE gear. Now, however, going between the two won't be as severe as it is right now.

Hit the jump for Daxxarri's posts and explanations in full regarding PvP and PvE gear.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Epic gems are here, and they're designed differently than we're used to. To be specific, they're designed without fairness baked in, which is somewhat of a new feeling for people who weren't around buying epic gems in The Burning Crusade.

Fairness is actually the wrong word for this. Life isn't fair, and neither is WoW. Instead, I'll talk about balance. Blizzard has gone to great lengths to ensure that the game remains fun for as many people as possible by trying to avoid changes that suddenly disadvantage an arbitrary subset of players or shift the desirability of choices made a long time ago.

Balanced changes don't force competitive PvP and raiding group to play the gold-making game to be on a level footing with the competition. They also don't provide a tangible itemization difference between the profession perks of different crafting professions.

Choose the adventures of Robin Torres as Roblinator the goblin shamanator or join in with <It came from the Blog> on Zangarmarsh (US-PvE-H).

This week, I'll be doing a random dungeon. Please join me if you are in your early level 20s. Alternatively, you can watch me in the stream above and participate in the chat room after the break.

Update: The stream is now over. Please click on the image above for the video replay.

Choose the adventures of Robin Torres as Roblinator the goblin shamanator or join in with <It came from the Blog> on Zangarmarsh (US-PvE-H).

This is a PvE week, so Roblinator will be attempting a dungeon -- hopefully with some of you. Join us in game or in the chat room after the break. We also have lots of polls this week to vote on after the break.

Update: The stream is now over. Please click on the above image for the video replay.

Choose the adventures of Robin Torres as Roblinator the goblin shamanator or join in with <It came from the Blog> on Zangarmarsh (US-PvE-H).

As promised last week, I'll be PvPing today with anyone who wants to join me. While in the queue, we will be questing in Azshara. If you can't join me in game, you can always watch above and chat after the break.

Update: The stream is now over. You can watch the video replay by clicking on the image above.

Daxxarri - 2200 Rating Weapon Availability

The decision to further delay availability of weapons requiring 2200 rating was not made lightly. Currently very few guilds are clearing PvE content that drops weapons of this caliber, which would make rated Battlegrounds and Arenas the primary source for top-tier weapons. We of course don't want players who are pursuing PvE content to feel as though they must engage in heavy PvP to obtain these weapons in order to be competitive or successful.

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Understandably, some folks are upset -- probably the ones who either already have the ratings and points ready to spend, or the ones who managed to get the weapons during the brief window where there was a bug. Daxxari answers those concerns in a later post as well.