Posts with tag mists-of-pandaria-pvp

Within the PTR Class and Set Bonus thread, which is now on part two thanks to its gargantuan size, it's easy to miss things, which is exactly what I did with this little gem:

Ghostcrawler

PvP
We're making a change to the way damage-to-healing conversions work so that the healing is not affected by resilience. The healing will be based on how much damage would have been done as if the target had no resilience. If you hit an opponent for 10K and have a mechanic that converts damage into 50% healing, your hit may land for 6K because of resilience, but the heal will still be 5K (50% of the unmitigated damage). This only applies to resilience, not to armor, Shield Wall or other forms of damage reduction.

This change currently includes Atonement, Glyph of Battle Healer, Ancestral Guidance, Vampiric Embrace, Nature's Vigil, Glyph of Siphon Life, Eminence, Glyph of Flame Shock, Leeching Poison, Death Siphon, Feral Spirit and Soul Leech.

Related, we have read feedback that certain mechanics, such as Retribution's mastery, Hand of Light, are double-dipping from resilience. If this happened, then your attack would be mitigated by resilience and then the mastery proc (which is supposed to be a percentage of the main attack) would also be mitigated by resilience. However, we can find no evidence that this is actually happening. In our testing, Hand of Light is never mitigated by resilience a second time. If anyone has additional information, please share.

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Yesterday, I finished gathering valor points for Wrathion, and moved on to the next step of the legendary chain. Unfortunately, this included winning two battlegrounds. I say unfortunately because while I enjoyed PvP back in the days of vanilla and Burning Crusade, I really haven't focused on PvP all that much since then. In fact, other than some excursions into Wintergrasp and Tol Barad, I tend to avoid it altogether.

It's not that I don't enjoy PvP, honestly -- it's that I know, deep down in my heart, that I'm not terribly good at it. So I stay out of the battlegrounds and let those that know what they are doing excel at it. But last night's excursion into the Temple of Kotmogu and the Silvershard Mines were eye-opening, to say the least. Temple of Kotmogu was an incredibly fun frenzy of grabbing orbs and killing players, and escorting carts in the Silvershard Mines was pretty entertaining, too.

Still, sometimes I miss the days where PvP was all about killing other players. It turns out, I'm not alone.

After announcing their intention to do so on Twitter a week or so ago, the developers, headed in this instance by Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, have posted a Dev Watercooler on Mists of Pandaria PvP.

Ghostcrawler comments on MMR or Matchmaking Rating, as well as class balance, even addressing specific concerns about certain specs. He also provides a sneak peek into new features which are coming up for PvP in the future of Mists of Pandaria.

Hit the break for the full post.

This has been an unfolding drama over the past few days, and for me is one of those moments where, even making the best effort, I literally cannot understand where Blizzard are going with a change to the game.

For a while now, the Conquest system has remained the same. If your rating in either arenas or rated battlegrounds is below around 1550, your arena point cap is 1350 for the week. The total cap is 1650, but in order to reach that higher cap, you need to do battlegrounds. If you're doing rated battlegrounds, you can get all the way to 1650, but not with arenas, unless your rating is high enough. So, when players noticed they weren't getting their conquest above 1350, they took to the forums.

For any readers who don't know, Mists of Pandaria brought about a fairly substantial change in PvP gear. Resilience and Spell Penetration were removed, and replaced with two shiny new stats: PvP Power and PvP Resilience. PvP Resilience is essentially the same as the old Resilience stat, reducing your damage taken from other players. It's active all the time, whenever you're wearing your PvP gear.

PvP Power is not, as many believe, a direct 1 for 1 counter to PvP Resilience. PvP Power increases your damage against other players. So, if you're a player who has 0 PvP power, hitting a player who has 50% damage mitigation from PvP Resilience, and your hit does 100 damage, it will only hit them for 50 damage.

Say you are that same player, only now you have a 100% damage increase against other players from PvP Power. Your 100 damage hit now hits another player for 200 damage. But, the player with 50% damage mitigation is still resisting 50% of that damage, so it hits them for 100 damage.

Of course, these values are not correct in-game, but we're getting to that. They're just for illustration!

Welcome back, readers, to this second instalment of our run-down of the new Mists of Pandaria battlegrounds. There's no reason why the Temple of Kotmogu is second. It's not harder, and it's not available later. It's just the second one I wrote about.

First, a word of warning. The information in this post is accurate in beta build 15961 and may change significantly before launch.

Like Silvershard Mines, this battleground is only currently available at level 90. It is significantly more straightforward in construction than its mine-based sister battleground but equally as tactically interesting. I'm really excited about both these battlegrounds, and I think it's fantastic how Blizzard is introducing new styles of battleground rather than capture the flag, capture the node, and invade the keep.

The in-game battleground finder screen describes the battleground as follows:

As you may be aware, there'll be two new battlegrounds arriving on our doorstep in Mists. They are the Silvershard Mine and the Temple of Kotmogu. If you listened to this week's Convert to Raid podcast, you'll have heard me talking briefly about these two battlegrounds -- but I save the best for you, dear readers, so this is a more in-depth look at the battlegrounds.

Firstly, a word of warning. The information in this post is accurate in the current beta build 15913 and may change significantly before launch.

So first, let's look at the more complex of the two battlegrounds, the Silvershard Mine. As the name would imply, it's in a mine. Revolutionary! More specifically, it's in a Venture Co. goblin mine underneath Stranglethorn Vale. It's described in the battleground finder tool as a 10vs10 escort battle, which is pretty accurate, as the objective of the battleground is for each faction to capture and escort mine carts to depots at the end of the line, retaining control of the carts throughout their jouney from the central depot to their destination. An added level of involvement is found at the crossroads, where players can change a mine cart's direction.

Just a short while ago, everyone's favorite blue crab, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, posted briefly on the U.S. forums in response to a thread regarding the function of PvP power and PvP healing. This certainly makes for interesting reading and may allay some fears of the PvE community regarding the use of PvP gear in dungeons and raids.

Is this testing or speculation? Because PvP Power and PvP Resilience should work anywhere with regard to DPS, but of course only when you are attacking or being attacked by other players.

The only thing that doesn't work is PvP Power-fueled healing. At the moment, you only gain the healing benefit when in BGs and Arenas. The reason is because that we don't want PvP gear to be super effective for PvE content (useful is fine, but super effective is not).

That design goal is easily met for damage dealers, because they won't benefit from PvP Power when damaging creatures. Unfortunately, there isn't a simple check for us to determine if a healer is healing damage done by PvP or PvE. In an Arena or BG you can make that assumption, but in the outdoor world you may be engaging in world PvP, or you may just be questing.

We are considering just letting PvP Power affect healing everywhere but dungeons and raids. That would solve world PvP and only risk unbalancing group questing and world bosses. Even the world bosses probably don't represent a huge game balance risk, given that the option always exists to get tons of players together to zerg them.

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So to sum up, PvP power is easily developed to work exclusively in PvP scenarios for DPS and tank specs, as the game can easily tell what you're hitting. Healing is far harder, as you're always healing people wherever you are, so the game has to test for PvP scenarios before employing the PvP power.

To me, as a PvPer, the second option that GC mentions sounds far more appealing. For the PvP healing buff were to only apply in Arenas and Battlegrounds seems quite contrary to Blizzard's desire to reignite world PvP. It would also leave PvP-geared healers rather defenseless outside of the Arena and Battlegrounds, were they to be attacked on PvP servers or similar while out farming, etc. I don't think that unbalancing world bosses is a huge price to pay, particularly considering Blizzard's earlier comments regarding the likelihood of world PvP taking place around world bosses.

However, I'm sure PvEers will take comfort in the knowledge that Blizzard is taking steps to keep PvP gear from becoming too powerful in PvE scenarios.

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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've been making a pretty concerted effort over the past month or so to knock out all those things that I hadn't quite gotten around to finishing for one reason or another in Cataclysm. Last week saw the end of the grueling grind to get enough tokens to purchase the mount shown above, which is easily the most hideous mount I now possess. I'm not sure who thought aqua went with olive green and pink, but whoever they were, I wholeheartedly hope they aren't doing the color scheme on any further mounts.

While I was pleased to get the mount despite its questionable color scheme, there was something I was far, far happier about. I got all the tokens I needed, I got the mount, and at last, at long, long last, I never had to look at Tol Barad ever again. The only things I enjoyed from Tol Barad were getting a pet and two mounts, and the backstory that never really developed further than "Here is a mysterious island with some really strange stuff and ghosts on it." The story disappointed me, the mounts and pet were happily added to the collection, and as for the rest of it ... Well, let's just say I'm not holding any candlelight vigils for the zone.

In Mists of Pandaria, we don't have a Tol Barad. We don't have a Wintergrasp. And I am perfectly happy with both of those things.

Nethaera sat down with WoW's game director Tom Chilton and asked him some questions about PvP in Mists of Pandaria. While a lot of the information we already knew about, there are some highlights that are worth noting.

The first thing is particularly interesting ...

Following on from today's Breakfast Topic on your favorite Battlegrounds, we're really excited to bring you the latest news from Pandaria: Battleground blacklisting is live in the beta!

This long-anticipated feature allows the world-weary PvPer to go through the list and click a thumbs down icon to the right of a highlighted Battleground. You can see what the icon looks like before it is selected on the highlighted Arathi Basin on the header image. Once the little icon is red, as you can see in the header image on Alterac Valley and Strand of the Ancients, those Battlegrounds are blacklisted. When you queue for a random Battleground, those two will be excluded from your random list.

It should be noted that the weekly Call to Arms Battleground cannot be blacklisted -- the "thumbs down" icon doesn't appear next to it. However, as you probably know, the Call to Arms changes every week, so the Battleground in question can go back onto your blacklist straight after the Call to Arms is over.

You can blacklist a maximum of two maps at a time. To un-blacklist, simply uncheck the symbol.

Being a crafty PvPer, I immediately begged a favor from the lovely Anne Stickney to see if we could blacklist more than two Battlegrounds by joining as a group. It turns out that Blizzard had already thought of that, believe it or not, and the the join as group function is currently disabled.

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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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