Posts with tag wow-arena

It's not simple, unfortunately. It would a) require a retooling of how Battlegrounds assemble teams and b) even under ideal conditions, it would likely slow down queue times dramatically. As Ovenmitz demonstrates, there are a lot of players who are very opposed to that.

First things first, I want to make sure you're aware that the information below reflects both short and long-term design considerations on our end. This isn't all on the table for patch 5.2 for a number of reasons.

To make this clear right off the bat: This shift of instant casts back to cast times is not just targeted at crowd control. We also wish to start moving some heals back to having a cast time rather than being instant. That said, we're not necessarily planning on overhauling many of the spells and abilities that have been instant for a long time now, such as Hand of Justice. We're looking at some of the big outliers that we see brought up a lot, which are instant-cast, area-of-effect abilities like Blinding Light, or Presence of Mind in combination with Ring of Frost.

We think that there are too many of these AoE CC spells at this time, especially instant AoE CC, which can create some frustrating gameplay experiences. Some other particular crowd-control effects that are on our radar are abilities like Blood Fear, which we're considering redesigning altogether, and Predatory Swiftness in combination with Cyclone, which feels virtually impossible to counter.


We're looking at diminishing returns for CC right now as a possible way to help with CC in PvP combat, but it's the type of gameplay overhaul that can be risky to implement in the middle of an expansion cycle if the change is too drastic. We are, however, taking a look right now at the DRs within particular classes, as well as special snowflakes like Cyclone. Either way, the design discussion will undoubtedly continue! ^^

I'll try to break it down as clearly as I can:

Any addon that enables a full, organized Battleground group to queue against a randomly assembled group is creating a scenario where that coordinated group has a huge advantage. That is not in the spirit of the experience we want to provide in the normal Battleground queue. Playing with friends is fun and important, but it shouldn't come at the expense of the spirit of the game nor the fun of others.

The normal Battleground queue is for players to jump in and play against other players in a similar situation. We realize that it's not a perfect system, and we're still looking at ways to improve normal Battleground queues further. Regardless, it's not meant for organized groups to "pug stomp" and get quick Honor. We have built in outlets for players that want to organize--if a competitive, social experience was really the goal, then there are clear ways to achieve that.

The ultimate effect that this kind of queuing has had is to drive players away from PvP. Perhaps it's been a long time since you've been in a random group, but a lot of players will see that they're up against a premade and simply quit. At best, they suffer through it. To an extent premade groups count on this. Heck, one of the popular addons announces opposing players that appear to have rage quit.

Addons aren't really a viable solution for botting issues, but we do take those issues seriously and we'll continue our work on improvements to the Battleground system, including better ways to deal with botting and other exploitative gameplay.

They remain. If a piece of gear is used as currency for a new piece of gear, upgrades are preserved.

Providing an environment where players can compete in the spirit of fair play is extremely important to us, particularly in rated Player versus Player combat. As part of that commitment we regularly monitor gameplay, and have discovered an issue where some Arena teams have exploited the queuing system to obtain high team ratings, "dodge" unfavorable team compositions, and engage in win trading.

These, and all, exploitative activities are absolutely prohibited. We will investigate the situation carefully, and players that have been found to have participated in exploitation will be subject to the appropriate actions against their World of Warcraft accounts. In the meantime, we are currently working to resolve any remaining issues with the queue system to prevent this behavior in the future.

To help everyone keep up with the upcoming system in 5.1 that will allow you to upgrade your Conquest gear with Conquest Points, a hotfix is being implemented very soon that will raise the Conquest Point caps:

At 1500 rating, the Arena Conquest Cap will now be 1800 (up from 1350), while the Rated Battleground Conquest cap will be 2200 (up from 1650). As always, when your rating increases, so will your cap.

Plan accordingly!

Beastmastery Hunters – We agree that stacking too many cooldowns to blow someone up is not interesting, skillful, or fair. (I also want to be clear that with all of these issues, we're not blaming players for using the tools that we gave them; we're blaming ourselves.) We're taking a hard look at the various Hunter cooldowns with the intention of reducing their burst. Hunters are receiving a buff in that they will no longer need to swap between Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Fox. We also hope these changes help result in higher representation of Survival and Marksman Hunters.