Recent Blue Season 5 Arena Posts

Burst damage in Arenas
Totally agree that the matches like you are describing can involve a lot of skill. But we also heard from plenty of players during the heydey of maxed out resilience that they felt like they couldn't compete because pure damage dealing wasn't of much use in an Arena. Instead, every class was asking for CC, counter CC, ways to close the gap, ways to interrupt or silence, etc. Damage itself was devalued. Even today you can see players who are glad to no longer have 20+ minute Arenas that feel more like chess matches.

Things may be too bursty now, but I think we've also been in a state where CC'ing or draining the healer was basically the whole game too. I think there is a sweet spot somewhere, but I didn't want players to think that was a very different place than what we thought

Resilience and burst damage

It is hard to nail the sweet spot on Arena balance, and what that sweet spot is depends a lot on what role you play. At times players have felt that they couldn't prevent someone from healing, which turns the entire fight into mana draining, silence and crowd control, since nobody ever dies. Damage-dealers were frustrated because they felt like just beating on someone (which their entire spec may have been designed around) was ineffective. Currently, the opposite is true, where players can be beaten down very quickly and healers tend to wonder why they should even bother trying to heal.

Resilience will make a difference - remember that not only is PvP gear itemized for resilience, but it uses up points that would normally be spent on +dps. The defenses are not only higher, but the offenses are lower. Furthermore, once players can survive for a few seconds, it tends to force everyone to worry about defenses once again. Will resilience make enough of a difference? That is something we are discussing right now.

We hear and understand all of the concerns. I don't have any announcements to make of changes at this time, and honestly changes of the magnitude we're talking would not be the kind of thing I would just casually drop as an answer to a forum thread like this. But we do hear you.

[...] While that was true to an extent, if you look at the Lich King PvP gear, you'll see that it pays a higher price for resilience. In previous seasons, you could get very high dps and resilience on the same set of gear. That is harder to do now. Rogues, like everyone else, will be risking being very fragile if they go with all PvE gear for the damage. That isn't happening now because very few people have much PvP gear. Once players can survive a few hits, then players without resilience are going to go down quickly.

(Weapons are an exception to this, at least for now.)

Again, I'm not saying that burst damage won't still be too high. That is something we're looking at.

Arena Matchmaking
My point was that when the matchmaking is working well, it will pit you against players very close to your skill level. Playing players very close to your skill level increases the chance you will lose. The point is actually not to have the 2000+ players mowing their way through scrubs. It's to pair off the best teams against each other so that getting e.g. Gladiator means something.

What I was actually getting at though was a loftier sentiment that players run through quests or an instance and one-shot everything and then go into PvP and can lose a lot. It's a very different experience, and psychologically I think it affects players more than they give it credit for. (If you are highly-ranked or don't even play PvE much then it likely affects you a lot less.)