Doublespeak: Blizzard edition
File this one under Dissonance, Cognitive:
One of our upcoming goals in Mists of Pandaria is to make the gap between the overall DPS/healing of both PvE and PvP items smaller. In fact, we have design plans for new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP than equivalent level PvE gear and weapons.
The overall goal is to reduce the barrier for crossing between PvE and PvP (and vice versa), as well as to also ensure that PvP gear is the best in PvP, and PvE gear is the best in PvE.
I read that, and now feel like I’m losing my ability to understand language.
I mean… okay, making the gap between PvP and PvE gear smaller. Got that, that’s good. But then they’re making “new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP.” So… err… they want the gap to be larger. Even if I somehow imagine that the DPS/healing difference will be smaller between the two gear sets, if these new combat mechanics makes PvP gear “markedly better” in PvP than PvE gear… then what the hell? You are right back where you goddamn started!
Up cannot be Down. We can’t have always been at war with Uranus Eurasia!
The only sort of thing I can imagine is if, for example, each piece of PvP gear reduced the cooldown of your PvP trinket, but otherwise had the same relative DPS/healing as PvE gear. Maybe that would be a lower barrier to entry? But if CC was balanced with lower trinket cooldowns in mind, then a fresh player would still be at a high, relative disadvantage. Perhaps not in BGs or even Rated BGs – respawning and getting back to the fight erodes a large chunk of your timer naturally – but absolutely in Arenas, which was the thrust of the thread the blue responded to.
Regardless, how would Blizzard ensure that PvE gear would be better in PvE in ways that didn’t affect DPS? Having 4000 resilience means you have 4000 less Haste/Mastery/Crit, right? It’s a huge difference.
I am so confused right now.
Posted on January 30, 2012, in WoW and tagged Blue Post, Cognitive Dissonance, PvP. Bookmark the permalink. 9 Comments.
In An Age 
Maybe resilience will no longer be payed with the item budget.
And PvE might get fire resistance back. :)
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Oh god… that would actually work, wouldn’t it?
Resistances need to die in a 400 Spell Penetration fire.
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My guess is that they want the PvP weapons marked better at PvP as compared to now, where PvE weapons are much better at PvP. Thus making PvP and PvE weapons more equal in PvP ;)
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They’re making the DPS/HPS difference between PvE and PvP gear smaller, not the difference between the gear.
So PvE gear has e. g. total 400 points of secondary stats while PvP has 200 secondary + 200 resilience. If they change PvP to have 300 secondary + 200 res, they will achieve:
– the DPS/HPS gap is smaller
– PvP gear gets better compared to PvE for PvP
– the barrier from PvP to PvE decreases
– the PvE gear stays better for PvE
which is all but one of the stated goals. The barrier from PvE to PvP increases even if they stated they wanted to decrease it though but I’m really not sure how they intend to change it as it seems to be direct opposite of making PvP gear better for PvP.
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The whole “markedly better while reducing the barrier” bit is what’s throwing me off. If they were simply nerfing PvE gear in PvP, it would have been much more intelligible.
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I don’t try to understand anything Blizzard is doing with WoW anymore. You can’t “decrease” a barrier while making each side of that barrier more distinct. It’s a contradiction.
I’m guessing what their goal is is to make it easier to PvP in PvE gear, provided you aren’t planning to actually PvP competitively with anyone who has PvP gear.
So why don’t they just say that?
Oh, right. Cause people would feel bad that they aren’t in I WIN mode 100% of the time.
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Whoever wrote that quote probably could have done a better job of explaining themselves.
If you’ve been following the blue tracker recently you might have seen a lot of whining about burst damage in PvP, specifically directed at [Rogues] players using PvE gear to put out damage beyond what the PvP system is balanced for.
The intention seems to be to lessen the gap in throughput between PvE and PvP gear, while simultaneously granting PvP gear bonuses which go beyond just having the resilience stat, perhaps something along the lines of the current PvP class set bonuses.
Basically to make sure that PvE gear is never more desirable than PvP gear for PvP.
The issue I see with the above system is that for PvE gear throughput is the only thing people want, so would require some pretty creative thinking to stop this from turning into the opposite situation– people using PvP gear in PvE– if as they claim there will be so little difference in throughput between the two.
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Having read the post and some of the thread to get a context it would seem to me that this is a Blizzard employee desperately trying to defend an indefensible position and doing a very bad job.
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I could imagine that gear of the same ilvl has approximately the same stats, but the environment checks what kind of gear you are wearing and gives you a slight bonus.
if you were to wear pvp flagged gear in BGs/arena you gain +x in resilience, which makes it better then pve gear but not mandatory for the casual pvp’er.
If you were in a raid encounter/dungeon you pvp gear would still be very good gear, just that the pve things gets a +3% crit chance. It’s not spectacular, it will be a min/max decision, but it is also viable for a harcore pvp’er to experience the pve content right away without having to gear grind beforehand.
In the open world both gear types will have approximately the same behaviour, making it possible to play on a pvp server and running around in your pve gear without getting one shot, maybe it’s all about contested zones.
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