Kirise
OG
Burst.
From the very first prepatch for Cataclysm, players struggled with the serious rise of burst damage in all of the XP-off brackets. We either die fast, or die very fast. Questions about the strongest classes and the best gear in a bracket often concern burst. In most brackets, the burst is too high.
A lot of hope and concern rides on the prepatch to Mists of Pandaria, when talents get a tremendous overhaul and resilience (now "PvP resilience") graduates to a baseline stat. An argument between two twinkers, Takea and Kre, got me thinking about why so many of us simultaneously look forward to and dread the prepatch, and the two of them deserve much of the credit for elaborating and clarifying the conflict of ideas in this article.
Simply put, the MoP prepatch is ominous, because it must solve two problems at the same time: excessive damage and excessive CCs. But you can't reduce one problem without affecting the other, which makes this mess particularly bad. Let's look at how WoW got into this mess, and what it will take to get out.
Ideally, we want to balance damage with health and healing such that burst is a threat, but gives players an opportunity to counter. Coordinated burst (i.e. focus fire) rewards team play by tilting the field in favor of damage. As a battle dynamically shifts around objectives, players enjoy the oscillating tilt of damage and healing with every strategic and tactical decision. The oscillation makes games more fun.
If damage reaches too high or healing drops too low, then damage roles make a superior contribution to a battleground. Battles simplify into "quickdraw" skirmishes that increase the role of chance and reduce the impact of skill and field awareness. Likewise, if damage dips too low or healing goes too high, then healing roles carry a greater impact in a battleground. Battles stall, depending on near-perfect coordination to take down healers in succession.
Crowd Control acts as a catalyst for damage and healing. By temporarily eliminating an opponent's ability to heal or do damage, we gain a short-term advantage. In a nutshell, CC effectively reduces the size of health, which in turn increases burst by adding time to do more damage or healing. Therefore, the longer CC lasts and the more targets it affects, the more "bursty" damage and healing get.
This complexity drives interest in WoW PvP. Ideally, the balance of damage and healing settles evenly on the buffer of health. Health stays high enough to keep damage from getting too random in its success and to allow heals to counteract damage. Health also stays low enough to maintain the intensity of quality tactics and focus fire, within the context of the objectives and terrain of a battleground or arena. Meanwhile, crowd control creates spikes of opportunity for damage and healing by effectively reducing or increasing health's buffer between damage and healing. Crowd control stays strong enough to compete with burst damage and healing, but weak enough to keep damage from becoming too powerful.
What a neat balance! We can tilt any battle by altering the rate of damage and healing in multiple ways. Winning the tug-of-war between damage and healing requires the best optimization and timing of individual performance, and the best team coordination. So what went wrong?
Quite simply, logarithmic stat growth between expansions. Ghostcrawler discussed the growth of stats in his blog entry concerning item squish. Stats scale a little more steeply in TBC than in Vanilla. And even more steeply in Wrath than in TBC. And so on. To help deal with this scaling problem when TBC came out, Blizzard introduced a new secondary stat in WoW: resilience.
Resilience originally did a small amount of overall damage reduction, and a larger amount of critical damage reduction, to help reduce burst damage in PvP. Later, resilience changed to a straight damage reduction stat. Resilience works like one-sided health -- it reduces the impact of damage without reducing the impact of healing. Resilience was a temporary fix for a problem that could only get worse.
With resilience, raising health makes healing comparatively more powerful, and mana lasts much longer. But lowering health to keep damage important makes healing get more "spammy" -- the smaller window of opportunity to heal encourages healers to overanticipate when a teammate needs a heal.
Now remember, crowd control temporarily affects the ability of health to buffer damage and healing, effectively adding burst. Therefore, resilience indirectly increases the impact of CCs. At first glance, that makes no sense -- doesn't reduced damage reduce the impact of CCs? Only if damage remains low enough. But Blizzard increased damage to prevent healers from getting too strong and to keep games interesting. Resilience forces damage to stay high enough to keep damage relevant, which in turn gives CCs greater impact.
Resilience fixed some damage problems in TBC in the short run, but led to larger problems in the long run thanks to higher burst and less mana consumption by healers. Today, World of Warcraft PvP is in a tough spot. Raise health, and resilience makes healing too strong. Reduce health, and damage makes PvP effectiveness too random. Increase CCs and WoW PvP becomes a game of who lands a CC first. Decrease CCs and some classes lose too much control and survivability. Raising or lowering resilience will require serious rebalancing of health, damage, and healing.
Why not just simply reduce the impact of healing? Recall that Blizzard did exactly that in 3.3.2, with an across-the-board 10% nerf to all PvP healing. But only endgame saw a significant number of players using resilience, so nerfing healing too much would (more greatly) unbalance non-endgame PvP.
How does Blizzard fix this situation? The first (but not the easiest) way is to engineer an item squish, removing the logarithmic stat growth. While ideal, redoing the stats of three (soon to be four) expansions' worth of items is no small task.
The second way is to reduce overall stats without an item squish, by removing items from the game or reducing the number of equipment slots. However, this can quickly oversimplify gearing choices. Even though Blizzard will eliminate the relic/wand/bow/gun slot, Blizzard made it clear they will increase the stats on these items to match current main hand and two hand weapons, and make the displaced weapons usable in the main weapon slots. Expect no significant impact to overall stats.
The third way is to take resilience to an even greater extreme, and offer a countervailing stat to keep healers from getting too strong. Not by accident, Blizzard announced they will give everyone 30% baseline resilience, and will introduce "PvP power" as a replacement for the soon-to-be obsolete spell penetration stat. While PvP power will increase both damage and healing, damage dealers will benefit more from PvP power since healers won't want to stack too much PvP power and risk losing efficiency by overhealing.
To help mitigate the impact of CCs, Kre suggested combining more CC diminishing returns, or exponentially increasing the cooldown of CCs. Myriad possibilities abound, and Eldacar eloquently describes both the impact of CCs in the game as they stand now, and the need for solutions.
The changes coming in Mists of Pandaria bring two possibilities for PvP in World of Warcraft. If balanced well, PvP in WoW could grant enough survivability to give newer players breathing room to grow, while providing veteran players some great playstyle choices and demanding team tactics. If Blizzard's choices do not pan out, WoW PvP could descend into a cesspit of unkillable healers, ridiculously strong glass cannons, and a "quick draw" environment where the first player to land a hit or a CC usually wins. If the second possibility comes to pass, expect a mass exodus from WoW PvP.
The MoP prepatch means much for WoW. Certainly adjustments will continue clear into the launch of Mists, but the prepatch will set the tone for the expansion, and Blizzard needs to get this right to keep PvP fun. Merged battlegrounds, the random BG finder, and "queue from anywhere" did much to increase access and reduce wait times, but we need a game worth playing, and the prepatch to Mists of Pandaria will show us what we can expect from WoW in the new expansion.
