never heard of the wsvg i guess.

From someone who spends an unhealthy ammount of time playing WoW I can tell you that "competitive-WoW" is total garbage, just the fact that with certain setup you can not beat others makes it as random as russian roulette, much less fun as well.

In 2v2 and 3v3, yes. 5v5 is fine.

law of large numbers? lmao :D

Hehe, it's so random that you need more players to make a win statistically significant x)

Aye - I'd say it doesn't get perfectly balanced until 40v40. Before all the tweaks to stop people from fighting with each other in PVP content, 40v40 could last as long as 12-18 hours.

hehehehe, pretty cool in one way though x)

when troop-morale and leadership affect gameplay... :D

Well, it WAS cool. It was a very long objective based battleground. Now, it's nothing more than a PVE race. People whined about it until it got changed again and again. Now, 40v40 last 15 minutes and we're lucky to see more than 15 real kills in a game. Arena 5v5 is all we have left for somewhat skill-based gameplay. =(

:&

av was horrid when it lasted 7 hours lol really, i only play bg for honor i think they suck otherwise, arena on the other hand is fun

That's the worst way to play WoW. You play BGs just for honor which you use to buy PVP gear which is used... to play BGs. If you're playing the game just for gear, you're doing it wrong.

Well, you have to get as much honour gear as you can to have a chance of rating climbing in arenas, or you just get flattened by people with better gear even if your tactics are superior.
So a lot of people will play BGs purely to farm them. Just playing the game for the giggles of eight hour AV games would be fine if there was no gearing up. The only way to play the game like that is to be completely uncompetitive, and to ignore the frustration of being squished constantly by tits with full arena gear.

That mentality is what makes WoW just a grind. You're grinding for honor to buy gear to get honor for gear. At some point, you have to sit back and have fun with what you have instead of just grinding for another grind. Even if you finally finish the grind to get the gear you want, the next week there will be new gear to grind to and you won't be on top anymore. The fun of the game was when you actually PLAYED against the opponents just for the win. I once played in an 8 hour AV from the START. We got pushed all the way back to frostwolf graveyard and stood our ground for 3 hours before pushing them all the way back to Vandar for the win.

Even with most of the recent changes, it wasn't so bad before this, there was still some fighting. With the advent of the reinforcement system on 2.3, the alliance is too afraid to fight because they know they'll lose in combat. Now they just run past us and we can only take down a few of them while they rush to our aid station to kill our general. The only way to counter it is to zerg their aid station and see who is the fastest. It's a PVE race for people to get honor so they can play in low ranking arena.

Supposing you are after the PVP honor gear, it would take (if you won EVERY SINGLE AV and they were all roughly 15-30 minutes) around 35+ hours just to get your S1 set that will allow you to compete at LOW ratings in arena. With even a moderate arena ranking, That's not even counting all the vindicator stuff. Then, once you start arena, it would take you at least 3 months to have all of your S3 gear. Don't forget that people who were already decked out in S2 gear already have S3 gear and make it even more difficult for you to increase your ratings.

wow is a grind..the game is not fun, get it through your head.

"The fun of the game was when you actually PLAYED against the opponents just for the win."

Yes, I've done that. Level 60 premades in AB and WSG, back when I used to raid and had gear that ment I wasn't squished by 50% of people who could only press two buttons. But at 70 I haven't been playing for a while so I'm having to catch up to all the players who've been gearing for ages, and it's a huge uphill struggle, 80k of vindicator's gear, + S1 gear to fill more gaps. That's a shitload of honour to get, and people know it.

I do actually enjoy EotS and the new AV. AV games are very varied but you can have very exciting sieges around Towers as well as zerg meets zerg fights around major NPCs. But now at least when you are loosing and loosing badly you don't have to wait five years for defeat. Giant eight hour AV games are interesting in principle, but in practice they are frustrating because at heart WoW is an RPG and people will want progression out of it. Eight hours for a piddly amount of honour is frustrating. When you have your full PvP set it's fun because you're not loosing anything by the game dragging on. Games being short does not mean the games aren't fun, they're just less 'epic'.

If you want to play just for the win I suggest you go into WSG since a game of that can easily stretch out over an hour between two premades who are determined to turtle. Plus WotLK will (supposedly) have guild vs guild BGs and outdoor siege shit so it looks like Blizzard have been taking notice.

WSG and AB have never given me anywhere near as much fun as AV. Instead, bonus honor needs to be changed to time invested in the game multiplied by objectives completed and individual kills need to be increased back to 10-20 honor per kill without DR. That would make 8 hour AV just fine since you could just jump in and kill people to get honor. It would actually promote PVP. Gear in BG does not matter.

"Gear in BG does not matter"

Gear does matter a lot. A band of S3 players capping/holding areas will require a large number of lesser geared players to overcome...which means the side with less gear must move people away from other areas to fight them. Gear always matters. It matters less in AV than in other BGs, but it is still important. Try defending a Tower against a bunch of epic geared players when you and your friends are only in blues. It's not pretty.

For the most part, geared players don't play BG - they're playing arena. There aren't even enough ranked teams with S3 gear to be noticeable in BG yet. Hell, even if they were going for all S3, they'd be too busy playing arena matches to have time. Also, this only supports the idea that you can balance the game by adding more players. 40v40 was excellent balance that had standoffs for hours. In WSG/AB/EOTS, most of the combat is done with smaller groups and with uneven numbers. That, however, is a strategy problem, not gear.

If you got pushed back in the old days as horde then you bg horde must really suck :D

btw u keep talking about 2v2 yes its badly balanced 3v3 lesser so, 5v5 is fine and really should be used for tourneys not 3v3

BG ill NEVER been fun unless its an actually team no just pugs or premades

Well, we did get pushed back to FW and it was quite a fight. We managed to push them all the way back for the win over the next several hours, though.

Well the way blizzard made it u have to do that to get gear for arena which is the fun part, theres no way as ally u can enjoy games when its pug vs pug ally lose all the time on my battle group, premade is the only way and even then its just farming, when we meet a horde premade they leave cos they have someone on the outside queuin them for another bg(insta queues for horde) as it stands now i dont have to do bg really unless im bored as i only need the ring and neck for this season

and just for your attention my guild came 2nd @ blizzcon :D

also rogue/mage(lock)/druid or rogue/mage(lock)/druid will beat lock/spriest/druid in 3v3, shows u have no clue

Yeah, if they're bad.

try playing games for fun, its alot more rewarding then for purple pixels. though actually i must say i am a hypocrite since the last week or so of grind for grand marshal was not fun at all.

with the amount of purples in TBC, and the huge quality gap between then the colour of items is pretty meaningless now...other than 'Blue = lawl shit'

i really just meant it as dergotory of stuff that is not even real.

wrong..

ok

so norwegian - pink! hah!

esr is filled with pre-assuming narrowminded bunch of idiots.

god. i should avoid these threads, i get redfaced

So Vedic is wrong?

im not sure how to put this, some classes work together better, you need certain classes in certain setups to make it work, but you can also win on skill even if you have a worse setup. 5v5 arena is (imo) the best way to play competative in WoW since you can only play with your own character (usually). but if you get to pick from all classes and you can play everyone of them i think 3v3 works good aswell. if you have seen any streams you can see that they rarely use paladin in 3v3 or 2v2, that's because paladin mostly shines in 5v5 (for example).

so this really comes down to who you ask. most people who play wow themselves think their own class is the most gimped one and they only play on skill while every other class is imbalanced and too good. what they can't see is that their class can't be the best at everything and blizzard is doing a very good job balancing it. i'm a paladin for example, my class is one of the best classes in PVE for healing and probably one of the most valuable in 5v5 pvp aswell (dispelling evul stuff and i have many defensive abilities + BoF etc etc) while i'm almost totally useless in 2v2 or 3v3 as healer since there just isnt enough defensive skills or firepower in the other player that we can beat another team with pure damage setup.. anyhow i feel like im ranting and this really goes down to who you ask :)

i see.. :]

pass the joint plz

No skill is going to make you win in 3v3 against a warlock, a shadow priest, and a druid... Unless they're just horrible at the game or are AFK. To say that the classes are balanced is silly at best. Blizzard themselves have said openly on the forums that many class compositions are completely overpowered in the 2v2/3v3 scene. They balance the game around PVE, not PVP. I've played every class to 60 (except druid) and warrior/mage/pally to 70. Some classes really are gimped in PVP.

To bring the balance to a greater level, you can only add more players. Personally, I think a 10v10 would be excellent. However, it would be rather hard to have tournaments for 10v10 since it's much harder to ship 10 people around the world and would take up much more space at the tournament. 2v2/3v3/5v5 only exist for the same reason that CS is newbie friendly. Even little 12 year old CHUKNRISPWNSU can get his share of kills in when he happens upon the team that is weak to his class composition.

Any theorycrafter can tell you that the balance right now is absurd at best. Arcane shot? Silencing shot? Warlock anything? Icy veins? S3 melee weapons? Mass dispel? Purge? Spellsteal? Deadly throw? Resilience? The list goes on. Blizzard doesn't fix problems, they just add a new layer on top of old problems to normalize everything. The problem is, it doesn't work.

heh funny....

ok, so you levelled alot of characters, this tells me you spend more time grinding mobs than PvPing, am i right?

correct, blizzard doesnt balance the game to duels. PVErs whine about the game beeing balanced for PVP and the other way around, do you see a connection?

and the warlock / sp / druid combo is a good one i agree but there are also other very good combinations. if you check the top ranked teams in the bgs you'll find that many of them use different setups! (just in the start of s3 things are a bit weird but thats what it was like before, believe me, i did check)

and you name all these spells and abilities that are supposed to be "inbalanced" yet every class seem to have some imbalanced spell or abiltiy???

the problem with the WoW scene (and everyone who comments on it) is that they dont just fucking play the game but whine about it at useless forum posts at forums while outside durotar or ironforge because they just lost a duel vs a better geared player or a bad setup for their class.

god im tired of noob kids who cries because they lose.

Being that I've played in a lock/druid/spriest team, I can tell you the reason that they don't go for the highest ranks are because it gets SO damn boring. Even so, almost every single top 3v3 team in the world right now has a warlock. No, I don't spend more time grinding mobs than PVPing - I've finished all my PVE days a while ago. I PVP every single day with several teams and do many BGs as well. I farm roughly 18k honor per day and play at least 20-30 arena matches.

Honestly, people have a right to whine when Blizzard is making PVP the main focus of the game but not actually balancing the game FOR PVP. It's not even that Blizzard isn't balancing the game for duels - they're not even balancing it for group PVP. They've said this themselves on many occasions. Resilience was blizzard's answer to fixing PVP in order to make everyone normalized. However, all it really did was make the same outcomes with longer fights and totally gimp crit-based classes like rogue and mage. One step forward, two steps back. Adding new mechanics to fix broken gameplay is not the way to do things.

Yes, somany classes have their own imbalanced features... How does this balance things? They're not equal imbalances, just things that collectively make the game work horribly. Once you get up in the 2000 ratings, class/spec composition gets pretty cookie-cutter. If you don't see these problems as completely obvious, you probably haven't been playing very long.

not reaching top rating because you got bored and still playing 30 arena games a day? give me a break, it's because you guys suck or that the setup actually doesnt work vs good players. if you've done all classes to 60 and what, 4 to 70 you've spent alot of time grinding in this game, that's my point. and "bragging" about how nerdy you are just doesn't show anything but what a complete fool you are for trying to impress me or something?

i've been playing on and off for several years both pve and pvp. pre-tbc was rubbish pvp but its getting good now which you surely can agree on?

and saying that "crit based classes are useless" is a fucking joke, if you think that rogue should be heavy dps in 5v5 you should go back to l2p-school and learn that rogues main focus is to interrupt and CC, not dps. same with mage really, mostly there for CC.

warlock makes good sense in most setups, whats wrong with that? if you play any class based game you'll see that some class is more commonly used since its a good thing to have when you play. another case of you beeing beat by warlock and finding it wrong, just face it.. your main class might not be the best one vs warlocks.. cry me a river.

its funny how you whine so much about how it sucks and you keep playing it, it just shows how empty your whine is. if you really thought it sucked you would have quitted long time ago, just like i did with PVE.

I don't complain that the game sucks, only that it's unbalanced and that it CLEARLY needs tweaking. I'm not looking to out-nerd you, you can have that title. To say that res hasn't destroyed crit-based classes is the most ignorant thing I've ever heard on the subject. Do you even HAVE PVP gear? Do you even know how it works? There was a time that frost mages were unheard of for PVP - now they're exclusive. I suppose you don't spend much time in the high ratings so you wouldn't know how things work. Just look at the top 10 teams in the world right now and tell me what you see. Cookie-cutter builds and almost exactly the same specs. Almost EVERY top 2v2 team is druid/lock. Almost every 3v3 team has a warlock. How many teams with a hunter even have a 2.2k rating? How about a rogue? Fire mage? Prot warrior? It sounds to me like YOU need to learn to play. Start with wc3.

look at the wsvg world tour when it was active, what team won and why did they do that? because they played well together and matched their opponents classes very well.

let's look at some arena top rated 3v3 teams..

current #1 cyclone (no druid there!)
current #1 vindication (warrior, pala, shaman mostly it seems???)

and let me get this straight about class balance, so mage is too good, druid is too good, warlock is too good... hunter can do very good in arena aswell (maybe you just dont have what it takes?) with reduced healing and mana burn abilities. altho people mostly focus hunter first just because of that and their heavy dps.

i agree though, some balances need to be made but you don't have to cry like a 5 year old about it and say that its totally bogus and random because thats just not the case. like i usually say when people strike me with "random, totally lucky" argument.. weird how pandemic won three straight events :DD

and why should a prot warrior succeed in arena? you can't be the best at every aspect of the game, that's just stupid. just as palas are not very good in 2v2 prot warriors maybe shouldnt be good in arenas. rogue do fine, especially 3v3 and 2v2. druid rogue combo is dangerous as hell if the rogue has the right gear to nuke.

as said before, warlock is a good class to have with you in an arena team and whats wrong with that...?

anyhow, i think wow pvp should have the option to play with premade chars, that way pvp guilds could pick their classes depending on what they play. would be more 'fair' that way or at least more intresting tactic-wise.

Many top teams have not attended the tournaments and the few that have are a poor indication as to how real world PVP works. As far as your links, your EU rankings are laughable at best. I wasn't speaking of EU, I was speaking of world ranking. EU only holds rank in 2v2 and with duid/lock teams. In 3v3/5v5, it's all KR/US. How many korean teams do you see show up at these events? Hell,, how many teams with a 2.6k+ rating do you see show up? None, that's how many. Pandemic isn't even in the top 20. Amazing. That's great, really. They're good, but not #1.

Also, did you even bother to watch the VODs? All the teams are saying the same stuff I have. One team even ran a lock that they hadn't practiced (with a player who never played lock) and they won. To say that lock is just "good" in 2v2/3v3 is ignorant. Do you find yourself more qualified to claim this over "top" teams? If all tournaments switched to 5v5, you'd see a lot more participation from the really dedicated and high skilled teams. Especially if the top US/KR teams attend. Instantly, by adding in 2 more members, you can nullify most overpowered aspects of the game and make it more about skill than luck.

I would totally agree with premade level 70 characters (exactly like guild wars has) that can ONLY participate in PVP. They once did a test realm with premade level 60 characters (pre-BC) that had a 5000 queue - even though they upped the player cap on the server by several thousand! Though, they weren't limited to PVP and world defense was spamming non stop. =P The battlegrounds were extremely fun since everyone was just playing to win instead of playing to get honor. There were about 90 AVs running on ONE server.

saying that pandemic won because 'people didnt show up' is just a bad excuse, it's like saying "IM THE BEST OF THE WORLD ITS JUST THAT I DONT PLAY :-- d". their loss if they dont show up..

i still agree lock is good in arena, when you you stop?

Who would show up to a tournament that has mostly random results? Even still, where were the tourney invites for korea? With your logic, Thresh is the best QW player because he WAS good. It doesn't matter how good people are now because he was the best. Clearly, he'd beat everyone now since he did it before. Silly. Even Fatal1ty was able to pick up a few wins in Q3 before the real skill started showing up.

The only people who don't complain about 2v2/3v3 are the people exploiting their class composition. Blizzard, on several occasions, has said that 2v2/3v3 need fixing. They're considering dropping 2v2 and making a 4v4. Not really sure that will be much better than 3v3, but it's not too bad. You agree locks are good, but you fail to see that it's a clear understatement. They're not good - they're game-breaking. One class should not be required in all teams for a ranking. 3v3/2v2, of course, but it just shows how you can't balance the game without adding numbers.

When WoW tourneys get more popular and more of the high ranked US/KR teams start competing, you'll see what real arena is like. I'd kill to see the 2.8k rating korean teams compete.

your logic fails in the first one. i concider paradoks the best qw player atm because he just won dreamhack. i concider toxic the best q4 player atm because he won most events. saying that wow is luck is complete bs because the same team won three times, that's not lucky.

blizzard agrees because kids like you cry all the time and they need your money. how would they fix it? do you have any smart ideas or do you just randomly whine about it? warlocks are good, not game breaking. thats silly. you have to look at the game in big and not focus on the small parts. you can't be 100% balanced in every aspect of the game.............. anyone with a bit of logic sees that.

and yeah, sure, bring those "HAXOR PRO PLAYERS WHO NEVER COMPETE" to the spotlight and we'll see..

Kids like me? One of us has a job working for LAN centers as a network technician and other is stupid. Don't bother trying to guess - you're the stupid one. Not only am I around gamers all day long, I play games all night, too!

Each class can be perfectly balanced in each aspect of the game while still being individual and unique. Guild Wars does it fine. I'd be playing Guild Wars, but I rather like the WC3 setting and lore. I dislike how unbalanced WoW is, sure. You don't see me sitting on the forums, though. You'll see me in arena fighting it out anyway. It's bad, but there's always hope for a fix down the line. Until then, we're willing to compete at the highest level our class compositions can offer.

WoW 2v2 and 3v3 are much like poker. It's not a game where you can truly increase skill in a way that increases your chance of winning - you simply have to decrease your chance of losing. Top poker players have won multiple events and then lost to some old lady who's never played the game before. All Pandemic have done is played against like-skilled teams and managed to luck out. If there was more participation in these tournaments and more participation from better players, you'd see a new winner at each event - just like CS. In order to correctly judge the balance of a game, you need both a level playing field and a generous sample size. WoW has given us neither.

Your lack of experience in the game is obvious. =/

there you go again trying to impress me.. i'll actually lmao@u for saying that you play games all day and night, that's what i did when i was a kid. it's not like its rare with "it technician" either, like that would effect your opinion on this matter?

so let me get this straight, you hate wow but play PVP for the lore? that somehow doesnt come out right. how does arena even fit in the lore? i thought you said you didnt do PVE and only pvp? get your story straight dude.

yes, wow is very much like poker, some aspects of luck and some aspects of skill. most of the time the better players tend to win, though.

yes, lacking experience after a few years of wowing is surely correct. i've told you a number of times that i dont think the game is balanced but crying about it here won't do anything better.

Though the better players tend to win, the high rating teams have yet to even attend. Thresh, QW, now, repeat....

Is balance not debatable? I suppose you should just STFU and play UT3, Q4, and other broken games when they come out and not complain about the weapons/movement/etc. You play the game, even if it's broken, in hopes that things will get fixed and you talk to others with opinions on the subject as well.

you have trouble reading, i've said number of times that there are a few balance issues but it won't help crying like a 5 year old about it.

hahah also the fact u farm 18k A DAY shows ur farm more a bg farmer than me my friend, i didnt even get to max out 65k by the end of last season i rarely play wow more than 2 hours a day u must do 12+

I get 2k/hour. We win every AV with 600 bonus honor. That's not even counting the honor we get destroying the defense. My AV queue times are less than 3 minutes.

that stll 9 hours a day u play....

Haha, you're a joke. Pandemic rules!

And you're a washed up tool.

vo0 was on fnatic when they fought against pandemic at some lan. he knows first hand that pandemic is a good arena team. you calling vo0 a washed up tool is going to be a mistake that you'll regret. youve only given us further evidence to prove to ourselves that youre a worthless fuckface. i think its time for you to make a journal saying goodbye to esr and how ignorant and clueless our entire community is.

Those journals are always fun and in 90% of the the person making those journals comes back any way. :o

notice that i didn't tell him to leave or that he would leave esr? =]

fnatic are no better ranked than pandemic. Better not to say anything and let us assume that you're an idiot than opening your moutn to remove all doubt.

"...let us assume..." there is no 'us' if no one is defending your position but you. hurry up and get crackin' on that journal. i'd like to have something interesting to read on esr for once.

as much as I like Vo0
you're an idiot

care to explain?

no


..exactly

x]

ur right 2v2 is bad but ur asking them to balance the game towards 2v2 which is wrong for 5v5 locks druids and spriest arent considered strong or even more disireable at all! and as blizzcon showed the fotm setup we're countered!

Actually, asking them to balance it for 1v1 so everything is balanced.

thats immpossible with the amount of classes AND 2/3 specs each class has

Hard work, sure. Impossible? No. Especially with the kind of money Blizzard can put into development.

just think about it, if u change stuff to say make destro warlocks deal with warriors better that then affects rogues and most liekly make the lock better vs rogues or another melee class, then theres people coming up with hybrid specs like sl/sl, how do u balance shamens vs other classes when they have a DD spec a melee spec and a healing spec, infaact how do u balance healing specs in 1v1, then all those changes you make mite make that class too goo/too bad for pve which is what most people do in wow !!

I guess its a flaw in wow theres too many specs and classes the best you can do is balance the most popular specs but it will still be unfair to some like myself who loved destro but hates SL/SL

The final games were awesome

wows bad

It should be obvious for even the most fanatic WoW fan that the randomness is HUGE in WoW compared to quake (even compared to CS lol). Your identical keypress can deal anything from a 0 dmg miss to a 4000 dmg crit. Throw in even more random elements hits/misses/crits/dogde/parry/disspells/resists/etc... pretty much EVERY element of WoW involves a dice roll...

It's also obvious that often the outcome of the game depends on the inherent rock/paper/scissors mechanic of a class based game. Which is also why the dreamhack teams didn't play with the same "best" setup but instead switched classes often depending on what they thought the other team would pick. But I guess rock/paper/scissors could also be regarded as skill: http://www.worldrps.com/

funny read btw: http://www.sirlin.net/archive/rock-paper-scissors/

Even so, disregarding the above, I think the 2 biggest problems with WoW pvp are:

1) Ungodly amount of time wasted leveling and gearing before you can actually play competitively.

Imagine if you had to play 2-3 months of singleplayer fps/rts before you could play multiplayer. Fun?

There were LOTS of players that got disqualified for having ebay chars in the first Blizzard pvp tourney. The players simply cba wasting months leveling/gearing a char instead of actually playing the game. A certain unnamed player who commented in this thread even expressed interest in buying my old account since his team needed a certain class for their pvp team.

I think Blizzard's recent speeding up of the 20-60 leveling process also acknowledges that leveling is nothing but an annoyance for pvp'ers.

You should be able to make a lvl 70 pvp-only char.

------

2) Classes and talents change *dramatically* from patch to patch.

A class or build can suddenly become literally 10 times better, or worse.

Compare the old rogue talent Cheat Death:
"You have a 30% chance to completely avoid any damaging attack that would otherwise kill you."

To the new:
"You have a 100% chance to completely avoid any damaging attack that would otherwise kill you and reduce all damage taken by 90% for 3 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once per minute."


It's also problematic that many changes are made to balance pve encounters, yet the changes still effect pvp.
Imagine if it was like that in fps/rts: Kids whine that Xearo is too difficult, so railgun damage gets decreased to 10.