Desvin
Game Designer
7 years ago
4/8 PvP Alpha Dev Update
Hey everyone,

Once again, we want to start off by thanking you all for participating in the Alpha and posting here in the forums. It's extremely valuable to us to be able to play with you all online. We're constantly reading these forums and discussing your feedback within the team. It's been a great help!

At this stage of development, the class and PvP teams are spending more time on class tuning and balance. We've read everything you posted so far and look forward to hearing even more of your thoughts going forward.

Honor Level 50 Templates Incoming
We've gotten some great feedback on the new Honor system and we've made some adjustments to its pacing. Now, we think the time has come to focus on getting as much feedback as possible on the Honor talents themselves. In an upcoming build (sorry no specific ETA), we've set the Honor level to 50 on the templates used to create new characters. If you'd like to instead continue to test the Honor progression, you are more than welcome to Prestige. We'd love the feedback!

Class Tuning
Damage and healing tuning has begun for classes and as such we'll be monitoring its effects on PvP. One of the big additions to PvP in Legion is our ability to adjust character stats on a per spec basis to tune things like damage, healing and health pools for PvP. So if we feel like a class is doing too much damage, we'll decrease their Strength, Agility, or Intellect. We commonly run into the problem that for any number of reasons, a class could be doing a lot of damage in PvP but not enough in PvE. For example, we recently reduced the PvP Agility on Havoc Demon Hunters to counteract a buff they received to their spells for PvE. Another example is the increase of Stamina for all Warlock specs since they did not feel tanky enough.

PvP Spell Multipliers
We also have the ability to easily apply PvP multipliers to specific spells when needed. These PvP multipliers only adjust the spell when used on another player or, in the case of healing spells, when engaged in PvP combat. We'd prefer to limit the number of spells we adjust in this way as it can be difficult for players to keep track of which spells have been adjusted. But, we'd like to illustrate some examples of how we've used this capability so far in the Alpha.

Self-Healing
Self-healing is valuable for giving players some degree of personal sustainability, but it can be problematic for the pace of gameplay in PvP if it is too strong. On the Alpha, we've recently used PvP multipliers to reign in the strength of Fury Warrior healing through Bloodthirst and Demon Hunter leech in Metamorphosis for just this reason.

Burst Damage
Many of our classes have instant cast spells that deal a lot of damage to create exciting inflection points in their rotation. But for PvP, where burst damage in kill windows matter so much, it can be problematic when one spell does too much damage. For this reason, we applied PvP multipliers to reduce the damage of Marksmanship Hunter's Aimed Shot and Marked Shot on Alpha. Of course, if the Class Design team adjusts the damage of either of these spells, we would adjust the PvP multipliers if we felt itsnecessary.

Thank you again, for all of your participation within the game and here on the forums. We couldn't do this without your help and we really do appreciate your support.
Edited by Desvin 04/08/2016 06:16 PM
Desvin
Game Designer
7 years ago
4/8 PvP Alpha Dev Update
04/08/2016 11:33 AMPosted by Calligraphy
Tuning? Aren't a lot of classes upset with mechanics still? Are you guys going to still be adjusting mechanics while tuning? :V

Edit - I ask this because tuning occurring for PvP can hit PvE, and vice-versa.


I feel you are reading too much into what I wrote. It would be best to take what was written at face value and not try to derive anything else from it.
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