Opinion// Lich King Screwed Up Warcraft

Thanks Blizzard. You ruined my game. Yes, this is a rant about a game I love too much and feel too strongly about. First though, a bit of history:

Back in vanilla World of Warcraft, or classic Wow, or basically the version of Wow as it was released – (player versus player) PvP was very simple. There were bugs, there were gaping errors - particularly to do with rogues - and there were massive imbalances. Most of that was fixed by simply introducing diminishing returns, whereby stuns, fears, and generally any incapacitating effect would diminish on each use. First stun six secs, second stun three secs, etc. It made sense, and it brought things back to a level playing field.

At the time everyone was screaming for devs to do something about it, and it took time. In a way though, it was understandable, Wow was still under a lot of development. Although there appeared to be excessive beta testing this was always going to be the case on a new game. The devs found their feet, and things were running nicely. There were still a few issues with certain classes getting gibbed by others, but balance cannot be achieved so that every possible match between the classes would leave either side with a 50% chance of winning. And that’s fine.

Then came The Burning Crusade (TBC): lots of interesting new quests, new battleground (BGs) and, of course: Arena. The basic premise of Arena is that you create a team to fight in one of the following categories: 2v2, 3v3 or 5v5. It became pretty clear that Arena was going to be incredibly unforgiving and frustrating when it came to bugs and class imbalances. Two-man was dominated by two team make-ups, Druid Warrior, or Druid Soul Link Warlock.

Druid Warrior was incredibly obvious – you had a massively efficient healing class that had more escape moves in its arsenal than any other class in the game, offensive or defensive. And then you have a warrior, who can fight until he is dead – no mana for Mr Warrior, you see.

Druid Warlock was notably popular also, merely for the fact that Warlocks held so many defensive spells (mostly damage reduction) and the ability to outlive a lot of damage per second (DPS). So, they were getting by with a lot of wins under their belts.

This went on for four seasons, though a few changes were made, tactics became limited and other teams started to come through in the 2v2 area, particularly Priest and Rogue. There was very limited success available for a lot of the other teams on show. Regardless, despite the tedium of pillar hugging (whereby you constantly run around a pillar to stay out of line of sight), the fact that 2v2 could only really be dominated by certain teams (and an array of other Arena breaking features, we got by). You would bite your tongue, move onto the next fight, and you’d try and win again.

Now? Now we have Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK).

WotLK in simple, cut down terms brings one thing: Damage. Damage and then some.

Arena is plagued by DPS teams. Healers (whilst it was right to take a necessary nerf from their Burning Crusade times) are now almost completely redundant. Combinations of Mages and Rogues, Retri Palas and rogues, (Death Knights) DKs and Rogues, all of them steamroll opposition. Top teams are now basically DPS fights with very little tactics involved. It’s unimaginative, fights last about 10 seconds from the second battle commences - It’s a zergfest.

Complaints have been made, albeit in incredibly unflattering methods, on the PvP forums, and now, we have a 'blue' (moderator) response.

“We're aware of the views concerning burst damage, and we're also discussing it internally. In fact, PVP is a significant topic of discussion for us right now. While we're looking into this, we feel we need to see how it is when people have a higher amount of resilience before we think too much about what we may want to do. We're not saying it's all about resilience though.”

Fuck you, Blizzard. Understand that with better gear and the scaling of resilience, there also comes better gear and the scaling of damage. Quite how this managed to evade the devs during testing I really don’t know. And quite how they can’t test this under their own controlled area in an instant is again mystifying.

This time I am not so forgiving, the success of Wow and the profits it brings should at least guarantee a fairly bug-free and balanced gaming experience. Neither of which Blizzard fully managed to provide since expansion.

Sort it out.