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Mists of Pandaria: Player vs Player
Mists of Pandaria
Official FAQ
General Changes
New Race: Pandaren
New Class: Monk
Class Overview
Talent Revamp and Calculator
Dungeons & Raids
Models and Items
Professions
Pet Battles
New Zones and Leveling
Player vs Player
Lore & Art
Media
The March 2012 Press Event clarified there will be
two new battlegrounds and one new arena
in Mists of Pandaria.
Resilience will be named to Defense
: it will also be a base stat and increase as players level, as well as having
offensive and defensive components
. In addition,
conquest point caps will increase if players control objectives in World PvP.
Separate player hubs for both Horde and Alliance on Pandaria will hopefully encourage world PvP as well. Finally,
a new PvP stat
will be added, PvP Power, that will make specific armor pieces more powerful only in PvP. This should solve some PvE/PvP gear overlap.
Gear
There are currently two tiers of PvP epics that have been datamined:
Malevolent Gladiator
: ilvl 483-502
Dreadful Gladiator
: ilvl 464-476
Battlegrounds
Temple of Mogu
: Located in the middle of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, players vie to pick up and control an ancient artifact. This artifact gives the player a damage buff but also increases damage taken--the goal is to have the artifact constantly changing hands. Another twist is that different parts of the map award varying amounts of resources--holding onto the artifact in a risky area of the terrain will yield more resources per minute. This is intended to be a fast-paced BG in a new style from previous ones.
Here's some datamined buffs related to this BG:
Orb of Power
+10 Victory Points!
+5 Victory Points!
+4 Victory Points!
+3 Victory Points!
Silver Shard Mine
: Underground area with mineral-rich resources that travel in mine cars. These mine cars are capture points--think of EotS, but moving. The Alliance and Horde want to capture these mine cars before they get to the depot, and at various points on the rails, there are splits where the mine cars can go either way. Depending on who controls channel points, the cart can travel different ways.
Achievement:
Silvershard Mines Victory
A DotA-style Battleground in Azshara Crater was tentatively planned at BlizzCon, but has since been put on hold. It may be implemented in later patches.
Arena
New Arena:
The
Tol’vir Proving Grounds
will utilize the sweeping vistas of Uldum and the Tol’vir art style with a simple layout based on Nagrand Arena.
Maps
Blue Posts
Resilience Changes
Resilience
We are renaming this stat to “Defense (PvP)” or possibly “PvP Defense.” All players will have 30% base Defense, the same way all characters have some base Stamina.
PvP gear will have Defense on it, as well as a new stat, “Power (PvP).” Power increases the damage you do to other players as well as the healing you do to other players in PvP situations.
If you have a lot of Power, you’ll do more damage to other players, but they likely have Defense as well. If you fight players in lots of PvE gear, they’ll take more damage. Likewise, a player in PvE gear won’t have enough Power to effectively penetrate your Defense.
The names PvP Power and PvP Defense may not be final, but we’re leaning towards going with stat names that are obviously PvP-related, rather than “fluffier” names that might not be as easy to grasp. We want it to be clear to players that neither Power nor Defense have any relevance when fighting creatures, such as in dungeons or raids.
PvP gear will be lower in item level than PvE gear of an equivalent tier, however the Power and Defense stats will make sure that PvP gear is more powerful in PvP (both offensively and defensively) than PvE gear. In our budgeting system, the PvP stats will be free rather than causing other stats, such as Strength or haste, to be smaller as a result of including Power or Defense.
The goal of this change is to make it easier for a PvP player to participate in PvE, or for a PvE player to get started in PvP. Currently, we feel it is too large a barrier to go from one to the other, and the result has been that we see more and more players choosing to focus exclusively on only PvP or PvE. In earlier expansions, it was more feasible to use PvE gear in Arenas or Battlegrounds until you acquired the more useful PvP gear. The same was true of being able to use your PvP gear in a dungeon or raid until you acquired something better. In Cataclysm, stepping into PvP with no PvP gear would result in a player being so ineffective that it was difficult to even make progress towards acquiring PvP gear.
For the higher-end of PvP or PvE (say Gladiators or heroic raiders), we believe those players will still gravitate towards the dedicated PvP or PvE gear. It is the players who are working towards those two end games that will benefit more from some cross over.
PvP Gear
Daxxari
I feel like I should take some time to better relay the development team's intentions when it comes to how PvP stats will work in Mists.
There are two important changes to PvP itemization coming:
1. We're splitting Resilience into an offensive and defensive component.
2. All players will have at least 30% damage reduction versus other players.
If you want to do more damage to other players in Mists, you have two options. You can get better PvE gear with more offensive stats, or you can get better PvP gear with slightly smaller offensive stats built in(because PvP gear is lower item level), but which will also give you more damage against players specifically. In today's game, stacking PvE gear is really the only way to do more damage to other players in PvP since Resilience only supplies a defensive bonus. These are completely made up numbers, but imagine PvE gear is 100% effective in PvE and 75% effective in PvP. PvP gear is 50% effective in PvE, but 100% effective in PvP -- despite its lower item level, it wins out over PvE gear when used for its intended purpose.
Here are some examples:
Ders the rogue: wears PvE gear.
Jillian the hunter: wears PvP gear.
In Cataclysm PvE, Ders does much better damage than Jillian in PvE, because her PvP gear “wastes” stat budget on Resilience.
In Cataclysm PvP, Ders does better damage than Jillian for the same reason. However, when Jillian hits Ders, he doesn’t mitigate her damage at all. The result is high burst damage on both sides.
In Mists PvE, Ders still does better damage than Jillian, because his higher ilevel PvE gear has more offensive stats. The difference is smaller however because Jillian’s PvP stats aren't part of the item budget.
The item level difference is the main distinction.
In Mists PvP, they both do about the same amount of raw damage to each other, with a slight edge for Jillian. Her power stat offsets Ders's PvE stats. Jillian takes less damage because of her PvP Defense (let’s say it’s 50% damage reduction), but Ders still has 30% damage reduction innately, so he doesn’t blow up either. Again the difference is smaller. If Ders wants to get serious about PvP, he’s eventually going to want PvP gear, and Jillian will want more PvE gear to do PvE.
Another way to think about it is that we are pushing PvP and PvE gear closer together with two changes: A player in PvE gear always has some base PvP defense (it's like a little PvP gear for free). A player in PvP gear can do more damage and healing than today in PvP because of the new Power stat (it's like a little PvE gear for free).
PvP Combat Mechanics
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.
More details on these upcoming changes will be posted as they become available.
Tanks in PvP
Daxxari
Anyway, we don't have a problem with players choosing to PvP as tank specs, but if they do, then we want them to be effective because of their defensive and control abilities, not because of their damage-dealing potential. It's intentional that, overall, tanks have to sacrifice some DPS in order to make up for their other strengths.
For comparison's sake, we don't think it would be cool if healing specs did as much or more damage than DPS specs in PvP, and the same is true for tanks. In Battlegrounds, tanks often do have a role, whether it’s running flags, defending a node or tanking NPCs. It is much harder to provide tanks a role in Arenas since the strategy ultimately revolves around focusing down enemy players. Nobody wants to try to focus down a tank, and tanks typically can’t contribute as much to focusing down enemy targets.
I'm not so much for debates, because design isn't about rhetorical prowess. It's about making the game the best it can be for all players, not simply those who can make a compelling case on the forums. Because of how personal (even emotional) the experience of playing a character is, sometimes it's hard to see over the fence into someone else's yard. We have to keep an eye on the whole neighborhood.
