So I arena with a Rogue. Our 2v2 team has hit a brick wall at the 1800-1900 level, thanks to one thing: the Warrior.

As a "Holy" Priest + Mutilate Rogue combo, our win ratio against teams without a Warrior is literally 85% to 90%. Our Arena rating is wholly dependent on whether or not we face teams with or without Warriors. Last night, over the course of 34 games, our ranking fluctuated between 1886 and 1787, and it was simply based on our luck at finding teams without Warriors.

Once we hit 1886, after getting lucky enough to face 3 or 4 teams without Warriors in a row, we faced seven teams in a row of Warrior/Paladin, Warrior/Druid, and Warrior/Shaman, losing all seven and dropping below 1800. This wouldn't be so annoying if it weren't for the fact that in about 5 of those 7 games, we outplayed our opponents and still lost, simply because Warriors are so overpowered.

Yes, our team is weak against Warriors by nature. Both Priests and Rogues consider Warriors one of their worst nightmares; however, the conclusion that "Warriors are overpowered" is based on the fact that Warriors are the dominant Arena class. There's more of them out there than anyone else, and it's because of the obvious reasons.

1) Hamstring
2) Intercept
3) Mortal Strike
4) Plate
5) High Hit Points
6) Attacking them Makes them Stronger
7) Mace stun effects (Deep Thunder too)

It wouldn't be so bad if maybe 50% of our games would have Warriors in them. Unfortunately, we face Warriors over 75% of the time. Because of this, we simply can't advance in 2v2 Arena. If PvP were "balanced," we wouldn't face Warriors 3 out of 4 matches and our rating would be significantly higher.

Let's look at the matchups.

A) Priest/Rogue vs Warrior/Paladin:
The most common "automatic loss" combo we face, Warrior/Paladin is the nemesis of the Rogue/Priest. Generally, 50% of our Arena matches are against this uber Arena prototype. We win about 15-20% of the time against this combo, and it's usually only because they're completely awful players. On a win, there's no "OMG SO lucky" thing that tips the scales in our favor, it's only because one of the two players plays poorly.

The problem is thus: the Warrior Hamstrings both of us and commences pwnage on me. This takes me out of the fight and forces me to simply heal myself until I run out of mana (sometimes I don't even get that far, especially if the Warrior is Mace stun-speced or has Deep Thunder). I can try to get some Mana Burns off on the Paladin, but it's dangerous - the damage output of a Warrior on me with over 10,000 hit points, 338 resilience, and 3800 armor can still overwhelm me if I try to take 2 seconds to get off a Mana Burn. I pretty much have to try, though, since a Warrior pummeling my Mana Burn frees me up to heal myself without interrupts. Intelligent Paladins will just laugh and hide out of LOS of the Burns anyway, if possible.

The Paladin stands ~30 yards away. My Rogue partner cannot get to the Paladin because he is Hamstrung. I can't go for the Paladin either because I am Hamstrung. The completely mobile Paladin can easily run from me so I can't get off a fear. I also can't get off a fear on the Warrior since Warriors are almost completely fear-immune to begin with - plus he can trinket, plus the Paladin can cleanse off the Fear.

If Hamstring actually drops on one of us and we go for the Paladin, the Warrior just intercepts them for the auto-stun and applies Hamstring. This is especially dangerous if it's on me, since now my Rogue partner, who is Hamstrung, is some distance away and cannot protect me in any way from the Warrior's poundings. Thus, I'm forced to stay near my Rogue, who is engaging the Warrior uselessly while the Paladin chills out from afar and heals away with a seemingly infinite mana pool. My Rogue feeds the Warrior rage, but there's really nothing else we can do.

Mind Control? Okay. Say I actually get one off - which is difficult, but I've done it, thanks to the three-second cast. If I'm in the Nagrand arena, I can throw the Warrior off the bridge, provided the Paladin doesn't cleanse the Mind Control off in time. Any intelligent Paladin will then jump off as well. Since we're both Hamstrung, we can't get to the Paladin to prevent him from jumping off to join his Warrior below, and going down there with them is suicide. I could then drink, but we're back to square one, since the Paladin can drink too. If we're not in Nagrand arena, Mind Control doesn't buy us too much. It doesn't last long, and my Rogue partner can go for the Paladin only to be intercepted the moment Mind Control breaks, get stunned, and get Hamstrung again.

Go for the Paladin from the start? Blessing of Freedom and bubbles make that impossible. The Warrior is on us quickly with the Hamstrings, which can't be removed; meanwhile, any movement impairing effects on the Warrior are cleared with Blessings of Freedom every 20 seconds. The Paladin quickly breaks away and the owning commences.

In short, one Warrior locks both of us down, letting the Paladin do what he likes in total freedom. I burn so much mana keeping myself alive that they easily win the mana war and we lose.

B) Priest/Rogue vs Warrior/Shaman:
We face these second most often compared to Warrior/Paladin. I'm not sure what's worse. The Warrior loses the infinite mana pool of the Paladin and his Blessings, but gains more DPS with Windfury totems and cleansings via Poison clearing totems. The Shaman can now offensively purge everything I throw up to defend myself so I crumple a lot faster. Remember, everything that a Priest has to defend themselves when attacked:

Renew
Power Word: Shield
Prayer of Mending
Blessed Recovery
Blessed Resilience
Focused Casting

...can all be purged off by a Shaman. If I then go to Flash Heal myself, I get shocked, interrupting the cast. These matches are, as you can imagine, pretty short. The Warrior pounds me flat and then it's a 2 on 1. The Shaman runs out of mana fairly quickly by spamming totems (which we kill, since we have to) and purging me a ton, but it's almost always over before the Shaman is OOM. The only chance we have is to keep killing totems and keep the Warrior stunned as much as possible so that the Shaman runs out of mana. However, in that case, the Shaman can run off and drink - we're both Hamstrung so we can't stop him!

The same other problems also apply. Both myself and my Rogue are consistently Hamstrung, so we can't get to the Shaman. One good fear could tip the balance, but I can never get close enough to the Shaman to put it to good use. They'd just trinket out of it anyway.

Mind Control is out, since the Shaman can just shock it off quickly.

Mana Burns are impossible - with the purging going on, I die so fast that I can't get one off, and even if I got close it would get shocked, although most Shamans are smart enough to let the Mana Burn go and then shock my heal, knowing that death will come swiftly for me.

"Why not have your Rogue stealth and open on the Shaman?" Well sure, but then the Warrior intercepts my Rogue, Hamstrings him, and the Shaman walks off, laughing. Shamans have high armor and do NOT die quickly. A Poison clearing totem will take care of Crippling Poison on him, giving him freedom of movement while we're both stuck with Hamstring.

The worst is when the Shaman purges off our Fear Wards and the Warrior Intimidating Shouts us to separate us, then Intercepts me. Now I've got the Warrior pounding me, the Shaman purging off all defense, and my Rogue partner too far away to stun the Warrior and buy me time. Splat.

C) Priest/Rogue vs Warrior/Druid:
Finally, this interesting combo has the usual issues cited above, combined with the Druid starting out stealthed and coming out only to heal the Warrior from a safe 35 yards away. Cycloning the Rogue allows them to blast me quickly and we can't get to the Druid to do anything to him. Thanks to Hamstring. I can't even Mana Burn, since a good Druid will see that coming and shapeshift. Since the damage we're doing to the Warrior is fairly minimal and controlled (Rogue vs plate), the Druid can afford to do this, popping out to heal only when necessary and just generally staying 35 yards away.

Mind Control? Nope, just Cyclone me to break it, and the usual Warrior-intercept-plus-Hamstring on the Rogue settles that problem even if I don't get Cycloned.

D) Priest/Rogue vs Warrior/Priest:
We have the most success with this combo, although it's *always* a challenge. Same rules apply as stated above. If the enemy Priest is smart enough to just stand there and Mana Burn me, though, it's a quick game over. My Rogue has to open up on the Priest and maintain Crippling Poison on them at all times so that the Warrior's inevitable Intercept + Hamstring move doesn't allow the Priest to get away. We will win this match if my Rogue can stay on their Priest and I outgear their Priest with survivability. In short, the match turns into two 1v1 survivability duels, and the first Priest that dies loses. Mind Control is very very useful here - it keeps the Warrior from pounding me for hopefully up to 10 seconds, and forces their Priest to either spend a global cooldown to remove it or else keep healing themselves.



Summary
Before we got up to our current rating level, we'd win some matches like these when the Warrior was dumb enough to attack the Rogue, leaving me free to heal/disrupt/Mana Burn all I like. That never happens anymore, since we're playing smarter opponents. I'm always the tank, and since I'm getting beat up it severely limits what I can do.

Really though, it all boils down to Hamstring and Mortal Strike. The reason why Warriors are *everywhere* in Arenas is because of these abilities. There's a huge overrepresentation of this class in Arena teams, and I can't blame the players for that. They're going to play the best classes, and the best classes in Arenas are Warriors, Paladins, Shamans, Priests, and Warlocks. But everything revolves around Warriors. The fact that there are wildly successful (2000+ ranking) 5v5 teams out there made up entirely of Warriors and Paladins says something. It says that something's broken.

The Mace stuns and Deep Thunder really make things even worse. Warriors with these wind up stunning even more than Rogues sometimes - when you try to cast a Mass Dispel with a 0.5 second cast time and you can't get it off because you're mace-stunned by a Warrior, something's broken.

I'm not claiming we should win all of our matches against Warrior + X. In some of these matches, they were the better team. In many other matches though, they weren't. Those of you who have played Arena know what I mean. We'd outplay the snot out of them, having better reaction times, better strategy, better tactics, and still lose. Okay, Rock-Paper-Scissors, fine. But Rock-Paper-Scissors doesn't apply when you're the Scissors and you're facing Rock 75% of the time and Paper only 25%. We play games against non-Warrior teams and beat the snot out of them, because we SHOULD be rated much higher than we are. But we can't get past the wall of these Warrior teams that can't be beat. We've beaten the Warrior teams ranked below us easily enough because we'd just massively outskill/outgear them, but it's not working anymore.

Maybe it's just our battlegroup. I don't know. I can't remember the last time I saw a Hunter in 2v2, and other Rogues are *extremely* rare. Meanwhile it's Warrior, Warrior, Warrior, game after game after game. Supposedly Shadow Priest + Warlock teams are common because they're the counter to the extremely common Warrior + Paladin combo, but we faced only ONE of those last night out of 34 games (and wafflestomped them, of course).

I just fear we've hit a brick wall of facing off against Warrior/X teams that aren't as good as we are and win anyway. The best part is when such teams start taunting you as they're winning, because they know you can't touch them. We had one Warrior do a /sleep emote a number of times at us last night after they killed me and it was 2 on 1. Boy, that's classy. That would be like Mike Tyson taunting Woody Allen in a boxing match.

Maybe we should play at 5:00 AM or something. Do the Warrior players sleep?

-Bolty

5v5

3v3

2v2

Hm, so that's where all the warriors have gone, and why it's so hard to find a warrior tank anymore.

You don't see hunters in 2v2 and 3v3 because it's even more frusterating (so I'm told). There are extreme LoS issues in the various arenas for hunters, and so even if you are a stunning hunter player, you can still do almost nothing, as everything ends up out of LoS, in the deadzone, or in melee.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, that doesn't come even remotely close to being 'fun', so hunters just aren't bothering with it.

But yes, warriors are everywhere there. They are reaping the benefits of overpoweredness, especially as Blizz has decided to consider Arena challenging, and holds tourneys/gives prizes for it. Why would anyone play a weaker class, if they were serious about winning it all?

I'm just wondering what nerfs will come due to PvP this time around.

Until last night, I could say 2v2 Arena was the most fun I was having in this game.

Now? If warriors don't get nerfed, and soon, I don't see myself playing for much longer. I understand that they're supposed to be my foil. That'd be fine with me if I was facing them ~25% of the time. It's every single game though, and the only explanation for that is they ended being the foil for too many other classes.

As for ourselves, invariably, our wins versus warriors always end up based on the same things. Either the warrior attacked me first, or the warrior didn't hamstring me. That's it.

Edit: The "2v2 isn't balanced" doesn't hold up, either. Blizzard's now holding prize tournaments for 2v2, there is no excuse. Rock/Paper/Scissor? Okay, that's one thing. But it's not even at that point.

Note, I don't have that much experience in 2vs2, and the priest/warrior combo isn't that great of a team in terms of balance. But if you look at the numbers Mirajj posted it looks like warlock/priest dominate the top 2vs2. This is the paper to the rock warrior/paladin combo. I wouldn't be surprised that if you guys hit the tier two groups, which are all the warrior/paladins that can't hit the tier one group of SP/warlocks.

I've basically decided I don't like 2vs2 as much as 3vs3 or 5vs5. There are to many hard counters. Everyone basically knows it. And once you get higher in the ratings you are going to stop seeing the retarded players. This means that against your counter you are basically screwed.

And that really sucks for my 2vs2 team because we have the cloth priest, which rogues/warriors do well against. And my as a warrior that casters and kiters do well against me (need a paladin to stop good kiters).

As for what you can do against warrior/healer teams:

Warrior/Paladin: Only caster teams really have a chance because the paladin has so much armor. The only way we've beaten these teams is get the paladin to bubble, mass dispel it, and interrupt the heal. The problem is only bad paladins let themselves get that low. The mana burn strat is hard to pull off because, well like you said, it's hard to ever get one off.

Warrior/Shaman: The fairly high armor of shamans is also a pain. At least you can dispell ES. Only thing I can think of is throw dots on the shaman, which does almost nothing. All the interrupts on the priest are hard to heal through.

Warrior/Druid: I actually haven't fought a good druid/warrior team. The few I have fought I've been able to catch the druid in caster form often enough to kill them quick they a smart druid should allow.

I know you don't like it Quark, but warriors are just the counter to your team, and that's they way the game is. Make a shadow priest/warlock team and you'll destroy them. Want less hard counters (not none, but less) and play a 3vs3 or 5vs5. Eh.

BoF gets a little better next patch, but Basically you force the warrior onto the rogue by shiv kiting with wound / crip and staying in his dead zone.

Sap warrior at the start and he will break it . rogue starts combo and gets initial poisons on, BoF will be applied, so spam dispel on warrior while running in dead zone and rogue switches to shiv spam. Poisons will be stacked now so cleansing is inefficient. The warrior has 2 choices at this point... get kited until the pally runs out of mana, or attack the rogue.

This, at the very least should turn a match into a mana battle instead of an instant death scenario. if you can mange to stay 7-8 yards away and pay attention to his movement, you can beat warrior / pally.

There is a huge cluster of warrior pally in the 1800-2000 range in 2v2. They naturally settle below the rogue / druid and warlock / s. priest ranks. If you can get far enough to break through the cluster of warrior / pally, you'll shoot up like another 200 rating because you'll suddenly be facing softer teams.

I think your main reasons for warriors being OP are poorly summarized. The valid reasons for warriors being OP are:
1) superior DPS scaling with gear (because a warrior in blues is not scary, but a warrior in good purples IS)
2) Healers amplify warrior power better than any other class

A warrior all alone is going to lose most duels against equally skilled / geared opponents. It isn't until you consider them + healer that they get pretty crazy, but they still manage to get beaten by the ultimate control team (rogue / druid) and the ultimate DPS team (warlock / priest).

I don't think complaining about the warrior specifically is really what you want to complain about. 2v2 is mostly about teams that beat other teams based on class balance. No matter what "power combo" you have in 2v2 you will generally get to 1800 or so and then start regularly facing your "nemesis" combo.

So what? Blizzard gives the most arena points to 5v5, which is clearly NOT the most balanced relative to class population balance at 70. Blizzard's reward system doesn't make sense.

Balancing classes doesn't work either. Right now 3v3 is reasonably balanced. Change it so 2v2 is balanced and 3v3 will become unbalanced. The appropriate way to solve the problem is for Blizzard to implement a handicapping system to the arena. Matches are arranged based on absolute rating, but point exchange at the end is based on handicapping. Handicapping can be determined by single class balance vs. Battlegroup 70 class balance (for an expected class ratio) or by full team makeup vs. an expected class ratio (the 2nd being significantly more difficult to maintain).

When I hear a rogue whine about 2v2 arena I don't hear it, all I think of is the hunters. If any class deserves to whine it's the hunters. They get owned by 1 of 3 ARENAS, regardless of what classes they face. We faced a druid + 2 hunter team 4 times that was better geared than us (s.priest / hunter / shaman). We killed them 3 times in blade's edge, then we caught them in the Ruins arena and they DESTROYED us.

I think you might have missed the main thrust of my post; that is, in 34 games I played last night, we faced the "dreaded" Shadow Priest/Warlock combo once. That's 1 in 34. This combo is the paper to our scissors; we slice them up like butter. But we never played them.

Roughly 28 of our 34 games were against Warrior + X. I understand Warriors are our foil. The problem is that they are a foil for almost every other combo. 28 of 34 is not "regularly facing." It's just about all we faced the whole night. These weren't all the same teams, either - that's what was even more surprising. Lots and lots and lots of Warrior + X teams.

These Warrior + X teams are not facing their nemesis combos. They're facing all the other Warrior + X teams. It's one big happy friendly Warrior bracket. Seeing the numbers Mirajj put up makes me wonder where the hell all the Warlocks are.

Maybe it's true that we have to "break through" their rating somehow to start wailing on all the caster teams. I just don't see that happening, though. We were brushing 1900 and got matched up against a team far higher in rating than us - a Warrior/Druid combo who beat us (laughably easily, as we never got to even touch the Druid) for 9 points. Then the slide started. This Warrior/Druid team was a friendly team from our server, who we talked with afterward, and their one striking comment was "man, I wish we got to play Rogue/Priest combos more often."

I should check our battlegroup's top 100 teams and see what their composition is. We can't seem to crack the top 200, instead hovering between 200-250th. This week we'll probably sink quite a bit, since we lost rating...

-Bolty

This would be acceptable if we didn't find a warrior in a good 2/3rds of the matches we're playing. It obviously is not balanced if that many got up there in the first place to the exclusion of all other classes.

Honestly Bolty the biggest issue with your team is your rogue's spec. Mutilate makes going toe to toe with a warrior a certain suicide no matter what the situation. I am currently in a 2150 2v2 rogue priest team on the whirlwind battlegroup, nothing amazing but doing fairly well. We have under 100 games played and a decent winrate. Our battlegroup has quite a few caster teams that play frequently and keep the average warrior X teams in check and out of the top rankings for us. . Though we lack a good number of warrior X teams we do play them fairly often and losing all the time just isn't an option.

I realize that these strategies will be almost useless to you as you run with a mutilate rogue but I took your post to be more about the rogue priest comp in general.

Warrior Priest: Let's face it. This matchup is the easiest. With offensive dispels a cooldown oriented class just has a better shot at burning down the other priest and can generally stay on target long enough to ensure that he dies even with the warrior trying to stop him. Burn down the priest asap, blind cannot be cleansed in this case so toss it out but it will likely be trinketed.

Warrior Druid: This matchup has also proved to be a somewhat winnable situation for us. Our strat is to fight the team near some los breaking object. If the warrior is on the priest frrom the go then the priest quickly moves close to a pillar or the tomb in lordaeron before I open up on him. If the warrior is on me I do the same. This is ideal because once the druid pops out you can watch him casting and duck out of los to avoid his cyclones to greatly reduce his power. I blow my cooldowns (combat build so adrenaline rush blade flurry in addition to evasion etc) at the start with evasion to not only force the druid to start healing and eat some mana burns and a fear, but also to gain initiative in the mana war. Generally this forces the other team on the defensive and the druid will spend the rest of the match trying to drink because most of his mana was just used. With early cloaks before cyclones hit and the ability to trinket cyclones because warrior fear is negated by fear ward this matchup can be won but without a combat build I'm not so sure it can be.

Warrior Shaman: To be honest we have not fought a top team with this makeup. We have fought lower less geared teams than us but that hardly shows the true strength of the comp.

Warrior Paladin: Against a well played team of this comp we simply lose. Killing the paladin wont work because he can judgement of justice kite me by himself even without hamstrings. Killing the warrior wont work because of the paladins amazing mana efficiency as well as hp/s potential. We have been fortunate not to face many of these matchups, but it's a losing situation. I have heard that rogue shadow priest can effectively deal with this makeup. I believe the solution is to rotate a druid into your comp and run rogue druid against this.

I agree with this. The Rogue's spec is simply horrible for this matchup. Change to Combat Maces and you will see improvement.

Bolty, you already understand that Warrior/Healer is the rock to your scissors. Complaining about it is not going to change anything. But what you also need to understand that above 1800-1900 range, it becomes mostly Warlock/Healer, so if you can get that high, you should have much easier time at that point.

It sounds like our BG may be a bit skewed in the warrior department for 2vs2. That graph Mirajj posted shows that there are a lot more warlocks than anything else in 2vs2. But I'm guessing that data is over all the BGs. It could easily be a warrior/paladin team that runs up against nothing but SP/warlocks all the time in another battle group and feels the same as you.

Concillian I think you downplay the extent to which paladin warrior (and other X warrior combos) counters all/most common rogue teams. I get beat by less skilled warrior teams all the time, it takes a truly incompetent warrior to produce any sort of winning streak in my favor.

I think your main reasons for warriors being OP are poorly summarized. The valid reasons for warriors being OP are:
1) superior DPS scaling with gear (because a warrior in blues is not scary, but a warrior in good purples IS)
2) Healers amplify warrior power better than any other class
*3) a healing debuff second to none in the game.
*4) superior mobility than any of the melee dps classes
*5) Superior base survivability from plate armor, cooldowns, and a turtling stance purely for survival.
*6) etc...

I'm not a fan of lists, but warriors have quite a lot in this game that you fail to mention. Rogue priest vs warrior X is a losing battle. Sometimes the tide can be turned but it's not likely and more often than not requires a mistake on the other team or worse gear. This is a major frustration and although it's easy to say to Bolty that they'd do better at high ratings, it would only be true if they could effectively dodge warrior teams at those ratings. Otherwise they'd be right back where they are now.

This is actually a pretty fascinating concept. What if playing popular classes on your teams gave you fewer points for wins and a bigger punishment for losses? Blizzard can calculate hard numbers for, say, the top 500 teams in a Battlegroup. If there are an overabundance of Warriors, teams sporting Warriors (especially those common 2-Warrior 5v5 teams) would score fewer points for a win.

Would we see a sudden surge of Hunters and Druids on Arena teams?

It would sure benefit my 5v5 squad. We have 2 of the 3 least-represented 5v5 classes, Rogue and Druid. I think sometimes we beat opponents out of sheer shock value. "A Druid? What's that?" Having 2 of your 5 members starting out in stealth can throw a curveball to some teams, especially when that Druid pops out and Cyclones one Warrior while rooting the 2nd.

-Bolty

Nah, because the LoS issues are still enough to drive even the most patient hunter nuts with frusteration.

It's the only reasonable way I see to get any sort of class balance into the arena. The beauty of it is that it doesn't require too much care even. You just compare arena population to battlegroup 70 population and tweak the numbers until your top 50 teams or so accurately mirror the actual population. No balancing around PvP unbalances PvE or soloing or balancing for 5v5 unbalances 2v2, or whatever, just tweak the handicapping values.

What exactly does this mean and how did you get numbers for it? I'm not sure I agree with this without some sort of proof.




I don't agree with this. All it does is slow down the movement of teams - it doesn't change any actual outcomes. Assuming that at this point of the season most teams have found their level, all it will do is take some of the sting out of your losses. It's not going to make you go up. If anything it will make it worse, because good new warrior pally teams on their way up will have to beat you like a drum over and over again to get past you.

I see the answer as twofold - nerf pallys and warriors (I say this as somebody who has a PvP warrior). My first thought for warriors would be to nerf MS substantially, and then make the 41 point arms talent restore it to the way it was. Without imp intercept it would be a lot easier to get away from warriors. The second part is to revitalize BG's (and improve their rewards). With more variety of play, there would be more room for less popular classes and specs. For example hunters who have a really rough time in arena's are some of the best flag defenders, and also are some of the best at AV zergs.

Actually, this is not correct. Let's look at a hypothetical situation of matches between evenly ranked Warrior/Paladin and Priest/Rogue. In general, evenly matched teams will earn/lose the same amount of points for a win or a loss. For this, let's assume that the winning team gets 15 points and the losing team loses 15 points. If the Warrior/Paladin can win 2/3rds of the time, then the average result for each encounter would be as follows:

Warrior/Paladin => (15 + 15 - 15)/3 = +5
Priest/Rogue => (-15 - 15 + 15)/3 = -5

So on average the Priest/Rogue team will lose 5 points per meeting. Now let's look at a situation where the Paladin/Warrior team only gets 5 points if they win while the Priest/Rogue team gets 20 points when they win.

Warrior/Palain => (5 + 5 - 20)/3 = -3.33
Priest/Rogue => (-5 -5 + 20)/3 = +3.33

In this case, the Priest/Rogue team is GAINING rating despite the fact that they are only winning 1/3rd of matches. This is entirely due to the handicap. As you can see, a handicap can definitely affect more than just the rate of movement, it could influence the DIRECTION of movement, as well.

I thought you had read this post.

http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/index.p...ndpost&p=131170

When people post similar 2v2 / 3v3 / 5v5 makeups on the PvP forums and I look at the overall population, season 2 doesn't look to have changed 3v3 and 5v5 too much.

Wouldn't that mean that warriors would then have to put in much more time to get the same gear results?

I already PvP on my druid rather than my warrior, but that would be the nail in the coffin, if I had to put in three times the work.

-Jester

This is the data I'm using. It's the same data that underlied the post you linked to, but I don't agree with rebalancing according to the general population. The reason is that these are top 20 teams, presumably with players who spend a lot of time on this game. As such they are going to be able to reroll to the classes they want, and their population relative to the general warcraft population I don't find to be relevant. The general population is influenced by many things which aren't relevant to PvP balance. For example, bloodlust makes Shaman a solid 4th member of a 5v5 arena team. However, much of the alliance general population has not rerolled a Shaman so they are the lowest in the general population. Using the population adjusted numbers make Shaman look really overpopulated, when in reality they are in the middle.

Ok, according to those numbers the top 3 classes in 5v5 make up 54% of the top teams, and in 2v2 they make up 53%. The bottom 3 classes are 10% in 5v5 and 8% in 2v2. I don't see a big difference. If you want to balance the arena numbers according to population, you have to cast a bigger net then the top 20 teams, people who would find rerolling a relatively trivial task.

Regarding handicapping - eventually you will find a point where points in ~ points out. Using the hypothetical 4:1 ratio, is it really more fun to go up 50 points so that you are losing 4 games for every game you win? Also, there are substantial further complications to the system. What about the poor MT, who just goofs off after raids. Does he deserve 1/4 the points because half the population is sporting Deep Thunder? 4 of the top 5 2v2 in the US feature a druid. Do they deserve even MORE points because the class is underplayed?

You missed hunters, who aren't even listed in 2v2, 2v2 is less balanced than 5v5, but check out 3v3. It's definitely the most balanced.





You don't need to respec to be viable now? This doesn't fix that problem, it doesn't really present a new problem either.

As far as the 2nd point, this is exactly why it needs to be normalized to the general population. You can't just look at what top teams are using, because they are, as you point out, re-rolling just to have the "uber-combo". I contend that the majority of the population doesn't want to be punished just because they aren't a part of ANY "uber combo" (hunters are an excellent example). Handicapping removes the requirement to re-roll, which is stupid anyway.

Pallies are a virtual necessity for any 5v5 team with a healer to have any shot at decent ratings... that's just stupid. Start penalizing teams for using pallies in 5v5 and start encouraging teams to use druids so the arenas are less about having an "uber combo" of classes and more about playing at your skill level. The effect of handicapping will be that the teams with sucky players who have good ratings just because of their class combo will start sinking, and teams with skilled hunters will start moving up.

Yes they are. There are 3 of them listed in 2v2, which is 1%.



Personally, I run a 5v5 team after raids. I play my feral and our MT runs prot for the first 3 games, and then we switch to better toons. I would be pretty annoyed if having a prot warrior around meant that those 3 games really hurt us.



Well if you handicap to the general population, then you end up not handicapping the dreaded war-pal much at all. They are 24% of the population when expected is 22%. Double hunters would be **PENALIZED** playing against them. Priest-Rogue would get a tiny advantage.

No, you determine handicap by looking at the the top #X teams vs. the general population...

That is you handicap to get the top team ranks representing the general population. You have to use the top ranks because these are where people will maximize potential of a class.

You look at what the top #x teams per battlegroup have for % of each class at the end of each season vs. % of that class at 70, Classes with high ratios (like 2 to 1) receive heavy negative handicapping and those with low ratios (like 0.5 to 1) receive heavy postitive handicapping.

For example, in 2v2 rogues are reasonably represented, so wouldn't get much handicapping, but in 5v5 they would have +handicapping. Hunters would receive +handicapping in all brackets and paladins -handicapping in all brackets.

The downside is that these are spec specific, yeah prot warriors get hosed, but they get hosed anyway, there's really only one arena item for prot warriors anyway (shield). You can't balance arenas around what are quite obviously non-PvP specs.

Under your scheme, War-Pal would get a bonus against Priest-Rogue. War-Druid (currently 3 out of the top 5 teams in the US) would receive a huge bonus.

This amused me - rankings of top 2v2s on Stormrage. This week we plummeted all the way to 459th in our Battlegroup.

There are 10 arena teams on Stormrage higher than us. The top two are Warrior + X teams. It's hard to figure out some of the other teams, though, since some of them have 1 player with a record and others without. Seems like a lot of team player shifting going on. A couple of Shadow Priest + Warlock teams there I wish we could face.

Thankfully my 5v5 is doing a lot better - just started this season with 3 out of 5 of us brand new to 5v5 play.

-Bolty

It also looks like you have folks formed another team just to ruin other folks ratings based on some of the 2v2 teams rated above you having only players with losing ratings. They rejoin the higher rated team and them play a few matches at the end of the week, but by forming a new team and completely outgearing folks they can play lower rated teams and pummel them. Blizzard needs to fix this because it really sucks when you are at a 1600 or so rating (which for only having 3 or 4 pieces of PvP gear per person on the team isn't bad) only to run into folks that are lower rated than you but decked out in nearly the full gladiator set who just crush you and who you end up facing 2, sometimes 3 times.) Too bad Blizzard doesn't do something about folks who do stuff like that, it sure feels like griefing to me.

Yes, unfortunately this is common practice, and to my dismay I have to admit that I'm doing it too. The reasons being that I want to have at least some points at the end of the week. So teams are shifting members in and out according to the need of the players and not of the team itself.

The only way that could be stopped is that one had to be in the team the whole week in order to earn points for that week.

That won't help either. People play their 5v5's for Arena Points, and use 2v2 as a sandbox playzone to get high ranking. The only way to truly fix this is to introduce a 1-week cooldown on team switching. The amount of "dirty pool" that goes on in Arena games is really sad, but if you don't do it, the teams that do will get ahead of you. Once you get to the ultra-ultra-competitive level (top 100), it starts getting really dirty.

GG, as Arnulf says, this happens all the time. Last season Quark and I got smashed repeatedly by a 2400-rating team that had disbanded and recreated just for the "fun" of it and the ability to severely hurt the rankings of other high-end teams. Duh us for re-queueing when they were playing after we hit them the first time, yeah, but it still shouldn't be allowed. Here's a 1750-ish (at the time) rating Rogue/Priest team with *zero* PvP gear (sans trinket) against a Warrior/Druid (of course) group in full PvP gearing. Smashed us flat 3-4 times, costing us 60 rating or so. This team builds up a quick rating, invites a friend of theirs, and maybe gets that friend a Netherdrake/Gladiator rating at the end of the season. Since the team is reformed so late, they can rise fast in few games, allowing their friend to get the necessary participation level to qualify easily.

Then we'd occasionally see these teams where one person is a PvP god and the other one is a PvP newbie or a bad player. The god player is helping their friend build up arena points and then jumping to their "real" team at another point in the week. This is yet another example of how broken the system is. You find all this stuff out by scanning the Armory after games to see the details of who you just played. We'd see it maybe once a week - a team where one member's on a 2000+ 5v5 team, and the other member is on no team at all but the 2v2 and is severely undergeared compared to their partner.

Team switching *needs* a cooldown and I don't know why Blizzard is so hesitant to stop people from gaming the system like they do.

-Bolty

Edit: Nevermind I reread some stuff again and see the issue (for those who may have read this post earlier)

The thing about team cooldown is it doesn't address many of the problems brought up here. Issues I can think of:

1) teams temporarily reforming to drag down their rivals
2) teams being sold
3) teams reforming for the fun of smashing lowbies
4) teams that are used to powerlevel friends


Any others?

While #1 is bad, it's the only one that a cooldown fixes. What would you think about individual ratings, doing away with the whole permanent team concept? For each match, the teams rating is the average of the players, but you only get points for your *personal* rating compared to the other teams. So if you are 2000 and your partner is 1500, your team is 1750 and you play against people who are 1750. If you win, you get no points or nearly no points, but your partner is getting 32 per game.

This solution knocks out problems 1, 2, and 3. #4 I would argue is legit - there should be a way for people to help their friends catch up. It's not like such a team is really going to crack the top teams, not unless they level off for a while and gear up.

Also, I think they should give points for every bracket, but at a much reduced rate. Your number 1 bracket could give 80% of what it does now, number 2 20% and number 3 10%. That would reduce the incentive for people to slum with alts, without making it prohibitive to help out friends.

No, no, they are though. Consider this scenario.

2 very highly rated players want to help a guildie get lots of arena points/Gladiator rank/whatever. They drop their team (or worse yet, sell it), starting over, inviting Newbie to their new team. Back to 1500 rating.

They then play 50 games with this total PvP newbie and just kinda screw around. Win a little, lose some, not really trying, just getting games in. Let's say for the sake of argument that they gain about 200 points, which isn't unreasonable when one of the two players is a God compared to your standard 1500-rating team.

Now the uber player brings in the other uber player while the Newbie sits. They rocket up the rankings and in the next 40 games get up to 2300 ranking. So, 90 games have been played and Newbie's participated in 50 of them.

From that point on, every week, they play 10 games. Newbie plays in three of them to satisfy the 30% requirement. The uber players make up any lost points in the remaining seven games and just hover at a high ranking.

After a few weeks of this, the season ends. Newbie got WAY more Arena points than he deserved, and sports a title he doesn't deserve. "So what," you may ask. This is no different from players in AQ40 escorting someone in all blues through BWL and gearing them up at lightning speed, even if that player is awful. Right?

Wrong. Newbie's rise, points, and title came at the expense of other players. That's what separates Arena rewards from PvE rewards. For him to rise, others got wafflestomped and pushed down. And the players who got wafflestomped could be much better players than Newbie. That's why the system has to fight things like this from happening. Every team they beat on their way back up to 2300 took a loss for Newbie, losing Arena points and standing, while Newbie gets the Arena points undeserved.

-Bolty

2300 is an exaggeration - thats the #1 team in your BG and there's pretty much no way to maintain that ranking giving away 30% of your games.

In any event, team switching cooldown's don't stop your little scenario, unless your 2 uber players want to play for a seperate 2v2 team to try and take #1.

My personalized rankings would solve it. The sucker would actually need to be on the field for the win in order to get any points.

Around 2200 is where 2v2 starts capping out on points to where gaining rating does not produce a significant increase in points gained. This rating would not be that difficult to maintain giving away three games a week, especially if the team was smart about it and queued when higher rated teams were running when giving away the three games a week.

As far as powering random people to gladiator goes, this is a serious problem given the current system and although not many people are currently doing it because it is more of an end of season tactic, it will be very prevalent in the end of the season using a method similiar to what bolty mentioned only stopping once a sufficiently high rating was reached with the two uber players playing and the random person benched and never playing again. Gladiator does not require a constant amount of games per week at all, which leads to the potential for gladiator ebayman, a fresh 70 in all greens and little to no actual gladiator gear besides of course the mount.

Anyone know which class the Warhammer lead dev plays?

Paladin.

~Frag

I fully agree with you on the cooldown but it doesn't change the fundamental flaws of the Arena PvP system.

The chess rating system (the one they are trying to model in Arena) is based on a few assumptions:

1. The game starts fair
2. Luck is not a function of victory
3. Awards are based on Classification

Lets take this apart one at a time. "The game starts fair": In chess both people start with the same number of pieces on the board. In Arena, your gear is a huge factor of who walks out with the win. So too does the classes you are playing and facing. If a priest walked in a match with his raid healing set on he will get pwned so fast they might as well not bothering to press a key. Skill can make up for some gear and class but not all of it.

"Luck is not a function of victory" Again in chess, there is no luck. In my younger years when I played chess competitively, a ranking difference of 75-100pts would almost guarantee victory for those ahead in ranking. The differences in play become so small that only very small mistakes are ever made and exploited to victory every time. In Arena, luck is just part of the game. Who you face in matchups, to did that shot crit or get resisted. Victories don't always go to the best, just the lucky. I would not be suprised that from a pure skill perspective (if that could be measured by mistakes made), that the top +100 teams are all making about the same number of mistakes in a match. Some are just having better luck then others, or having better matchups.

Most chess tournaments recognize that there are levels of game understanding that need to be "gotten" to move to the next level of play. Yes the biggest prizes go the the winners and the top 5. But the remaining prizes go to the people at the various skill levels. In Arena the rewards are items that help Arena PvP. Thus those people who have played season 1 have a huge edge on those who didn't. Add to that those that are playing season 2 are gaining huge rewards and advantage over those in season 3. If you leveled a new toon to play season 3 Arena, you have almost zero chance of being competitive no matter what your skill. You will simply be outgeared and no amount of time playing will make up for it.

If blizzard wanted to make Arena a test of skill they would be better off modeling the system of that of Roman gladiators. There were 5 (I believe) types of gear sets in that system that could be used and all where about equal. The rewards from winning where given outside of the arena. It would be a simple change to the preparation period and would make for more even matches (even better if you could see the classes of your oppenents). Today the desire/temptation to create a 2v2 team to gear a friend is so high given that Arena gear makes such a big difference in the win percentage of low end fights. The reforming of teams isn't nearly as big of a problem as gearing in 5v5 and using that gear difference in 3v3 and 2v2 to "escort" friends in the mid-range ranked fights. And sadly, it is one of the only ways I can think of to gear a new toon for competitive Arena PvP in a reasonable amount of time.

But at the +1900 level that you are fighting in Bolty, much of this is moot. You are most likely facing people also decked out with gear equal to yours. Some of these 2v2 teams are breaking up and reforming only to act as escorts and so might even help your rankings. If they are dragging a noob up with them as an escort, they would have out classed you anyways given they have an anchor on their ranking and still found a way to rise in the rankings to the non-cheese level.

I don't know that a bit of randomness invalidates the whole system. Over the course of hundreds of game (more then you can probably play in chess), it evens out. Primary evidence of that is that team Pandemic pretty much wins everything. The disparities between classes don't inherently make it a bad system, the problem is that some classes are good in all or almost all situations, and some are bad nearly all the time. If it really was a giant game of rock paper scissors, I think most reasonable people would be ok with that.

There is not a huge gap between S1 and S2. Also, S3 is probably a long long way off (it will most likely coincide with the release of another top level dungeon... i.e. not on the radar and possibly not before the next xpac). Nothing is terrible about spending a couple of months at 1800-1900 while you grind up some more gear. Even at a middling rate, its not hard to catch up, especially if you hit the BG's pretty solidly. My warrior didn't play in season 1, and will have 4xS2 in 5-6 weeks - I find that fair. Especially since I know I'm not a fantastic warrior right now. Remember, the only way to really practice arena's is to play in them, the chance that a really good player will have no gladiator gear is almost zero.

Your comparison to Roman gladiators is a bit odd. What do you mean that rewards were given outside the arena and what does this have to do with Warcraft. I'm not sure exactly what you expect other then it sounds vaguely like arena wars.

The only reasons it seems like Pandemic is winning all the time is because a) they have 5 people on the team, and they can produce almost any matchup that is strong against opponents' matchup, and if you are judging them from their success at WSVG, there isn't even 1/10 of the good teams represented there.


WoW is simply not built for PvP - it's a PvE game with some PvP tacked on. Trying to balance PvP here is like trying to make Waffles out of Jell-O mix - it just doesn't work. Randomness is only a very small tip of the iceberg - you have to balance cooldowns, PvE performance, pets, CC, healing, burst, latency, and let's not forget the horrible system that is Rage - and this is just for starters.

5) discovering that you have not the necessary 30% and your teammates are not on or not willing to play some more matches, thus leaving the team and forming a new one ad-hoc just to get some points this week

Reasons #1, #2, #4 make me speechless. I had no idea. I am too naive it seems..

I recognize #3 though. Starcraft ladder games had this. Players with a high rating were creating new battle.net accounts to smash entry-level players.

Interesting thought for me: when Blizzard unveiled the arena system I thought to me that this was finally it. The definite system that would ensure some modicum of measurability. I had not counted on the ingenuity of the players to trick the system to their advantage. Instead of willingly confining themselves to the rules they found ways to play the system itself.

WoW definitely is PvE oriented, but millions of people enjoy the PvP. It seems to me like they are a few major but not massive changes away from having a really great PvP game. There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It remains to be seen if they can make those changes before Warhammer or Conan come out and get it right.

I picked Pandemic because they seem to win almost all the time. Bloodlust is the consensus most difficult BG, and they ended up at the top of that in 5v5. I don't follow the WSVG closely (and their website is a complete mess) but I remember them messing with the other team in the final by copying their composition. In any event, the variability in an arena match doesn't seem to be any more then a game of football or basketball - and a billion people seem to think those are fun competitive and exciting.

The idea that the ladder doesn't have a "modicum of measurability" is silly. The vast majority of people are at a ranking that fairly closely resembles their skill, gear, and commitment. Reformed teams aren't keeping you below 1600.

This little gem popped up on my realm forums in regards to selling teams.
Inc Wow Forums Link