The start of any expansion is a rough time for PvP. I only have two expansion packs to draw on here, but they both followed the same pattern.
TBC didn’t have any starter PvP gear. Nothing. If you didn’t still have your old Warlord gear from 60, you didn’t have anything. You PvPd with whatever you could glean from quests, heroics and Karazhan, picking up pieces where you could from there. It was possible to find nice pieces here and there, the odd quest reward or instance drop with resilience or a crafted piece of gear like the Unyielding Girdle.
Lich King was similar. Not exactly the same, but similar. Starter PvP gear existed, all easily crafted if you had a lot of gold to spend or a lot of time to farm and were or knew a crafter with the same. Hundreds of gold later you found yourself with a nice set of gear that was vastly inferior to the stuff raiders could get.
The overall trend, then, was that everyone PvPd with whatever they could pick up from heroics and Karazhan Naxxramas. Why spend hours and hours getting a PvP set together when you could just raid (which you were going to do anyway) and use epics 13 item levels higher?
The end result was an arena season that defined everything wrong with burst damage. Nobody was wearing resilience, and if they were it was only in small values, but everyone was wearing top of the line raid gear.
No resilience? Low stamina? Little to no survivability.
Raid gear? Very high DPS stats? Extremely huge burst.
This slowly but surely led to big nerfs in damage output for many classes across the board. Arcane was nerfed into oblivion for several patches. Ret paladins still haven’t recovered, currently puttering along as one of the worst scaling melee classes in the game. And so forth.
Oh, we can say so and so was OP and this class was putting out too much damage and on and on, but that wasn’t the core problem when the expansion launched. I’m sure I don’t need to enumerate further, people were bursting and got bursted down really fast because everyone was in their top tier raid gear.
This entire expansion has similarly followed this pattern of people wearing raid gear to PvP and putting out game breakingly huge amounts of damage. For example, unholy DKs with Bryntroll before the proc nerf. Need I say more? Alright, how about healers with Val’anyr? Frost mages with dual Reigns?
Consider the arrival and immense success of comps such as Wizard Cleave and Beast Cleave. Both of those comps involve the following strategy:
- Pick a target, preferably something that wears cloth
- Blow all cooldowns and kill it
- Collect points, queue again
Wizard Cleave, for those not in the know, is a comp that focuses on huge burst windows to kill someone. Destruction Warlock/Elemental Shaman/Holy Paladin was popular for some time. Beast Cleave is BM Hunter/Enhancement Shaman/Holy Paladin.
Both comps would simply blow Bloodlust/Heroism and then zerg the crap out of something. As long as both DPS guys picked the same target, they would always score a kill almost immediately.
I’m not sure how many if you watch the arena tournament stuff. The last MLG tournament at Dallas, suffice to say near single handedly caused the resilience buff we have today. To summarize, a Beast Cleave team (eMazing Gaming, or eMg, if you want to google it) won the tournament, and their strategy was “blow all cooldowns and zerg a clothie” if there was one, otherwise pick whichever target was the weakest in terms of defensive cooldowns and mitigation.
Essentially the team just overpowered whatever they were fighting. If they fought an RMP, it didn’t even matter how well the RMP played. They could delay, control, and prevent the huge super instant death burst, but it didn’t matter. eMg lost precisely two games the entire weekend, both to RMP teams, and beat everyone else so thoroughly that Blizzard refuses to buff BM hunters to this day.
To PvP vets, that wasn’t really surprising at all. Cynical, maybe, but most hardened PvPers upon hearing about Beast Cleave tear everything apart mostly just nodded, said “yep” and that was that. Bitter weeping strictly optional.
Here’s a video. What you just watched was a national tournament, starring some of the very best players in the world, and it showcased a mage dying in four seconds of combat starting.
The major consequence of all this burst, of course, was a huge rise in the might of defensive cooldowns.
Holy Paladins, for instance. With season five, Holy Paladins became extremely popular and effective healers due to their numerous and powerful defensive cooldowns that would let them live through massive burst long enough for their partner(s) to burst the other team to death.
Paladins remain popular healers for many comps for this reason. Their numerous and powerful defensive cooldowns make them relatively self-sufficient in terms of escaping damage. All healers need assistance from their teammates, yes, but paladins need significantly less baby sitting than shamans/druids/priests.
The other major paradigm shift with Lich King level burst was that everyone got defensive cooldowns. Even classes that traditionally never had any, such as hunters and enhancement shamans, received several different abilities with their own ability to survive strictly in mind. Admittedly hunters defensive cooldowns might be rather laughable and buggy in practice, but they do exist.
Unlike in raiding, in PvP everyone has to DPS, CC, tank and heal. Usually not all at once, but every class and spec needs to be capable of doing each of those, provided your definitions for things like DPS/CC and so forth are loose enough.
Strangely, this plethora of defensive cooldowns has resulted in a possibly unforeseen overall trend in how arena matches play out. Basically, after you have forced a target to blow a defensive cooldown, it is inefficient to switch targets.
Take a warrior. I just started playing a variation pf PHDk a couple weeks ago (replace the paladin with a priest) and say we’re fighting warrior/ret/healer of some sort. We open, hard, on the warrior. Forcing the warrior on the defensive massively kills his offensive power, and we can generally keep a ret paladin under control fairly easily.
We do enough damage as PHDk, even with me sporting a 200 weapon, that we can usually force a Shield Wall in the first twenty to thirty seconds of play, especially on RoV. When Shield Wall goes up, we make a judgement call. If the warrior is at, say, 11% and his druid healer is sitting in a trap, we’ll just stay on it and get a kill. Otherwise we switch long enough for Shield Wall to wear off, then switch back.
With Shield Wall down, the warrior doesn’t have nearly as many strong defensive options left. Why would we switch targets? Why would we switch to, say, the druid or ret paladin when both of them still have all of their defensive options available?
That was a rather simplistic example, but it remains true across the board. Switch things up to, say, TSG, and the strategy remains the same. Force the Shield Wall on the warrior, keep hurting, then the paladin blows HoP to keep his warrior alive long enough, and then back to DPS the warrior.
Which is the better strategy? Stay on the warrior without defensive cooldowns, or swap to the DK who still has all of his stuff or the Paladin who still has most of their own cooldowns left?
Quite a few of these defensive cooldowns people have can completely negate a swap, making it even less attractive to truly swap kill targets. A DK versus a caster cleave, for instance, can completely nullify a swap to himself with Anti-Magic Shell. Mages have Ice Block, hunters can use deterrence to survive a bladestorm swap, and so forth.
I don’t really see any way to avoid this particular paradigm shift, short of removing many to all individual cooldowns and either adding more or transforming them all into team wide cooldowns. What if a Paladin could bubble anyone, not just themself? What if a rogue could cast Evasion on a teammate? What if a Warrior could cast Shield Wall on an ally? What if a mage could “deep freeze” a teammate to protect them in a block of ice?
But I digress.
Hopefully, Blizzard has learned a great deal from Wrath, mostly about burst and the horrible problems raiding foists on PvP every damn patch. At the very least they said starter PvP gear won’t suck so bad in Cataclysm compared to raid gear.