- Author: Passion
- Date: April 23, 2024
- Updated: April 23, 2024
- Expansion: WoW Classic
As Season of Discovery has no public testing of any kind, any new change is essentially tested live by the player base. In this case, we are at least being informed of that intention.
Beginning this upcoming weekend, starting on Friday the 26th at approximately 19:00 CEST, and lasting for four days, PvP damage will be globally tweaked. This means that in all forms of PvP content, including Open World, Battlegrounds, and presumably also duels, players will be dealing significantly reduced damage. This should also include all player-related pets, such as Shadowfiends, Hunter Pets, and hopefully the Emerald Whelplings spawned from Dragon’s Call.
Hopefully this gives Blizzard the necessary feedback to adjust PvP to a more stable point, instead of what we have currently which typically involves whoever attacks first almost instantly killing the other player.
Hello, Classic PvPers!
This coming weekend, we will test an adjustment to Player versus Player combat in Season of Discovery. We will implement a global damage reduction aura on PvP combat between players (and player controlled pets and other units).
When we started Season of Discovery, we knew that PvP would become significantly more fast paced and bursty, with each class being capable of significantly more damage output, and this quickly proved to be true. We experimented with a damage reduction aura in battlegrounds during Phase 1, but it didn’t work as well as we hoped, mostly because healing was scaling more aggressively than damage at that point, causing healing classes to become significantly more oppressive in battlegrounds than they normally would be. Now that we’re in Phase 3, we’ve made many changes and added more runes, and burst damage has significantly outpaced healing output, so we feel that it’s a good time to try this again.
Damage scaling and its impact on PvP has always been a concern in World of Warcraft, even since original WoW. Various systems have been introduced to counteract this to varying levels of success, but ultimately it always comes down to the fact that player damage outscales player health at a base level, and an adjustment is needed for combat between players to continue to feel satisfying as player power increases. We’ve been hesitant to introduce this as a permanent feature, and we prefer to give it a trial run this weekend to get an idea of how it feels before we take further steps. Please note: this aura will affect all areas of the game world, not just battlegrounds.
We encourage you to get out into the world (or in battlegrounds) and PvP the weekend and let us know how it feels. We’re prepared to do some tuning to make it the most effective, so your feedback will be very helpful.
We currently plan to enable the aura on all Season of Discovery realms on Friday, April 26 at approximately 19:00 CEST, and it will be disabled four days later, during scheduled weekly maintenance in each region.
We look forward to your feedback. Thank you!
About the Author
