Testing Adding Damage Reduction to PvP

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 10:00 a.m. PDT (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!