To buff pvp or not to buff…. that is the question.

So over the last month we have seen many buffs and nerfs to PvP. From a 100% resilience buff to a 10% healing nerf. Over the next few paragraphs I will be expressing my opinion on each buff and nerf to pvp.

If you have been following this at all you will see that our good friend(or enemy) Bornak over on the WoW forums has been a busy man. Lets go over what has happened. Firstly in season 7 we saw the up rise of protection specced warriors and paladins doing well in arenas. Protection specced warriors were a huge challenge, they had an incredible survivability, and a rather large amount of burst damage which was the problem. So to keep protection a viable PvE spec they upped the threat of the burst abilities and lowered the damage. This was needed. There was far too much survivability with a prot warrior, which there should be, and a huge amount of burst. That is where the problem came along. If you look at any of the classes you either have survivability or burst not both. So to fix it and not effect PvE, Blizzard went ahead and made this very simple and easy change.

Then came the buff to resilience that was posted a week before season 8 started. The information put out said is that there will be a 100% increase to damage reduction from players from where it was currently. So if you were at 10% damage reduction from players you would now see a 20% damage reduction from players. This was to help increase the longevity of arena matches. I know from experience that some matches were over before they even started. I cant count how many matches I have had that were under 10 seconds. A few lucky crits and the other team, or mine, had lost. I was extremely excited to hear that I might actually survive a good fear from a destro lock, this meant that with the Prot nerf I might be able to survive long enough to figure out what the hell went wrong with the battle that was just lost! There might actually be some strategy to a fight now instead of “burst the (insert class here).”
Soon after it was announced that during arenas, battle grounds, and Wintergrasp there would be a 10% healing debuff to all classes. This almost made sense to me. With the resilience buff news soared about how disc priest/holy paladin/ms warrior would be the dominating comp of season 8. I agreed on all fronts. RMP(rogue, mage, priest) would be down along with beast cleave (healer,enhance shaman, BM hunter) and wiz cleave (healer, ele shaman, destro lock). Then the healing nerf was put out and I got confused. Why buff resilience to make survivability across the board only to nerf survivability of healers and the ability of the healers to keep their teammates alive?

I figured there was a good reason and I would see if I jumped in and played around with the changes but as soon as I got into the first battleground I noticed… very little change. Understand, if you dont know already, that I play a disc priest. One of the tougher classes to kill so I hear. I havent played as any other healing class because I really enjoy playing a priest so I can’t speak for them. So looking at the buffs and nerfs I noticed that nothing happened. There was a 100% resilience buff which put me up from roughly 10% damage reduciton to now 24% damage reduction taken from players. So out of the resilience buff I gained 14% which is huge. Remember that this buff doesn’t effect the chance to be critically hit at all but just all damage that comes from players. Then it gets turned around and we get a 10% nerf to all healing. It just seems that those 2 changes just about cancelled each other out. Which is what it felt like. Nothing had changed things were back to normal.
Then came an additional nerf. Sacred shield and Power Word: Shield will now absorb 10% less damage. Again I cannot speak for paladins on this because I dont play one but as a priest this is probably one of the biggest nerfs that we could take. As discipline we priests rely on shields to make up for our “lack” of healing compared to other healing classes. I figured there must be something to justify this but since I had not seen much of a difference in battlegrounds I decided to jump into arenas and see how it all felt out. I decided to go in with my good warlock buddy and do some 2v2. We hopped in to start against a shadow priest/ rogue. My warlock was sapped and instantly they were on me. 10 seconds later my face has been severly melted into the ground. Now I understand that Blizzard isnt focusing on 2v2 to balance PvP but if I’m being destroyed like this in 2v2 what would be the chance that it would be the same in 3v? So a few days later I hop into 3v3 with my team and well, the most prominant teams out there are still playing and doing very well.�
So at this point I would ask, why all these changes only to make not change at all, then I hopped over to arena junkies and check the top rankings fully expecting to see TSG(warrior, DK, holy paladin) in the #1 spot. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Infact there is only 1 TSG in the top 20 teams and they are ranked number 15. All these other comps are odd to say the least. 2 shaman and a warlock? 2 druids and warlock? And finally a mage, warrior, and paladin. All these comps a few seasons ago you would not see working this well.

So in conclusion, I at first thought there was little to no change to PvP. I myself couldnt see it but then there are the facts that are there. I must be wrong though because so many teams are doing so well with an “off” comp. I suppose as long as someone is seeing a difference we are doing well. I will expect more changes to come before cataclysm that will hopefully be a lot more simple than many small changes.