Yes, I said that. If you are disagreeing with that remark, then you are essentially saying "It shouldn't be a viable tactic to kill a healer."

If you aren't saying that, then all we're really quibbling over is a matter of degree.

I didn't say it should be trivial to kill a healer. I purposefully didn't specify how many people it should take to kill a healer. I didn't say that we were happy with how easy it is to currently kill a healer. But if you are anticipating a point where you just laugh at warriors or shamans or other classes without brutal CC and drains, then you might be disappointed.

Also this:

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It only takes half a brain to realize what he meant was that pre-wotlk it was never an option simply kill the healer. It was a mess of mana draining, mortal striking, crowd controlling and intense co-ordination to make that resto druid, or one of his friends drop after season 3.

He wasn't justifying the insane amount of damage people are taking, he was merely saying that the game design needs to change so that we don't have 15 minute 2v2 arena matches because people just don't die.

If he were indeed meaning what you guys have said earlier in this thread, I would completely agree. Healers are having way too much trouble surviving and healing at the moment.

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Like a lot of priests on this game I absolutely loved pvp healing, hated arena but no matter, since wrath I have dueled every class out there and any time I even go near a rogue, warrior, pally, hunter, or DK I am dead in 3 to 4 seconds. I can hold my own against mages and have a 40% win rate on locks. Should I be able to beat all those other classes? No, and I am not asking to have that kind of power, what I want is for there to be the same caution in them when engaging me as I have just walking out of town and see one of those classes looking at me.

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We do not balance 1v1 PvP. We make virtually no attempt to insure that all specs are viable at dueling. It's a fun distraction at best, perhaps a way to test our your abilities against a specific class.

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Long story short GC yes we are peeved, you are not forthcoming with anything remotely looking like a boon to us.

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These forums are not about seeking boons from us. I encourage players not to come here asking for buffs and becoming disappointed when they don't get them.

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All the posts we see are still about dps class fixes and still more nerfs to our mana regen.

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It makes my ability to post difficult when you compare how many fixes you got compared to someone else. That is just a losing battle for us so I wish players wouldn't go there. I do think mana regen is probably too easy in PvE and too easy in PvP for some classes, but I think we shouldn't derail this thread with that discussion. You have to get away from the idea that nerfs we mean we hate you and buffs mean we love you.

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No eta on the long awaited over haul to the healing meta game that though I enjoy, as many have stated is clunky at best.

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I have given an ETA and I will give another one. It will be a long time. Do not look for it in the next patch or so. We want to take a comprehensive look at healing the way we did at tanking, and that took a long time. Healing may even be trickier to change. I also always add when I comment on this topic that you should not assume that all or even most healers hate healing or even find it clunky at best. Many players love healing and we have to be careful not to break the game for them.

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And to top it all, the only response we see on any kind of regularity is " Wait until you are at X junction and you will see a difference." Yet we have reached how many "X" junctions and not only been let down but have actually seen our archetype get a set back that we still get the sit and wait response for?

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I think whatever quote keeps getting referenced here is misquoted or mis-stated or something. All I have ever said was that damage will be lower when everyone is at full resilience. Will damage be low enough then? I have never answered that because I think the jury is out. I understand many players think damage will still be too high. We certainly take their opinions (and numbers) into account when we discuss it.

I'm sorry if you hate your priest (I think you were a priest). We don't.

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GC is not saying this. He's saying S4 had too much druid survivability.

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I was trying not to go there, so let's just say we don't ever want to be in a situation where any healer has too much survivability. Players certainly complain about the paladin bubble too.

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No what you're trying to do is justify the mess in PvP right now.

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This thread was started because some players either intentionally or unintentionally took a quote I said and tried to turn it into saying that healers should be extremely easy to kill in Arenas. It has continued because some players are so upset that they aren't really interested in what I am actually saying and just want to vent. You waste my time and that of other players when you use this forum to vent.

This thread was not actually about the current state of Arenas. It was about a quote I made. Since my quotes tend to get reproduced across the Internets, I felt it was necessary to set the record straight. As I have said, I really do hate having to talk like a politician. I think we are all a lot happier when I can be frank with you guys. But seeing things happen like this does not bode well for that.

We (Blizzard) are talking about the current state of Arena. It's not appropriate for me to say anything about it yet because honestly we need more discussions with our entire design team. It isn't fair for me to give you my opinions without consulting them (and it's a long conversation), particularly not on something that elicits such passionate responses from players. Anything that brings about this much discussion from the community (and I don't think it's just QQ) is going to promote discussions at Blizzard.

When throw-away comments about how Arenas should ideally work can spawn 5 or 6 long threads, I'm sure we can expect a firestorm when we do discuss our actual plans for PvP. Let's all stick to what I actually say, and not what we imagined I say. If I say something confusing, I will clarify it.

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Q u o t e:


You know what me and my friend do when 2 dps is on our resto druid? We peel him off. If you are a healer, and you are dying in 1-2 GCD, something is wrong, and it's not the game. Either you think you can survive in pve gear with 14k hp, or you're not as good as you think you are. I watch healers ALL THE TIME survive for incredible lengths. What they can't do is tank 2-3 people anymore, and they could in BC. That was a problem.

The hyperbole of dying in 1-2 GCDs with one person on you simply isn't true anymore.
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And I'd like to point out that the ONLY reason you don't see a lot more posts like this is because most sane people, healers or otherwise, who have some experience and understanding of the game and critical reasoning ability avoid these forums like the plague. I'm just here to see what the blues are saying and because I enjoy abusing my brain, I guess.

And notice how nobody responds to this guy, presumably because they assume his post snuck in from an alternate dimension where pvp damage is 30% lower or something. On the contrary, he's playing the same game you are and he's closer to the truth than most of the posts in this thread.

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It is unfortunately common on these forums to see comments like "Everyone knows" when the very next comment disagrees. But thanks for your comments, and I hope that players that don't post here still get something out of the forums. I do read several other forums out there, but I only post here.

Unfortunately, these quotes are being taken out of context, so let me elaborate:

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Q u o t e:
No eta on the long awaited over haul to the healing meta game that though I enjoy, as many have stated is clunky at best.
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I have given an ETA and I will give another one. It will be a long time. Do not look for it in the next patch or so. We want to take a comprehensive look at healing the way we did at tanking, and that took a long time. Healing may even be trickier to change. I also always add when I comment on this topic that you should not assume that all or even most healers hate healing or even find it clunky at best. Many players love healing and we have to be careful not to break the game for them.

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I was referencing the hard look at healing that we have sometimes discussed in this forum. Those changes will take a long time, possibly next expansion. I was not saying that we are not making ANY changes to healers or to Arena healing specifically in the near term. I wasn't addressing that issue at all with this response.

I hate having to spend half my words on caveats, but it appears the ones I chose were confusing.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]

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Killing a healer should be possible, but it should be like killing a prot warrior/paladin. It's possible, but it's going to require you to use your stuns, silences, etc. Just letting dps faceroll their keys and kill a healer is stupid design.

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I didn't say dps should be able to faceroll healers. I said it should be a viable strategy to kill them. What I meant was that we want to avoid situations where players say "No matter what I do, I cannot keep that guy from healing." (Unless of course, the healer just totally outplayed them.)

I think what got me in trouble was the "etc.". My intention was not that dps should be able to autoattack or faceroll their way to victory. :)

My point was that we don't give every spec the ability to stunlock, sheep or silence. And we're not going to. But those specs still need to feel like they can contribute in an Arena. Understanding the concerns now, I should have said something more like "It should still be possible for warriors and shamans to take on and sometimes defeat healers (even if it takes 2v1 or 3v1 or whatever)." Crowd control should not be the dominant factor in Arenas. Neither should burst damage.

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Let me ask. I'm not asking if 1 vs 1 is balanced. Rather, I'm asking, is anybody supposed to die as quickly as under 5 seconds against a single attacker, assuming one is wearing PvP gear?

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I don't know what the magic number is for a fair death. Even if I picked a number, I think I would be lawyered to death by exceptions or see "GC hates rogues" threads manana. :)

I will say that I don't think anyone enjoys being killed without any meaningful chance to respond. There's no game there. Games to me are about making interesting decisions. If there is no realistic decision you (or your teammates in a group setting) can make that can have any real effect on the outcome, I think that's bad.

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If players aren't willing to call you on something they think would be game-breaking I doubt these forums would be very useful.

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They should absolutely call me on it. I don't know that it takes 6 threads and dozens of pages to call me on it. I think some players just want to vent.

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GC, I hope you arent taking this stuff personally, because I'm sure nobody intends it to be. We all* appreciate the time and effort you are taking to answer this whole line of inquiry.

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I don't take it personally. This whole thing wouldn't work if forum posts made me upset. Filling the old mug with gin isn't quite the same thing.

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This position does not jibe with eaither current reality or with your previous statements regarding your intended dps heirarchy. The "pure" dps classes are the ones which you have stated will always have at least equal to the highest single target dps potential. Coincidentally, they are also the ones with the most stuns/cc/silences/interrupts (every spec, I might add), not the least like the examples you cited.

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That hierarchy is largely a structure for PvE. I don't know how well it maps to PvP at all. Strength in PvP has a lot more to do with a handful of specific abilities. Ultimately the goal is the same -- we have had classes and specs that historically were not very viable in Arenas, and that's not what we want. It is just a lot harder to fix for PvP because balance is so dependent on the specifics of those abilities and testing is so limited by the skill of the players involved. There is no test dummy on which to test PvP effectiveness.

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Q u o t e:
This whole situation is broken beyond fixing. We tell you we die in under 10 seconds, you tell us we should "wait" and "get more gear." We tell you we can't get the gear without winning. You make it so the best gear is only gotten by winning.

We tell you that even if we get over 1000 resilence the best teams / dps still don't need it. You tell us nothing.

I wash my hands of this whole thing. PvP boycott continued until my pallie is 80.

And that isn't meant to be a troll. That is meant to show that at this point many people are losing faith and waiting for current characters to be viable isn't an option.

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I'm honestly not the least bit interested in claims of rerolling, cancelling, boycotting or whatever. You don't need to attach those to your arguments. I can't verify them, and we can't be held hostage to threats anyway. Just don't bother with them, IMO.

I understand that you guys are always going to be impatient for changes. That's natural. But what I have been advocating is "please be patient" not "wait and get more gear." Here is a cross-post from an answer I made in another thread:

What I have said is that damage will be lower with high resilience. I don't think anyone argues that point -- it's mostly just math. So then the question becomes how far off we will be then (what I said in my last post).

We want Arena gear to be attractive. If we get to the point where players can survive without it, then the Arena rewards are less desirable. If we get to the point where players can hit the cap too easily, then they can mix in PvE gear and we have the raid-in-order-to-Arena problem. If we over-compensate and nobody can kill anyone, then you risk a world where the best drain teams win and there won't be a spot for classes that emphasize damage over crowd control (warlocks and shamans perhaps).

I think most players agree on what things should feel like when everyone has good gear -- something akin to the best parts of the previous seasons (and ideally with broader class representation). If you buy that, then the question is how we get there and what things should feel like in the early seasons.