Sunday, 9 September 2012

PVE vs PVP

This blog was an early look at PVP vs PVE near to the end of WOTLK.




PVE and PVP players have long been at each others throats in a battle for supremecy, a constant argument over 'which requires more skill' with the general (there are lots of exceptions so this will all be very generalised) attitude of both sides looking a bit like this;



How much truth is there behind the argument though? From my own experiences whilst most PVE'ers that aren't very good in PVP are fairly happy to admit it, the ego of PVP'ers that are raiding often consumes them when it comes to 'invalidating' any mistakes they make because 'pve is easy'. This leads to a permanent headache for any raid leader when it comes to raiding with these individuals as despite being 2.6~2.8k rated in the arenas they are pretty much without a clue as to what's going on in this so much 'easier' environment. To take an example, a certain beast cleaving paladin that was rank 1 on the prestigious cyclone battlegroup for a few months in season 8 must of had a ui that looked somewhat like one gigantic flash of light button combined with the attention span of a 4 year old made him an incredibly unreliable paladin to raid with despite being at the 'top of his game' according to his ratings. See if you can guess who the pvp focused players are in http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-t84x7nd5psvfkgle/sum/damageDone/?s=11837&e=12114 this raid.
Ignoring the lower end of the scales where teams are struggling to break 2400 and guilds that still haven't killed HC LK, the mistakes both sides make are fairly similar and despite common sense dictating that arena players would have superior awareness this is very much not the case when the random 2.6k rated wizard cleave heroes in my pug die to a number of things including;
  1. Sindragosa Debuff - completely unaware of a stacking debuff on instant death
  2. Defile - don't expect them to move from this
  3. Putricide Oozes - or this
  4. Festergut Vile Gas - or spread out for this as that would be 'too easy'
  5. Deathwhisper Ghosts - ghosts that do huge amounts of aoe damage? wat?
Obviously team PVE also dies to these things, but they're not the ones claiming everything is easy and are suposedly meant to have far superior awareness to their surroundings. This pretty much describes the issues of the large majority of PVP'ers that I have raided with in PUGs with the above attitude issues being combined with a lack of class knowledge leading to substandard dps.
Another difference between the two sides is playstyles, people that aren't doing both often have problems transistioning between the two. Arenas requiring quick adaptation, reacting to what's going on and quickly thinking of ways to deal with it often leads to problems when they have to follow a set pattern or listen to instructions in PVE. A common example being again related to Paladins that I've played with which will either spam cooldowns aimlessly in PVE/not use them at all when required and sometimes focus a bit too much on using a HOJ on something resulting in a dead tank when really the playstyle should be just turretting heals. The same can be said about PVE players entering into the arena, due to not having a good idea of what's going to happen nor a predictable amount of damage incoming it's very hard for players new to arena to deal with the amount of pressure some teams can put out which leaves them struggling against heavy dps teams and doing a lot better in slower drawn out matches giving them time to work things out. Conclusion of this being that the PVE-centric players often have problems dealing with unexpected situations and the PVP players that deviate from the plan can often cause confusion which leads to wipes brought on by the fact that the PVE players have trouble adapting to suddenly having to cover a different role.
The argument that PVE is just against a script is very often brought up however most of the actions put out by the scripts are reactionary, what's the difference between sidestepping after seeing a flying ooze coming towards you vs seeing the right spell pop up on your focus cast bar at the right time and counterspelling it? - there isn't any, both are pre-determined reactions to an event, whether it's a player or a script producing the event there is no difference, the only part that really should come into this is that PVP'ers are often having to make far more of these decisions at a far quicker rate.
This isn't to say that PVP'ers are bad at PVE though, look at previous projects such as PVE is Hard http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/World-of-Ming/PVP-PVE which took BT/Hyjal down in mostly season 3 gear and to look at a more recent example Vicious Cycle. From what I know, both of these guilds started to have problems with players showing up to raids once the easy content was down, VC stalling at HC modes in ICC and PVE is Hard failing at the first real test of a raid group (bare in mind that S3 gear was not at all bad in BT, the weapons were>the non Illidan/Archimonde PVE stuff so it was not as big a gear issue as many made out at the time); Brutallus. Was PVE so easy once the content became more demanding? not quite, but it does fit in with the general experiences a lot of guildmasters have had with recruiting high end pvpers, they have the tendancy to guild hop and get bored rather fast. This does not apply to everyone however as there are some excellent PVP'ers that have been/are in world class guilds. Take Deus Vox for example http://www.wowarmory.com/team-info.xml?r=Laughing+Skull&ts=5&t=hella+many+points&select=hella+many+points whilst only Kollektiv has been active on the tournament scene recently both him and the ex-Pandemic guys are not only claiming top tournament posistions and R1 titles they're also getting top 10 US PVE kills and top WOL http://worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Icecrown_Citadel/Festergut/25H/Combat_Rogue/ posistions as well, players that excel in both areas though are a true rarity as not many are able to achieve that (no matter how much they like to claim that it's 'easy').
To take a quote on PVP'ers in top end PVE guilds -
"My personal feeling is that people who come from a long history of mainly pvp focussed play are difficult to control, they tend to have a greater feeling of entitlement and individualism, because they are used to a far greater level of self determinism. That said, they also have a far higher level of patience and focus than many pure pve players." - Log - GM of Infamous in Vanilla http://www.realmhistory.net/outland/106/guild/infamous/973.html


At the end of the day both areas can be condensed down to a few simple steps of analysis -
1. Identify Target
2. Know strategy to kill said target
3. Avoid/Prevent abilities said target can use to kill you
4. Execute strategy and kill target before they kill you
This is also why when something new comes up in PVP it takes a while before effective strategies and counters are found to it (e.g. Beast Cleave) in the same way it takes a while before there's full strategy guides available on the interwebs for claiming your next lot of epics. A player who focuses solely on one area of the game is unlikely to really excel in the other without putting some serious effort in no matter how 'easy' the welfare modes are (in general if it's puggable then it doesn't matter, so 95% of the current content); to put it into context, avoiding wiping the raid with a defile on HC LK requires the same reactions that it does to spell reflect sheeps/cyclones, you have to pre-emptively react to both abilities (good luck spell reflecting hasted sheeps/cyclones without <50ms if you don't have your shield out before they cast), whether you can achieve either comes down to the level of experience of the player of expecting that particular 'script' to happen and reacting to it.


Title sharing on Sturmangriff / Charge Battlegroup
Can someone go help Barburas take rank one in 5s as well?
His team has done a great job screwing up the 7 way tie in the 3s Ladder but there's still a bunch of teams left in 5s that are sharing rank one at 2434 rating wth a 1900 team on the first page, having more R1 slots than Gladiator slots is kinda dumb especially since this could of easily been over 60 Wrathful Gladiator's from one battlegroup. Hopefully Blizzard decide on some way to differentiate tied teams from titles in Cataclysm or change the system so it's harder to tie as the rampant win trading and title sharing is putting a smear on what was once a fairly prestigious title to get; this is just one of many BG's though which has a huge amount of teams sharing with many of the worst battlegroups producing nearly as many Wrathful Gladiator's as normal Gladiator's.


Initial 4.0 Death Knight Thoughts
These are my current thoughts on the biggest DK changes for Unholy coming in 4.0 at level 80 as they're looking more finalised now.
- AMS off the GCD should of done ages ago, no more ams'd while sheeped/feared now.
- Not having to use PS/IT to reapply diseases constantly due to Festering Strike is going to increase our damage a fair amount, resilient infection will also make cleanse wars with DK's a battle that healers aren't going to win.
- Runic Empowerment is a really really dumb mechanic, runic corruption should be how it functions by default (have fun if you're playing frost and being spammed with useless runes).
- Dots being able to crit is going to make the aoe damage insane in PVE for Unholy DK's although I don't think it was really such a great idea to nerf pestilience and then rebuff it with a talent, feels a bit filler-ish.
- New rune system will make them play somewhat similar to rogues in the sense that using every rune as soon as it comes up won't be a requirement anymore to avoid a dps loss.
- COI Change should of been done in S5.
- Dark Transformation is going to raise the skill cap hugely as pet control is going to be vital now rather than just as a tool to blow shit up and stop people drinking that can be suicided without thinking.
DK's benefitting more from strength than arp is also going to be great when the patch comes as warriors/ferals are doing very very little damage now with the loss of it. Karuki "knight of daeth" out.


As far as I can recall I've only had good experiences with PvP players swapping to PvE. However I believe that they have a bit of a harder time taking orders and might be a bit more arrogant generally than players who has played mostly PvE, this ofcourse varies from person to person though but that's the overall picture that I've gotten. I also think that they have better focus from the start and have an easier time to adapt in stressful si

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