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;
- Sindragosa Debuff - completely unaware of a stacking debuff on instant death
- Defile - don't expect them to move from this
- Putricide Oozes - or this
- Festergut Vile Gas - or spread out for this as that would be 'too easy'
- 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
No comments:
Post a Comment