Tuesday, October 9, 2007

I Feel Naked in the Arena

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...and not in a good way. No, I'm not talking about ERP. I'm talking about craptastic armor values of my Arena gear!

After reading about Season 3 gear and armor penetration over on Phaelia's Resto4Life, it made me start thinking about the armor value I have now compared to the armor value of the cloth wearers.

With a little digging, I discovered the following:

  • For Tier 5 gear pieces that correspond to Season 2 gear (head, shoulders, chest, gloves, legs), cloth wearers get about ~1k in armor, leather wearers gets about ~2k in armor, mail ~4k, plate ~7k.
  • For Season 2 gear pieces that correspond to Tier 5 gear, cloth wearers get about ~2k in armor, leather wearers gets about ~2k in armor, mail ~4k, plate ~7k.

Uh... what? In our Arena Gear, the gear that is supposedly designed toward survivability against those who would rather we not continue stabbing them in the eye, we have as much armor as a Priest. Yeah. Priests and all other clothies got a 100% boost to their armor from Season 2 gear. Meanwhile, Rogues (and to a lesser degree the various Druid specs) get virtually no armor boost.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the various classes and their abilities designed around the type of armor they wear? A Warlock has Fear and other tools to help compensate for his cloth armor. A Mage has Polymorph and Frost Nova and other abilities. Every cloth wearer has already been balanced for their armor type.

Now this is probably the result of them already giving the cloth wearers the +910 armor that will be partially negated by the armor penetration of Season 3. However, why should Rogues (and Restoration Druids) be penalized by not getting any armor bonus? No wonder why in a 5v5 match, our team met with a Priest who seemed to have more armor than me. Add on Inner Fire and all their other abilities, she had way more armor than me.

Therefore, since the beginning of Season 2, cloth wearers have gotten tougher, while melee characters and healers in leather have received zero compensation. Even next season, it will take weeks for melee players to get Season 3 pieces. Meanwhile, cloth wearers will continue to enjoy their day in the sun.

All of this and rogues still get to stand toe to toe with their opponents to do damage. Cloth wearers already have ways to distance themselves from melee characters and now they have twice the armor as they did before as well!

It seems to me that the entire idea of armor penetration is flawed and this solution is even more flawed. Even a proposed solution of giving all characters 910 more armor just seems like a bad fix because PvP characters will have an advantage over PvE characters.

I'm under no illusion that game mechanics are easy to balance for PvE and PvP, but there has to be a better solution.

1 comment:

Loni Huff said...

It's ridiculous that Rogues should have less armor than anyone else. Rogues should have twice the armor of any cloth wearers they come up against. No wonder everyone always targets them so early on in a match. Ugh!