ETA: I am a total n00b because apparently you can already queue as a raid...the "Join as Party" button being somewhat misleadingly named!
Looking ahead to Cataclysm it is clear that Blizzard wants to make PvP more accessible than ever before, which I think is generally a good thing. Cata could be the best thing to happen to PvP since...well, idk...random BGs?
We are getting guild talent trees in Cataclysm, and we have definite word that that will include PvP talents of some kind. You earn these talent points by accruing guild currency, which are acquired in various ways...but most noticeably for us, by winning rated BGs. Here's the kicker there though : in PvP as in PvE, they're throwing a ballpark number around of 75% guild participation for it to count as a guild win to get the points. That means 7/10 of the people in the raid (or WSG, explicitly used as an example) have to be in your guild.
Thought 1 : 7 > 5. Therefore they're going to let us join queue for BGs in a raid, finally, instead of limiting it to party...at least for the rated BGs. About time, Preform AV Enabler is getting kind of clunky and it's annoying anytime you try to set up a premade to pause and wait 15 minutes while the people who don't have the addon have to go download it. I suspect this is only into effect on rated BGs -- elsewise you'd get the same complaints that people had before about twinks rolling over casual pvpers, until Blizzard separated them. But maybe it could work on normal BGs too, since Blizz has something in place already (allegedly) to try and match premade groups against similar-sized ones.
Thought 2 : Talent trees are supposed to (theoretically) make people more loyal to guilds. I'm wondering if it won't actually encourage less -- "ok, everyone gquit and join our guild for the duration of this raid so you can get our perks...then you can go back to your original guild after." Blizzard could stop that by saying you needed to be in a guild for a certain amount of time before you had access to the nomnoms...it wouldn't even need to be that long, probably a day would work since PUGs aren't usually formed that far in advance. But it seems unlikely that Blizz would do that.
Some of the talents posited include a mass rez, mass summons, extra gold loot, reagent-free raid buffs, reduced mat cost for flasks and other consumables...most of which seems to me is pretty PVE-ish. We could get some mileage out of raid buffs, I suppose, and it's likely that rated BGs are going to be SRS BSNS enough to at least require flasks so maybe that helps too. The big problem here is that in PVE, you don't care if guild A has a certain perk, and guild B doesn't...they're not competing against each other, and there isn't something like "you do 5% more damage" or "raid bosses have 5% less health" that would cause all sorts of progression drama about who has Legitimate Kills and who doesn't. But in PVP, guilds are going to be competing directly against each other, which makes a whole host of "give you an edge against the content" talents unworkable for balance reasons.
The only PVP talent I've seen proposed is to reduce the flag cap time by a second, which I suspect is highly unlikely, again for balance. It looks to me like by "PVP talents" we're actually going to get stuck with the wuss-talents that can go either way (like the raid buffs). I've thought of a couple things but they all run into that balance thing and I can't seem to come out with a way around it.
* More efficiency -- maybe guildies move x% faster, or x% faster mounted speed, to get to objectives faster. This is again a pvp/pve talent both but useful in BGs certainly.
* More information -- maybe guildies can see when another guildie is under attack, and by how many people. Much like calling incs at a flag, but more automated the way some addons do now. Alternately, give all members of the guild "track humanoids" for the duration of a BG. But what if guild A has this and guild B doesn't? Fairness? Or do we assume at this point that any serious PVP guild, even if they don't have Unbalancing Talent P, will probably have Unbalancing Talent Q, and therefore they work/cancel out?
* Terrain alterations -- there's already been some hints of this with individual talent trees like the mages' wall of ice, or the rogues' fog thingy (I forget the name). What if the guild leader had something like this at their disposal that they could use every..idk, 15 minutes, to limit it to once in a BG.
* My pet idea : allow two guildies to set up a portal that's operable as long as the channellers at both ends are not disrupted. Say it's a 20s channel that allows you to port from ST to farm, but subject to the same disruption as any channelled cast. So if something's under threat, you could rush reinforcements there...but only if you can keep the enemy off your portal-anchor long enough to do it. It's a massively unbalanced idea, of course, and would only work if you were working off what I said above, assuming that the other side of the BG would also likely have some kind of kickass talent too. It might be worth mentioning that the Zerg can do something similar to this in Starcraft with a thing called a Nydus Canal (and I think SCII also but I'm not as up on that as I should be) so it wouldn't be a new concept for Blizzard.
What ideas can you come up with? If you were running a PVP guild in cata, what end-level talent would make you drool with anticipation?
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
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Unfortunately the idea of talents were nerfed for two reasons. Blizz didn't want people guild shopping simply because of the the guild talents a guild might have, and they didn't want there to be many arguments of who gets to spend the points, and on what. However, they're now doing guild levels up to 20, with automatic abilities at each level. So it's more like automatic spells than talents, in that you get goodies, but they're chosen for you. It's my guess that en total the list will be well rounded so that both pvp and pve guilds will get both types of abilities, but more abilities will be gaine the more enriched the guild is
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