It’s interesting to see how WoW has evolved from its initial release. As a player of the game since it began, tracking the evolution of the game excites me in a kind of academic way. What is most interesting however, is how the developers at Blizzard have adapted to the problems of balancing for the two worlds of an MMO, PvE and PvP.

Back about a year ago or so, someone posted a topic about how damage was scaling in WoW and how it affected PvP. His conclusion was that if Blizzard did not find out some way to scale back damage progression, PvP fights would become two shot crit fests.

His reasoning was this:

Stamina was not scaling enough. People were getting maybe an additional 500 or so hp from a new set, while damage numbers were increasing much faster through new armor gains. Not only that, people were getting access to trinkets that boosted damage significantly.

Armor caps off heavily after a point, and none of the new sets were giving enough of a bonus to raise the damage reduction by any significant amount.

The only real way to deal with damage ability-wise is through mitigation (aka healing). There are few if any abilities that can prevent or redirect damage in WoW and most of those are self targeted only.

Not everyone agreed with this, but I agreed firmly with what he was saying. Based on my own observations of the game, damage output was scaling fine for PvE, but PvP wise, it was getting out of hand. The new addition of resilience as a stat on items seems to confirm that the developers at Blizzard agreed as well.

What does resilience do? Well, here’s a blue post from forum CM Eyonix:

Resilience Rating: 39.4 rating grants 1% less chance of being struck by any type of critical strike, and 2% less damage taken from critical strikes.

The beauty of this solution by Blizzard is that it allows for item upgrades to be meaningful, without destroying the crit ability of players which are DPS classes. Furthermore, its only really important for PvP. While I’m sure it has its uses in PvE, health is God as far as it comes to PvP. Good PvPers realized a long time ago that a dead character produces no damage, and thus, staying alive was in many respects, more important then eking out that extra 100 damage. Resilience helps players stay alive in a meaningful way.

The other nice thing about this solution is that Blizzard doesn’t have to go about changing the abilities of classes drastically to incorporate damage prevention and redirection abilities as some players were arguing for. I don’t want to imagine the kind of headache that this would have created, not to mention the issues from a PvE standpoint.

The result of this is that WoW is now in a sense, splitting. Back in the day, PvP was not something that many people engaged in, or did seriously. With Blizzard’s new focus on creating a quality PvP experience, especially in the form of the upcoming Arena Tournament, a second viable world of play has emerged that is gaining a rabid focus that equals those of the PvE school. While this PvP community has always existed, Blizzard is in my opinion, trying to legitimize it, capitalizing on it in a fashion that few online RPGs attempt to do and succeed at. The only ones that really come to mind are DAoC and Guild Wars.

In any case, my only wish is that there was some way to watch arena matches. I doubt I will have time to ever compete seriously with the top players.