Upcoming changes to pvp in Mop - regarding PvE and PvP

I feel like I should take some time to better relay the development team's intentions when it comes to how PvP stats will work in Mists.

There are two important changes to PvP itemization coming:

1. We're splitting Resilience into an offensive and defensive component.
2. All players will have at least 30% damage reduction versus other players.

If you want to do more damage to other players in Mists, you have two options. You can get better PvE gear with more offensive stats, or you can get better PvP gear with slightly smaller offensive stats built in(because PvP gear is lower item level), but which will also give you more damage against players specifically. In today's game, stacking PvE gear is really the only way to do more damage to other players in PvP since Resilience only supplies a defensive bonus. These are completely made up numbers, but imagine PvE gear is 100% effective in PvE and 75% effective in PvP. PvP gear is 50% effective in PvE, but 100% effective in PvP -- despite its lower item level, it wins out over PvE gear when used for its intended purpose.

Here are some examples:

Ders the rogue: wears PvE gear.
Jillian the hunter: wears PvP gear.
In Cataclysm PvE, Ders does much better damage than Jillian in PvE, because her PvP gear “wastes” stat budget on Resilience.
In Cataclysm PvP, Ders does better damage than Jillian for the same reason. However, when Jillian hits Ders, he doesn’t mitigate her damage at all. The result is high burst damage on both sides.
In Mists PvE, Ders still does better damage than Jillian, because his higher ilevel PvE gear has more offensive stats. The difference is smaller however because Jillian’s PvP stats aren't part of the item budget.

The item level difference is the main distinction.

In Mists PvP, they both do about the same amount of raw damage to each other, with a slight edge for Jillian. Her power stat offsets Ders's PvE stats. Jillian takes less damage because of her PvP Defense (let’s say it’s 50% damage reduction), but Ders still has 30% damage reduction innately, so he doesn’t blow up either. Again the difference is smaller. If Ders wants to get serious about PvP, he’s eventually going to want PvP gear, and Jillian will want more PvE gear to do PvE.

Another way to think about it is that we are pushing PvP and PvE gear closer together with two changes: A player in PvE gear always has some base PvP defense (it's like a little PvP gear for free). A player in PvP gear can do more damage and healing than today in PvP because of the new Power stat (it's like a little PvE gear for free).

I will be interested to see how this plays out. Personally I see classes that can dot multiple targets benefiting the most.

The fact that the base dmg mitigation in pvp is going to be 30% coupled with the fact that resilience scaling is totally retarded in 4.3 vs the damage (i.e. they have no fucking clue currently) makes me believe that heroic raid geared players still gonna have an edge. It's a concept I really like, but it's all gonna depend what the sweet spot cap for resilience is going to be in myst. Currently once you have 42% dmg reduction it's really hard to trade off offensive stats for more resilience, as each extra point in resilience doesn't add the same amount of resilience like it does up until 40%.

I see 3 main problems in pvp nowadays (apart from mechanics/control),
- resilience scales really poor with gear vs damage done (from 4.0 to 4.3 you gained what, like 10% extra dmg reduction?)
- health pools scale really poor with gear vs damage done (20k extra health or something since 4.0)
- (heroic) pve gear is superior to pvp gear, once you have a base amount of resilience

They only talk about the difference between pvp & pve gear. But even with the model they suggest, the next vial, pve set bonus or legendary is gonna outdo any base dmg mitigation formulas they use. And I really doubt that the next heroic madness 2H is going to have an equivalent for pvp.

To me the solution is much more simple:

- add a tag to each piece of pve gear, and as soon as you step into arena or a bg, the stats get halved (or -30% whatever number)
- as soon as you step into arena or a bg, you get a flat x% zone wide HP buff (i.e. currently players should have way over 200k health pools in pvp in my book)

I'm totally fine with pvp gear being somewhat viable in pve (e.i. the same stats like what you would get from heroic dungeons now).

TLDR

They only fix less than half of the problem in my opinion.

Less stam on PvE gear imo. Getting sick of the glass cannons actually being able to sustain massive hits and dishing out insane dmg. My brother on his Arcane mage never takes resilience into BGs, he has leg staff and full heroic raiding gear, he just dominates and it's as simple as arcane blast arcane blast, next target, repeat.