The Introduction of 'Resilience' is one Blizzard's Greatest Regrets (according to an interview I can't quite link right now)

I was a HUGE fan of PvP in WoW... up until the introduction of 'Resilience', a PvP-specific attribute which pretty much broke items into two types, PvP and PvE gear. Blizzard's take on PvP attributes lowers incoming damage by reducing overall critical hit chance and the critical damage multiplier, amongst other things - and so increasing 'time to kill' to a place where longterm strategy and exectution of tactics is more important than equipment stats. A commendable goal, but splitting itemization into PvE and PvP also seperated character progression from each other and made progressing in either PvP or PvE roughly half as rewarding than before the introduction of a PvP-specific attribute.

Why SWTOR too has a PvP-specific attribute I simply cannot understand. Bioware is rightfully willing to hand out great gear for playing PvP, more easily obtainable and even better looking than basic PvE epics. Ontop of it, there's the PvP-specific attribute - 'Expertise'. It increases damage dealt against players and reduces incoming damage from other players. This achieves the same thing as Blizzard does with 'Resilience' - in the long run, you'll have to have PvP specific gear to PvP and your hard earned PvE gear will never be truely competitive. Hell - stats are normalized in Warzones (instanced matched PvP like WoW Battlegrounds), so that lvl 10 players can compete with lvl 50 players - except for expertise, which turns the whole concept of normalized PvP into a farce.

My advice to all MMO gamedesigners. Listen to Blizzard. When they say 'the introduction of Resilience is our greatest regret and here's why...'. LISTEN - and don't commit the same mistake. Just hand out competitive gear from both PvP and PvE play. So that no matter what I play, I'll always progress. I'm not doing either PvP or PvE or both. I'm simply playing SW:TOR or WoW or whatever and I always progress. I earn competitive itemization so I can enjoy all content, if I wish to do so. If I PvP for months, I can just go and raid with that gear no-problem. And if I'm raiding, I can take my gear to a warzone and be competitive rather than crippled.

tl;dr - I hate PvP-specific attributes. They break any MMO into PvE and PvP and destroy cohesion. A big design NO-GO!

I'd be curious to see the interview you're referring to, a casual Google search yielded nothing. Without the context surrounding a quotation like that it's a bit hard for me to parse their reasoning.

I have no vested interest in this issue currently, as odd latency quirks and my ancient rig have caused me to eschew any PVP in TOR. That said, I completely understand the reasoning behind this type of segregation of gear.

Having gear that is interchangeable between PvP and Raiding has the dangerous side-effect of making the two modes interchangeable within the minds of players. Once that happens, you have to be incredibly careful about how easy either type of gear is to obtain. How many hours/tokens worth of PvP do you require for one piece of Heroic-level gear when Heroics can easily be cranked out once you hit 50? Do you give out end-game Raid Boss level gear for PvP as well? If yes, how do you balance it?

A well organized guild can take down an entire raid dungeon in one or two evenings. During this time, on average, a player can expect to receive one or two piece of loot. Afterwards they are locked out for the entire week. Do you make it so that an entire week of PvPing is required in order to obtain a single piece of equivalent gear? How do you reconcile the difference in time investment? Do you require the same 6-10 hours of play time a player can expect to invest in raiding for a single piece of PvP gear? Then you can easily be earning 4-7 pieces of PvP gear a week as opposed to the 1-2 pieces or raid gear you are limited to each week due to lockouts, so why raid? Do you put a hard cap on PvP commendations earned per week to keep the two modes in pace? Then you are actively punishing players for wanting to invest their time in PvP. Do you make allow raid gear to be better than PvP gear? Then you are forcing PvP'ers to raid in order to stay competitive.

Maybe there's a way to balance this all out, but it's such a nightmare scenario that I can completely understand why Bioware would rather just slap Expertise on their PvP gear and call it a day. It may not be the most elegant solution but it keeps things more or less fair for everyone involved. If you PvP a bunch you'll be optimally geared PvP and if you PvE a bunch you'll be optimally geared for PvE.

I lived in an era where hardcore raiders decked out in crazy purps would come in and trash my skilled group of PvP'ers because they simply had better gear than the best PvP stuff we could obtain at the time. I lived in an era where my guildies were forced to grind through PvP for hours every week to give my guild a significant boost come raid-time. Then Resilience happened and I never had to worry about any of that shit again.

I understand your frustration, but Expertise/Resilience is the lesser of two evils. Like I said, I'd love to get more context about why someone at Blizzard declared Resilience as their biggest regret because I have no idea what they could be thinking of as a more appealing alternative.

I hate 'em. Too much of a snowball effect--people that PvP nonstop, regardless of skill level, eventually get to a point where a decent players with no PvP gear have no chance at all. It just feels...dirty.

But, then again, I've always thought the PvP in MMOs was pretty terrible. Running tight circles around people and pressing the same sequence of buttons/macros over and over? Yeah, woo, fun.

I was kind of into PVP in wow but I haven’t touched PVP in SWTOR yet as I always get side tracked doing quests or crafting but as to the attributes for PVP? I’m guessing they do this so PVP has less of an impact to PVE and class balance?.

@Seppli: this is simply the easiest solution to the way characters scale in a wow clone MMO environment and having PvP within that system. IMO these systems were never really meant to have deep, competitive, balanced PvP, but they've evolved. These are loot treadmill games at their core, and keeping players playing is paramount to the game's success.

On one end of the scale you have the PvE crowd. These people must see steady increases in DPS, HP and survivability, and HPS throughput, and boss monsters scale similarly. This is an easier balance to strike as you can take the average DPS of a group and boil that into the encounter length you want, and determine an appropriate HPS throughput requirement for tanks and aoe healing etc.

On the other end of the scale you *must* have PvP that allows player skill to be something of a factor, especially when it comes to arena style small group PvP. This means you really cannot have the vanilla wow model of ZHC/AP/PoM/Pyro mages that can one shot someone every 5 minutes. And the arena 1.0 pro strat of having a caster shaman insta gib an opposing team member had to be eliminated. You also need PvP to feel relatively balanced all the way up the ladder, because you don't want people burning out from losing all the time if you can help it.

As it turns out from like... 8 years of trial and error, these two things are nearly impossible to get exactly right even balancing in isolation by having separate groups of gear. When you throw them into the pot together it becomes an order of magnitude harder to balance correctly. The goal of PvP stats is obviously to allow gear progression which is decently balanced on both sides of the game. Even in WoW they still fuck it up sometimes and people are forced to PvP for the best PvE gear, or vise versa, and people really really hate that. Having gear that is balanced for both, while impossible, still would not work because in an MMO a majority of the players will take the path of least resistance, and it would kill whichever side it is seen as "harder" to obtain gear from.

There is no right answer here, but having a separate PvP stat allows more gear, and a bit more separation of playstyles within the system. IMO pvp specific stats allow for better PvP balance(if hopefully done correctly) and PvE progression scaling, so its the "better" of two wrong answers.

@Renahzor: @StarvingGamer:

The first decision designers have to make is whether to allow one side (namely the endgame PvE side) to have a slight advantage over pure PvPers or not. For me, the key motivation for endgame PvE raiding during the vanilla days of WoW was to beat endgame bosses ---> get great gear ---> and take that advantage onto the Battlegrounds ---> in turn get even more great gear = a cicle of awesome!

Pure PvPers rightfully were pissed at how overpowered PvE players eventually became, but that's mostly because WoW's PvP rewards system wasn't built to be competitive with PvE itemization from the get-go. It was incredibly hard (time consuming) to gain access to the best gear and it was less powerful than high end PvE gear after a couple of PvE content upgrades. Blizzard simply didn't think ahead.

There's plenty of elegant solutions to keep PvE and PvP itemization in balance. I can think of plenty such mechanics no problem. Daily and weekly tresholds/cooldown timers, tiered progression, requiring earlier tiers of gear to obtain the next, generally scaling survivabilty much more than DPS, an aribitrary rank system regulating itemization - generally making sure it's a cohesive tiered progression with no leaps and shortcuts, regardless of what players do - the goal is to make it 'a singular progression path instead of breaking it in two'. The options to make it so are nearly endless.

The addition of 'Resilience' was 'patch design', not 'elegant design'. It is telling that literally everybody just carbon copied Blizzard's patchwork instead of coming up with something elegant themselves. It's kinda like spawn mechanics in FPS games. If you think about it, they're all broken something awful - yet the every single developer is too bloody lazy to even attempt a more elegant solution. Why? I just cannot understand.

It's lazy and I'm eager to see somebody doing something more elegant than segregating PvE from PvP gear/itemization.

@Seppli:

The issue is if you have perfect balance between gear, then PvE players who also PvP will have the edge in gear progression, making them stronger in PvP than the people who don't raid. In addition if people want to keep up with the real raiding bleeding edge, they would be forced to PvP for the additional gear, which is NOT a solution. If you're arguing that this crossover shouldn't happen and people should play what they enjoy most, that is exactly the outcome resilience is trying to achieve (albeit without 100% success). The split should be that gear you receive while raiding is best for raiding, and the gear from PvPing is best for PvP. The only people I really see complain about this are the ones who want their gear to carry them in the other aspect of gameplay. It *is* telling that rift and TOR have copied resilience almost whole cloth, its a decent solution to the overall problem of needing PvP and PvE progression in a wow clone MMO.

Personally I hated WoW PvP. I despised the fact that I needed to play 10 arena games a week for 3-4 weeks to get a best in slot for my content level weapon to raid with in order to be competitive in DPS. Its one of the main reasons I haven't gone back. I do not want to PvP for gear that is better/less effort to attain than raid level gear, but I have to if I want to see more content.

EVE online has exactly the system you are looking for. Items picked up in PvE can be incredibly powerful in PvP, and extremely expensive to lose. While some ships and modules are better for PvP use than others, there is no stat that dictates these specific items as PvP items. Then again, that game is designed completely differently from a wow clone. Until these games stop selling so many copies and holding well beyond break even subscription numbers, you can likely expect more of the same.

@Renahzor:

The solution is as elegant as it is simple. Make sure that gear is competitive regardless of itemization venue and enforce a tiered progression, which prevents both hardcore PvE and PvP players and those who do both to gamebreakingly outpace each other. All it takes is clever mechanics and some thinking and planning ahead. Like an arbitrary ranking system with a weekly capped progression as a requirement to wear higher tier gear (to name one concept).

I'm very much in favor of PvE gear having a slight emphasis on performance (damage/heal output) and PvP gear being skewed more towards surviviablity (larger HP pools). With that core design it becomes a matter of smart scaling. As long as survivability slightly outscales performance, PvP will come down to execution rather than stats - just as it should be. And both venues of itemization are fully rewarding - every gear upgarde is an upgrade for both PvE and PvP. Just as it should be.

Allowing the elite few to gain an edge is simply part of the MMORPG deal and it has to be. To be quite honest - the e-Sports angle is the worst thing that happend to MMO gaming. MMORPGs are about character progression and definitely not about 'even playingfield competition'. Itemization should not be designed to be fair, but to be fun. Keeping players hooked on chasing that ultimate powerfantasy and prevent them from ever quite reaching it - by mechanical design, and if necessary with arbitrary checks and balances. No need to break the game in half and make itemization of either venue half as rewarding and fun in consequence.

'Not Casuals' will always gain an edge over 'Casuals', so it's really only the 'PvE vs PvP Hardcore', respectively those who just play a lot altogether. It just ain't that hard to keep it fun and competive for both. From the lack of trying, one could believe it's impossible. It simply isn't.

The only game I know of that got PvP setups right was Guild Wars. The gear was whatever the gear was, and even then, the gear was randomized when it DID drop. Just because you got a particular item from killing a dungeon mob, that doesn't mean it had the exact same stats as someone else who killed the same mob and got the same piece of gear. You had to find the "perfect" version of that gear. What it really came down to what good team comps and "elite skills", which you captured off of mobs in the PvE. THAT is where other MMOs seem to fail in the PvP: make it about the skills that players have, not necessarily about the gear.

One thing that I give The Old Republic credit for on their PvP is giving tanks a real role to play in there, namely thanks to being able to have a use for taunts in PvP (they reduce the damage dealt by the targets by 30% for the duration of the taunt). That is a HUGE thing.

So far, what I've seen of people I know playing the PvP (I haven't done it myself yet) has been pretty cool. Huttball seems like a fun time, even if you are a lowbie going in.

Nonetheless, it's one of the few times in an MMO where the PvP isn't drawing my focus...at least, not yet. The PvE content in the game is so damn good that I can't ignore it like I did with WoW. I feel like I'm a part of this world, and going into the PvP makes me fear that I'll make everything turn into a game rather than an experience of immersion.

With all that said, I think it's still too early to see how well or how bad Expertise works out of the PvP in The Old Republic. It needs some more time to grow and evolve. They could easily right Blizzard's wrong on this if they give it the attention necessary while not tearing apart the PvE aspect of the game.

@jakob187 said:

The only game I know of that got PvP setups right was Guild Wars. The gear was whatever the gear was, and even then, the gear was randomized when it DID drop. Just because you got a particular item from killing a dungeon mob, that doesn't mean it had the exact same stats as someone else who killed the same mob and got the same piece of gear. You had to find the "perfect" version of that gear. What it really came down to what good team comps and "elite skills", which you captured off of mobs in the PvE. THAT is where other MMOs seem to fail in the PvP: make it about the skills that players have, not necessarily about the gear.

^Quoted for truth.

I loved in Guild Wars that you could make a level cap PvP toon out of the gate. No PvE gear to grind. You have to PvE a bit for some elite skills, but you can also buy those. Playing PvE didn't hamstring your fun in PvP whatsoever. You just had to learn the format you wanted to play.

I just hit level 49 with my Imp Agent and decided not to PvP til I saw my whole story line. I am kind of leery of the whole "locked" level 50 gear that you can't mod and i hear the PvP gear looks atrocious. Fortunately for me, I never feel locked into an MMO. I think I will play a few of the classes to level cap to see their stories and then I may move onto other games. Including GW2 when it comes out. How can I not want to play an MMO that has drop in PvP with a menu that is setup like an FPS PvP menu for drop in play and no sub ever? Sounds to good to be true but it isn't. GW2 is hitting all the right notes with me.

@Seppli said:

@Renahzor:

Personally, I'm very much in favor of PvE gear having an emphasis on performance (damage/heal output) and PvP gear on surviviablity (HP pools) - at this point it becomes a matter of smart scaling.

You just described, in exact words, what resilience and wow pvp gear does. It allows designers to add survivability in PvP without wrecking HPS, TPS, and raid mechanics in PvE. My point is, balancing character stats in a raid environment is not only very different than PvP balance, it is likely done by an entirely different team. Resilience as a stat gives them the leeway of adjusting one side of the game without completely revamping the other. You're speaking in platitudes about something that is actually incredibly difficult to achieve when you really start to dig into base mechanics. Resilience exists because of the need to separate the two halves of the game in some meaningful way, and it solves more issues than it creates. The reason people continue to use it is not laziness, but rather the fact that it works to solve a specific problem that this specific style of game has in regards to the way PvP interacts with PvE.

As to your first point, much of the game revolves around hardcore progression and the drive to be better. If you arbitrarily cap a PvE guild's progress in a zone because of a "gear weekly xp" bar, it actually hurts the drive to get better. I'll run my guild as far as I can up the weekly xp bar then go fuck around once the raid gets too hard and farm some gear xp in PvP to fill out the week. Each system having a different reward and a separate gear grind actually keeps people playing longer imo, which is really all these games are, a gear treadmill that keeps you wanting just one more month.

I generally view people who do not like PvP stats are one type of person. The type of person that likes to raid, get gear, and one shot people. The type that thinks because they raided, they should automatically be at an advantage over those that don't. There are people out there that do not like to PVE. It is a hallmark of MMOs that the best gear available will always from from PvE. Not for every slot maybe, but for quite a bit of them. It WoW for instance, trinkets from PvE dwarfed what was available for PvP, and anyone that was in a guild that was clearing the bosses they dropped from had an advantage. At level 60 when there was no resilience, I raided for one reason. Get gear to PvP with. Get a good weapon so my warrior could run around with a pocket healer and dominate a BG. When BC came along, you are right that it separated the game in to two sections, but it was a welcome separation in my eyes. I didn't really enjoy PvE too much. I liked getting friends together and running Warsong. WIth the introduction of resilience, I was no longer required to raid 4 nights a week to get a weapon. I could do arenas with a friend, or I could solo grind BGs just killing people.

So why should someone that spends no time getting the gear designed for PvP be on equal footing with the people that spend all their time PvPing? If the PvP gear is better than PvE gear in swtor(Haven't gotten to 50 or looked at any max level gear), it isn't a problem with a stat that increases up time in PvP; it is a problem with the way Bioware decided to itemize their PvE gear. In WoW, if you tried to raid in PvP gear, you wouldn't be able to even come close to the same DPS or Healing as someone in full PvE gear.

The problem isn't a PvP stat. The problem will be is the way the gear's stats are allocated.

@Renahzor:

Not at all. Resilience reduces effectiveness of PvE gear by lowering everybody's crit rate and crit modifiers and whatnot against them. PvE gear becomes increasingly unviable in PvP to the point of simply being useless. It's as strict a gear segregation as it gets.The same basic idea without a PvP-specific attribute though? Like it was in Vanilla WoW? Where PvP gear just had a bit more HP on it and pretty damn neat stats? When you'd be able to go endgame raid with your Rank 14 gear, because it simply was 'that good'? That's what I'm talking of.

Regardless of itemization venue, your character progresses and becomes more viable in PvE, as well as PvP. You're talking the complete opposite. And it doesn't need to be a PvP-specific attribute. What you call platitudes, I call an unspecified number of valid designs developers should come up with. Just because you can't imagine simple and elegant solutions to the problem of 'competitive PvP balance versus meaningful PvE character progression', doesn't mean there aren't tonnes of them.

The simplest and most elegant one being to give out good gear for PvP play. Competitive in comparison to PvE gear and valid as PvE gear - but a tad bit less 'performant' and maybe a bit less spectacular looking. There's progression tiers for PvE gear, hence those progression tiers have to be matched by PvP progression both in quality and pacing. There's 1001 mechanical ways to achieve that.

Explain where-in the problem is with such a scheme? Yeah, maintaining/producing competitive/meaningful and interchangable itemization from both PvE and PvP would essentially double the workload for the devs. As a player, that's 100 times more attractive than breaking the game in half - essentially taking away half the value of every item reward. Making character progression half as meaningful and half as rewarding than otherwise. It's simply too high a price to achieve somethign that's contradictory to the very genre of MMORPGs.

Now we PvE to PvE to PvE. Or we PvP to PvP to PvP. Or both - which is like playing two completely seperate games, and when they touch, it's pretty much broken. Ever went out questing with 'best of best' PvE gear and got ganked by players with PvP gear? Yeah - you won't make a dent in them. Way back when, before all the eSports nonesense? We PvE to PvP to PvE to PvP ad infinitum... an endlessly more motivating experience. And when I had good gear, I had good gear. There was no distinction between PvE and PvP gear. And it made so much more sense for a MMORPG. Infinitely so.

Thats what you get with a copy-paste warts and all approach

@Seppli said:

@Renahzor: The simplest and most elegant one being to give out good gear for PvP play. Competitive in comparison to PvE gear and valid as PvE gear - but a tad bit less 'performant' and maybe a bit less spectacular looking. There's progression tiers for PvE gear, hence those progression tiers have to be matched by PvP progression.

1. Hardcore PvErs hate when people who don't PvE get gear that is as good as theirs for PvEing without actually doing it. I made a post a long time ago on the WoW Raid forums. I was mostly trolling, but I was saying that I should be able to buy tier 6, the highest at the time, with my arena points. I was in gladiator range on all my teams, and I was sitting at the point cap with every set of gear I could get. The raiders, who could already buy PvP gear with their badges, shot the idea down so hard the thread was like 20 pages long of people telling me how stupid I was.
2. You are saying that PvP gear shouldn't be as good as PvE gear. Why? What does that do except force people who want to be at the top of the PvP game to do PvE when they may not want to? Not everyone likes to raid, or even if they do like to raid, not everyone wants to do it enough to get a full set of gear. Getting PvP gear in these games can be done solo and at your own pace. Raiding requires at least 7 other people in Swtor.

If someone wants to devote all their time to PvPing, why shouldn't they have an edge over someone that doesn't PvP at all? Should a person that clears the highest raid, but has never set foot in a battleground be allowed to perform better in PvP because they decided they wanted to raid instead of PvP?

@Cataphract1014:

I'm simply saying the 'PvP Attribute' is an ugly solution. An unecessary one.I don't disagree with you. I believe doing PvP only should reward great gear eventually. Competitive to PvE gear and viable as PvE gear too. Why shouldn't PvPers get great gear? All it takes is mechanics to pace and tier the PvP itemization to fall in line with PvE progression.

Blizzard kept putting better and better PvE-reward gear into the game, whilst it simply didn't have any plans for doing so for PvP. Their solution to the resulting gamebreaking PvP imbalance? Instead of giving PvPers great gear as a reward for PvP play, they gave PvPers gear which expressively cripples PvE gear via a newly introduced 'PvP attribute' to the point of being completely useless.

Once the developers recognized the problem, they simply could have planned ahead. Have a production plan to get that gear ready and have all the mechanical checks and balances in place to evenly pace the progress of itemization of both venues. It's not rocketsience.

If you are into the high end PvP scene in MMO's (if there is such a thing) then you will learn to love Resilience, it is not a perfect system by any means but it works. There is nothing more annoying then losing an Arena match in wow because some guy randomly got some overpowered PvE trinket that has a proc that crits for 60k damage, and not because he was better then you or knew how to play his class better.

@Seppli: I actually like the idea of resilience more than it just separates the to paths of the game. I liked PvP in classic, but I feel that it could quickly be rather frustrating regardless of gear. If you have the best possible PvP gear but can still be one shot by someone, I don't think that is fun. At least with resilience, you have something to climb towards to be alive longer. You know that at the end of the tunnel, you will be able to stay alive for more that 2 seconds if a mage targets you. Right before BC came out I did some BGs with a friend in the best PvE gear available. He said, "I'll go get the flag." He walked up and crit frostbolt someone for 4500. Basically one shoting them. How do you get around that with damage scaling in PvE without a stat to lower damage in PvP? Getting one shot isn't fun, and sure it can be fun to do to someone, but if it was all that happened in PvE there wouldn't be any new people that were willing to deal with it.

I played Rift for a few months. When I got to level 50, I had 5000HP. I did some battleground and I was continuously oneshot over and over. Literally getting crit for more HP than I had. It was not fun at all. If a company is going to continuously release expansions that raise the level cap and damage done, they need something to make PvP more than who gets the first shot off. MMOs aren't about twitch skills like aiming. It is about using the right abilities at the right time. I don't think the only right time should be when you first see a person and who is faster to hit a button.

To me, Burning Crusader was the pinnacle of PvP in WoW. It was when I had the most fun, and when I felt it was the most active. Is there a way to make PvP more balanced for everyone and keep both sides happy? Maybe. But to me, resilience is fine. I would rather have something than nothing.

@Prodstep said:

If you are into the high end PvP scene in MMO's (if there is such a thing) then you will learn to love Resilience, it is not a perfect system by any means but it works. There is nothing more annoying then losing an Arena match in wow because some guy randomly got some overpowered PvE trinket that has a proc that crits for 60k damage, and not because he was better then you or knew how to play his class better.

But it does not. In the open world, where PvE and PvP meets. In the actual 'Massive Online World', the guy wearing PvE gear is the gimp with no chance of survival. If all you do is sitting in captial cities queuing for matched instanced PvP, you'd be better off playing a game like Battlefield or Call of Duty in the first place. But I guess that's just me.

@Cataphract1014:

Simply because it's an MMORPG, which is about character progression first and foremost. And not about competitive balance. Because the both are diametral opposites. I agree that a hardcore PvP player deserves great gear and should have an edge over both casual PvE and PvP players. I say PvP gear should have 20% HP over same tier PvE gear, whilst the PvE gear should have 10% more damage and visually reflect the venue it was obtained with. Standardized and militaristic for PvP gear. Extravagant and 'artifacty' for PvE gear.

I'll never understand why 'pure PvP' players play MMORPGs in the first place. Every FPS, racing game, fighter - whatever really - is better suited for competition. RPGs are to a large part coaching games. Coaching a character to be better than others, be it NPCs or other Player Characters. Essentially it's the players job to try and break the game in favor of his character.

@Cataphract1014:

Getting one-shot isn't a necessarily a matter of 'resilience'/''PvP attribute', it's a matter of balance. Having a PvP attribute is just one possible solution to deal with increasingly dropping survivability due to increasing itemization. Another solution? Smarter scaling of survivabilty vs output performance.

When did blizzard say that adding resil was a mistake? I've played wow since 60 so I remember what the game was like before resil and I remember that the ONLY reason I ever wanted to raid was to obtain gear to be competitive in PvP. I remember raiding MC and BWL for nightslayer/Bloodfang and then dominating everybody. It felt great to finally be on the other end of things with the advantage in my favor but that isn't great way to properly design a game with pvp and pve. You have to award gear for both parts of the game individually and furthermore, they should be comparable in overall quality. There shouldn't be any reason why a pvp set is better in pve than a pve set and vice versa. The problem is that PvE players don't want PvPers to be competitive in pve with pvp gear on. THAT'S why blizzard implemented resilience. Sure, resilience slows the pvp game down which is a good thing. Nobody enjoyed me 2 shotting them on my rogue back in vanilla WoW. But it comes down to keeping it fair for both pvp and pve players. Why should somebody who got the best gear in the game from killing NPC bosses have a huge advantage over me in pvp? Why should I have a huge advantage in performance in pve from attaining the best pvp gear in the game? Neither situation makes any sense. Also, you can't just make lesser gear with no "pvp stat" rewarded from pvp. Nobody is going to want the second best hand me downs. They want the best in slot epic pieces to stay competitive in their respected areas.

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to take a break from using the terms "pve" and "pvp" for a while.

@Trilogy: I like you.

@Trilogy:

The sense lies within my outlandish notion of the MMORPG being designed cohesively - it being ONE game, not two. The itemization segregation makes no sense to a player who plays the 'entire' game and doesn't just cherry pick. Why should a top equipped raider be a vicitim to every random PvP gear wearing nob in the open gameworld? There has to be a more elegant solution and there certainly is. Unifying MMORPGs again into a singular cohesive experience, rather than collage of stuff that doesn't go together anymore. Just give everybody good competitive gear regardless of the venue.

@Seppli said:

@Trilogy:

The sense lies within my outlandish notion of the MMORPG being designed cohesively - it being ONE game, not two. The itemization segregation makes no sense to a player who plays the 'entire' game and doesn't just cherry pick. Why should a top equipped raider be a vicitim to every random PvP gear wearing nob in the open gameworld? There has to be a more elegant solution and there certainly is. Unifying MMORPGs again into a singular cohesive experience, rather than collage of stuff that doesn't go together anymore. Just give everybody good competitive gear regardless of the venue.

It's a nice thought but its incredibly difficult to design an MMO as a whole. Here's an example that isn't related to gear but you'll understand what I mean. Somewhat recently in WoW, the warrior ability "colossus smash" was nerfed for pvp because it was far too powerful. Colossus smash was a short cooldown ability that reduced the armor of the target by 100%. It was perfectly balanced in a pve enviorment but out of control in a pvp one. Warriors were making mince meat of wimpy cloth armor wearers and bulky plate armor wearers alike. Blizzard's solution was to keep colossus smash at 100% armor reduction in pve and bring it down to 50% against other players. It was an overall good change but not an optimal one. It added in complexity to the ability that blizzard tends to shy away from in lieu of cohesive design. That same sort of cohesive design that you're asking for. But it's not that simple as you can see from my example. The developer has to cater to both sides equally without stepping on the toes of the other side in the process. In other words, I don't envy mmo designers.

As to your other point...

Why should a top equipped raider be a vicitim to every random PvP gear wearing nob in the open gameworld?

Because the top equipped raider earned his gear in a raiding environment. He didn't earn it by displaying his skills against other players. He earned it by displaying his skills of teamwork and strategy against the toughest bosses in the game. It's the same reason why the best pvpers in the world shouldn't be able to walk into a raid and do more dps than you do in your top end raid gear. In WoW, both sides excel in their respective fields with the gear that fits the situation the best. Of course there are situations where somebody who raids 5 nights a week in the top guild on the server brings his legendary weapon mixed with his pvp gear into a pvp enviorment and has a pretty large advantage over the people that don't raid. Can you guess how the non raiding pvpers feel about that advantage? They don't like it. Should the developer ban that legendary (orange) weapon in competitive pvp environments? It would bring more balance but is that even fair to the person that obtained that hard to get legendary? There's a lot of icky situations like that when it comes to mmo design. It's why MMO's will never be truly balanced as long as they feature pvp and pve and desire to make each part of the game enjoyable as possible for as many people as possible.

I agree with you that MMO's should be more cohesive and elegant. It's just not as easy as you imagine it to be. I suppose that's been my point this whole time.

@Trilogy:

Sure - I understand your points about how it's difficult to balance PvE and PvP. Skills doing different things in PvE and PvP in order to balance things I'm completely okay with. Like how a tank's taunt ability works in SW:TOR's or Warhammer Online's PvP by reducing damage dealt to everyone else but the tank. It's elegant design.

I truely believe it's as easy as keeping a constant balance of itemization rewards from both PvE and PvP at all times. Whenever a new batch of PvE content and rewards gets added to a game, the same has to happen for PvP. Keeping both venues of itemization in balance, in competitiveness and attractiveness for progress. The trick is pacing progress without making players feel limited in their obsessions.

You and Cataphract speak from the perspective of players who only want to PvP. I like both raiding and PvP and from the days of Vanilla WoW, I know how much I love to grab some loot in a raid and take it to the Battleground, as well as getting gear from PvP and bringing that advantage into a raid. If the game is designed with cohesive itemization, all of the game opens up as you play and progress. That's much more rewarding than raiding for raiding's sake and engaging in PvP for PvP's sake.

The segregation did come as a result of the very vocal demand of the PvP-centric player who disliked getting the short end of the stick by the elite few raiders all the time, which happend simply because designers never were willing to match PvE itemization with PvP progression outright. The PvP attribute is a patchwork fix to that problem.

All that has to change is the designer's willingness to match itemization from PvP with PvE. Because playing a cohesive MMORPG is just about twice as rewarding than what we've got now.

I would like to see pvp and pve gear be interchangeable to be honest there is no more skill involved in pvp as needed in pve its just who can put in the most time I am very unhappy at the inclusion of a pvp only stat.

Expertise is a necessary evil. Without a stat to seperate pvp and pve gear you will always get either crowd complaining about having to do the other thing to gain the best gear. While you could seperate it by giving pve sets more power and accuracy while giving pvp more crit and surge (making pve sets better for sustained damage and pvp sets better for bursts) it would lead to very restrictive spec designs. Every class would have to have a very specific PvE and PvP spec choice as things like a crit-based spec would never ever work for PvE, and dot specs would be completely useless for PvP. Having this very archaic stat just allows the game to be way more adaptive when it comes to allowing people to play either PvE or PvP. The only thing you need to do to transform from PvE to PvP is to change your gear.
 
It's just impossible to create that perfect balance where neither side would want to do the other to get better geared. Even if the gear is exactly the same there would still be things like accessability to factor in.

@Ares42 said:

Expertise is a necessary evil. Without a stat to seperate pvp and pve gear you will always get either crowd complaining about having to do the other thing to gain the best gear. While you could seperate it by giving pve sets more power and accuracy while giving pvp more crit and surge (making pve sets better for sustained damage and pvp sets better for bursts) it would lead to very restrictive spec designs. Every class would have to have a very specific PvE and PvP spec choice as things like a crit-based spec would never ever work for PvE, and dot specs would be completely useless for PvP. Having this very archaic stat just allows the game to be way more adaptive when it comes to allowing people to play either PvE or PvP. The only thing you need to do to transform from PvE to PvP is to change your gear. It's just impossible to create that perfect balance where neither side would want to do the other to get better geared. Even if the gear is exactly the same there would still be things like accessability to factor in.

Impossible is a word that's not in my vocabulary. What about having every single 'loot drop' found in PvE instances mirrored as an available PvP reward and just have smart mechanics in place to pace progress. Like having an item rating and tier attached to every item and you'll need to pass a certain 'gear score' treshold to equip items of the next higher tier. 'Achievement Requirements' could be a beneficial pacing tool as well. Maybe attaching each a PvP and PvE achievement for every tier of every equipment slot and later tiers being tied to competitive PvP success (either PvE or PvP achievement will reward the license). Highly active players who PvE-Raid and play PvP will progress more quickly, but in the longrun that's the only downside to such a integrative system really, other than making PvE rewards a 'lil less special, but double as useful and fun than they are with a gear segregation.

A small price to pay for a return of cohesive itemization.

Special rewards for the highest elite of PvE and PvP could/should be purely cosmetic. Like unlocking optional visual glows/auras/nametagfonts/scaling charater models size (making them a head taller than regular folks)/special mounts (as per usual). Such things.

Impossible is a word that's not in my vocabulary. What about having every single 'loot drop' found in PvE instances mirrored as an available PvP reward and just have smart mechanics in place to pace progress. Like having an item rating and tier attached to every item and you'll need to pass a certain 'gear score' treshold to equip items of the next higher tier. 'Achievement Requirements' could be a beneficial pacing tool as well. Highly active players who PvE-Raid and play PvP will progress more quickly, but in the longrun that's the only downside to such a integrative system really, other than making PvE rewards a 'lil less special, but double as useful and fun than they are with a gear segregation.

A small price to pay for a return of cohesive itemization.

Special rewards for the highest elite of PvE and PvP could/should be purely cosmetic. Like unlocking optional visual glows/auras/nametagfonts/scaling charater models size (making them a head taller than regular folks)/special mounts (as per usual). Such things.

@Ares42 said:

@Seppli said:

Impossible is a word that's not in my vocabulary. What about having every single 'loot drop' found in PvE instances mirrored as an available PvP reward and just have smart mechanics in place to pace progress. Like having an item rating and tier attached to every item and you'll need to pass a certain 'gear score' treshold to equip items of the next higher tier. 'Achievement Requirements' could be a beneficial pacing tool as well. Highly active players who PvE-Raid and play PvP will progress more quickly, but in the longrun that's the only downside to such a integrative system really, other than making PvE rewards a 'lil less special, but double as useful and fun than they are with a gear segregation.

A small price to pay for a return of cohesive itemization.

Special rewards for the highest elite of PvE and PvP could/should be purely cosmetic. Like unlocking optional visual glows/auras/nametagfonts/scaling charater models size (making them a head taller than regular folks)/special mounts (as per usual). Such things.

Don't wanna be a negative nancy, but introducing a complex system like that will probably just incite even more complaining. And as you say yourself it would still lead to a situation where you'd gear quicker by doing both PvE and PvP leading to both camps complaining about having to do the other to maximize their gear potential.

Fuck the camps. Mending the break of PvE and PvP has to be the paramount goal. Non-exclusive and integral itemization is the way to a player's heart.

There's always gonna be complainers. Hell, there'd be people who'd complain if suddenly all women decide to freely give relations to anyone who gives them a dollar and asks politely. What the hell is wrong with you guys!

Casual players cannot match hardcore players progress in the short term, regardless of genre. As long as a casual player's progress isn't arbitrarily capped by overburdening social requirements, they'll eventually become competitive with those who strife to outpace the competition.

I thought Resilience was necessary, but it got worse and worse, Burning Crusade is my absolute favorite expansion because that's when Resilience was still young, and I thought those days was when WoW was balanced the most. But now it's way too gear heavy and skill doesn't matter nearly as much anymore. Can only hope they don't make Expertise incredibly important that it makes gear more important than skill.

@TehJedicake said:

I thought Resilience was necessary, but it got worse and worse, Burning Crusade is my absolute favorite expansion because that's when Resilience was still young, and I thought those days was when WoW was balanced the most. But now it's way too gear heavy and skill doesn't matter nearly as much anymore. Can only hope they don't make Expertise incredibly important that it makes gear more important than skill.

With a full gear of PvP items, you'll...

• deal around 12,5% more damage to players
• take around 12,5% less damage from players
• heal players engaged in PvP combat for 12,5% more
• ...and the gear is quite outstanding to begin with
• ...and there's the obligatory set-bonuses

Needless to say, unless you got the very best PvE gear, you'll be squished like a mosquito. I'm pretty much unkillable by people without decent PvP or outstanding PvE gear by now. At least it's more than good enough to be a great raiding starter kit and the best PvE gear is performant enough to be competitive. For hardcore players, it kinda works, even if it's not elegant. Casual players get thrown under the bus with this system, at least in the short term. I prefer the current situation over how WoW's Resilience works, because SW:TORs gear is viable for both endgame PvE and PvP, regardless if I got it from PvE or PvP. That's what I want, I'd just don't like PvP-specific attributes and what it does to the overall gameplay. I just don't think that PvP gear should make players PvP gods and bum fuck everybody who choses not to wear it.

I thought Resilience was necessary, but it got worse and worse, Burning Crusade is my absolute favorite expansion because that's when Resilience was still young, and I thought those days was when WoW was balanced the most. But now it's way too gear heavy and skill doesn't matter nearly as much anymore. Can only hope they don't make Expertise incredibly important that it makes gear more important than skill.

OK, this is probably going to make me sound like a real newbie (and the answer is probably really obvious to MMO vets) but hey, here goes.

Surely, if PVP gear has this added resilience/expertise (ability to reduce incoming damage and increase the damage you're putting out), then that can only be a good thing? Shouldn't it be awesome gear to have for PVE raids also? What's the catch that makes PVP gear non-viable for raiding and vice versa?

OK, this is probably going to make me sound like a real newbie (and the answer is probably really obvious to MMO vets) but hey, here goes.

Surely, if PVP gear has this added resilience/expertise (ability to reduce incoming damage and increase the damage you're putting out), then that can only be a good thing? Shouldn't it be awesome gear to have for PVE raids also? What's the catch that makes PVP gear non-viable for raiding and vice versa?

@Ares42 said:

@Moreau_MD said:

OK, this is probably going to make me sound like a real newbie (and the answer is probably really obvious to MMO vets) but hey, here goes.

Surely, if PVP gear has this added resilience/expertise (ability to reduce incoming damage and increase the damage you're putting out), then that can only be a good thing? Shouldn't it be awesome gear to have for PVE raids also? What's the catch that makes PVP gear non-viable for raiding and vice versa?

Expertise only works vs other players. So you basically take away either accuracy/crit/power/surge from a PvE piece and then add a flat percentage bonus to PvP performance. However since it's way easier to get a bunch of tier 2 PvP gear than PvE gear in this game a lot of people find that using PvP gear for PvE is still better even with the loss of a secondary stat to something useless.

Thanks dude. That sort of information is good to have in mind. it will be interesting to see how SWTOR develops this.

Expertise is fine in ToR. For a couple reasons. First off until 50 the pvp gear you can get actually has very very little expertise on it. Enough to give you a slight "edge" but hardly enough to tip the scales hard in your favor. So you can use pvp gear leveling to 50 in pve situations, I know I did. Second with the upcoming patch pvp is going to be switched into levels 10-49 and level 50. So no one who isn't 50 yet will ever have to face someone who has large amounts of expertise at that point. Lastly expertise is actually far more interesting a stat than resilience. Resilience simply makes it a lot harder for you to be killed by other players, Expertise does that as well as increasing the damage you do to other players by the same amount. End result is two guys with the same amount of Expertise will actually be just as effective at killing each other as two guys with 0 Expertise. It only gives you an advantage against people who aren't in pvp gear or have very little of it, but when you fight other well geared pvper's it does not dramatically change how you played before. In other words the WoW problem of a skilled healer simply being able to out heal the damage of players unless it became like a 3-4 on one doesn't happen in ToR.

@Karkarov said:

Expertise is fine in ToR. For a couple reasons. First off until 50 the pvp gear you can get actually has very very little expertise on it. Enough to give you a slight "edge" but hardly enough to tip the scales hard in your favor. So you can use pvp gear leveling to 50 in pve situations, I know I did. Second with the upcoming patch pvp is going to be switched into levels 10-49 and level 50. So no one who isn't 50 yet will ever have to face someone who has large amounts of expertise at that point. Lastly expertise is actually far more interesting a stat than resilience. Resilience simply makes it a lot harder for you to be killed by other players, Expertise does that as well as increasing the damage you do to other players by the same amount. End result is two guys with the same amount of Expertise will actually be just as effective at killing each other as two guys with 0 Expertise. It only gives you an advantage against people who aren't in pvp gear or have very little of it, but when you fight other well geared pvper's it does not dramatically change how you played before. In other words the WoW problem of a skilled healer simply being able to out heal the damage of players unless it became like a 3-4 on one doesn't happen in ToR.

While I agree that 'Expertise' is fine for now, I refute the necessity of a PvP-specific attribute. Simply because I see no reason why everyone shouldn't get access to all endgame gear regardless of gameplay preference, be it PvP or PvE (or both). It comes down to having smart checks and balances to pace itemization progress approprietly, without making players feel restricted in their passions.

For me, segregated itemization translates into 'double the work for half the fun' and I've since lost my passion for both endgame PvE and PvP in this type of games. Why raid, if the treasures l loot aren't making me more lethal and powerful against other players and NPCs alike? Why PvP, when the rewards don't further my quest of becoming a more capable mosterslayer? It's like self-fellatio. I simply don't see the point of doing it soley for its own sake.