Dev Watercooler: Mists of Pandaria PvP

Ghostcrawler: Now that Mists of Pandaria has been out a few weeks, we wanted to let you all know what we consider working well in PvP, what we want to improve, and what’s coming down the pike. I’m going to split this up into three parts: a discussion of Matchmaking Rating (MMR), class balance concerns, and a sneak peek at some of our PvP plans. […]

Class Balance Concerns

We have 34 class specializations in the game now, and the intention here isn’t to go through every one to discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Instead, I’m going to address the ones that players seem to be most concerned about. That’s inherently a subjective call on my part, so I apologize if you think we missed something. Also, simply because something isn’t mentioned here doesn’t mean it’s being ignored. You can see some of the specific changes we are trying out in the 5.1 patch notes.

Beastmastery Hunters – We agree that stacking too many cooldowns to blow someone up is not interesting, skillful, or fair. (I also want to be clear that with all of these issues, we’re not blaming players for using the tools that we gave them; we’re blaming ourselves.)  We’re taking a hard look at the various Hunter cooldowns with the intention of reducing their burst. Hunters are receiving a buff in that they will no longer need to swap between Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Fox. We also hope these changes help result in higher representation of Survival and Marksman Hunters. . . . Read full article