WoW SoD Phase 3: Damage Reduction Coming to PvP

Season of Discovery Phase 3 is seeing a lot of changes both to its PvE and PvP content. This time around, the devs are looking at tackling the massive PvP imbalances that have arisen from the new runes, abilities, and items that were added in Season of Discovery thus far.

Not only has the community been providing feedback regarding the state of PvP, but it seems that certain playstyles and strategies are overwhelmingly unfun and unfair, beyond the WoW Vanilla issues that were originally identified years before.

With that being said, we will take a look at what Blizzard is planning to do so that PvP becomes a more enjoyable experience both for casual and hardcore players, wishing to represent their faction and defeat any opponents that come their way.

WoW SoD Phase 3 PvP Changes

The devs have released a blog post detailing their plan to implement a global damage reduction aura on PvP combat between players, including player-controlled pets as well. This is primarily in response to the massive amount of burst damage that is dominating battlegrounds, frustrating players by removing almost all counterplay. 

Now that we’re in Phase 3, we’ve made many changes and added more runes, and burst damage has significantly outpaced healing output, so we feel that it’s a good time to try this again.

Although the devs are right in saying that WoW Classic has always struggled to balance PvP, with Season of Discovery, some classes seem way overtuned, making it almost impossible to avoid Shadow Priests, Balance Druids, or Hunters chipping you down from a safe distance. 

Damage scaling and its impact on PvP has always been a concern in World of Warcraft, even since original WoW. Various systems have been introduced to counteract this to varying levels of success, but ultimately it always comes down to the fact that player damage outscales player health at a base level, and an adjustment is needed for combat between players to continue to feel satisfying as player power increases. 

It is also important to note that this aura will affect all areas of the world, meaning that PvP griefers will be a bit easier to deal with if you are constantly facing issues either questing or farming in the open world.

We currently plan to enable the aura on all Season of Discovery realms on Friday, April 26 at approximately 10:00 a.m. PDT (19:00 CEST), and it will be disabled four days later, during scheduled weekly maintenance in each region.

Although this experiment could yield great results, it is still too early to tell whether damage reduction will remain in Season of Discovery. Having that in mind, make sure to try it out for yourselves and provide feedback to Blizzard so that they can adjust the PvP aspects of the game more appropriately.