A deep mind for deep thoughts.
This whole thought process was sparked by a comment I left on Galoheart’s website.
To reiterate here, World of Warcraft can actually be divided into two separate games. One of which is the PvE, and one of which is the PvP.
These two worlds do not interact with each other, much as players and developers alike would love to say they do. They don’t.
One version is the technical detail, the precision, that goes into player versus environment. This is pitting live, human players versus artificial intelligence, and in WoW’s case, its almost always not intelligent, just scripted. Not a criticism, just a statement of fact, is all.
Then we have PvP, where it is a player versus another player. Nothing is scripted, little is preset. It’s simply players killing each other in a competitive environment with the tools they have.
PvE does not mesh with PvP. PvP does not mesh with PvE. You can have one or the other. A player character does not react to “aggro”. A prot warrior cannot use taunt to save his healer. A hunter cannot use disengage to drop aggro. In PvP, a PoM Pyro would be a great opener, dropping a huge amount of damage right at the start. In PvE, this is called “suicide”.
But I need not go into depth here.
Quite bluntly, PvE and PvP each require completely different talent specs and gear sets to be successful in each.
If you’re a heavy disc priest sporting 400 resilience, you are going to be a very poor raid healer.
If you show up to an arena with your epic Tier 5 healing gear, able to keep a tank up solo for an entire boss encounter, you’re going to be annihilated by a rogue named Zephirotth.
You can find hybrid specs, you can put points into both PvE and PvP talents… but in most cases, this will leave you sorely lacking in both spots.
Take mages, for example. In order to be successful arena wise, you must put hefty numbers of points into frost to be widely successful. You won’t go anywhere in a competitive arena as a raid fire mage, except for a quick and speedy dirt nap.
Likewise, if you try and raid as PvP frost, you will find yourself being out DPS’d by the main tank.
So. Now that we’ve got that out of the way. (more…)
