WoW Cataclysm to focus heavy on Battlegrounds

Good news.

There is going to be a big focus on BGs for Cataclysm, including the ability to get the best PvP gear from rated BGs.

Ghostcrawler took to the forums and went on explaining a lot of where Blizzard’s brain children are in terms of conceptualizing the changes. Needless to say we’re going to be seeing Cataclysm in 2010 which is very exciting. The post itself is more about burst damage and gear scaling in the new expansion as compared to how things are now in Wrath of the Lich King.

I’m pretty excited to see that Battlegrounds are going to be making a comeback so that the spectator sport that is the Arena which also holds little to no place in the canon of Warcraft is dropping aside to it’s rightful place.

The gear scaling is “easy” to fix, meaning we know what to do and it just requires a lot of work. We are prepared for players to be sad when their ratings convert less favorably, but most would agree it’s good for the game in the long run.

I already addressed the burst issue above. If the bathtub is bigger, then the rate of health pouring in and going down the drain don’t affect the volume as severely.

I also don’t want to give the impression class balance is perfect. It’s not. We have some success stories and some specs that we didn’t get to where we intended. But we had an ambitious design from the beginning, and the way we work means there is always a much larger list of stuff we want to get done than we can actually fit into a given expansion or patch. We think the trend is good, and a lot of the changes we made for Lich King are going to endure through Cataclysm, which means we’ll be able to focus more on the problems we have now rather than resetting everything. source

So basically they’re going to throttle back the rate at which DPS scales and make it so healing is more reactive and based on being efficient than just spamming in case the boss lands a hit. That also means avoidance is important but not the only way tanks can gear for survival. I like the fact that burst is being toned down some as well and all of this is going to mean that PvP might be less frantic. A lot of players feel that if the combat is frantic and uncontrolled then it’s fun, but to me that just makes the curve favor the elite or the well geared over entry-mid level players.