PvP - Arenas
Burst Damage
We think this was a bigger problem when season 5 started than it is now. We managed to address some of the worst burst (Bubbled Ret pallies, Arcane Barrage, Mutilate+stun+stealth, Explosive Shot, Impurity + Howling Blast, and now finally Shadowfrost Icy Touch). At the same time, being able to call upon your burst when needed (blowing cooldowns etc.) is pretty important for being able to finish someone off before they can escape or get a heal. We won't have a very fun Arena if everyone is always hitting for 2000 damage (they just can't be hitting for 20,000 either).
We have seen many fights now that won't wind down because the healers can just keep going and going forever. While we don't want fights to last for 6 seconds, we also don't want to see the only way a fight can end to be through mana drains (the spell effect itself, or just slowly, painfully watching someone's blue bar exhaust itself). Ideally both situations would sometimes occur, but there would also be more fights somewhere in the middle. (Source)
[...] We definitely designed a few classes originally in a way where all they bring is big burst. We have realized now that this doesn’t work. It ends up being not fun for the burster or the burstee. We are trying to redirect Ret, Arcane, and PvP rogues of all types away from the proverbial “two shot” and more towards having different answers for different situations. (Source)
Paladins and Death Knights too dominant
We think DKs and Holy paladins are too dominant in Arenas. Beyond those two there are some imbalances, but you are going to find a lot of debate among the community about who it is, and I think that might come to dominate the rest of the thread. The "two-shotting" is a little exaggerated in most cases. (Source)
Resilience
You don't need 800-1000 resilience to survive a Shatter combo. The game is designed around the notion that you will escape or prevent CC. You aren't going to survive long CC'd with players beating on you no matter how high your resilience is.
I think what we might do differently next time is make higher resilience values available earlier. You start to notice resilience having an effect at say 500 or so and you start living long enough to counter attacks at 800 or so. A lot of players going into the season with 100 or so resilience did get blown up. This felt particularly weird because:
1) For the last few seasons, their resilience had pretty much just gone up. Season 5 was a reset that had a lot more in common with Season 1.
2) In addition, this was complicated by the issue above -- that players were combining the weak resilience with very potent PvE weapons that they had already looted from KT. If the Arena season had started around the same time Naxx had opened (combined with slightly better tuning on Naxx) then there would not have been such a discrepancy.
3) Some classes had overly powerful built in resistances that made up for the lack of resilience. Specifically, DKs had a lot of cooldowns and passive defenses built in for tanking and paladins had their shields, which could be used offensively at the start of the season.
To drag out a tired cliche, the combination of these 3 (low resilience, KT weapons and baked-in defenses) plus the high burst at the start of the season created a perfect storm for fast Arena deaths.
Perhaps a better solution is to have relatively high resilience on the starter gear (like 500) but at the cost of offensive stats. We do want PvP gear to be a progression though. We don't want you to start the first season of an expansion with amazing resilience and offenses. (Source)
