"The Arena Mini-Game"

Also known as "Duels in a box" and similar disparaging names. There seems to be a large portion of the playerbase (well, the forum-going playerbase, lol) which has a distinctly unpleasant view of the arena. Be it a hardcore raider or a battleground hero, most of them proclaim that these sandbox duels aren't "true pvp" or the real world of warcraft. They equate it to some sort of mini-game, like say, the snake vs monkey game-mode that came with metal gear solid 3.

A friend of mine I hadn't seen in a long time recently moved nearby. I was thinking of showing him a bit of what wow was like. At first, I considered him showing some footage I caught of us fight heroic halion on fraps, but I quickly came to a realisation. Raiding does not look exciting from a gameplay perspective. Why is this? The answer is quite obvious: large amounts of raiding involves standing in one place, pressing 2-3 buttons over and over. Now, alot of people who say that are disparaging raiding - I'm not, I enjoy raiding. However, it's hard to deny that alot of what drew me to wow in the first place - the large variety of class abilities, the interesting ways of handling mobility vs damage, and in the case of pvp, the fast pace is absent from raiding. Not to say that raiding holds nothing of what initially brought me to wow - the "epic feel" of raiding and the very cool and stylized environments are sweet too, but that's less of a gameplay feature.

In fact, in many real ways, raiding is the actual mini-game of wow. Arena has certain restrictions of course (largely the inability to use external items such as potions, flasks, grenades along with a very few certain abilities), but at its core, arena incorporates far more of what wow actually -is- than raiding does. There's a big thread on the wow forums I was just reading, where people are complaining about being forced to spec into "situational" abilities such as dragon's breath in order to learn living bomb. Dragon's breath is an absolutely core, iconic fire mage ability that is extremely useful in any situation... except for fighting raid bosses. There are plenty of other abilities like this too. Any fire mage who focuses on 5mans, battlegrounds, arenas or even just farming will tell you that they love dragon's breath and how it's saved their butt plenty of times, but it suddenly becomes situational when applied to raiding. There are many, many abilities like this, but how many are the reverse? How many are only useful in raiding and nowhere else? Well, there's a couple of threat-based abilities such as soulshatter which serve no real purpose in pvp or soloing, but those are only there to support the shoe-horned in "aggro" system that wow uses (as do most mmos, in all fairness). Not only does raiding have no way to make use of a large number of class abilities, it has to create a few new ones simply to make it work. The reverse could be argued of arena and pvp of course, an example would be dispersion, which was most likely implemented with pvp being the primary idea behind the ability, except that all such abilities are useful in all other aspects of the game (except only "situationally" in raiding).

When you're leveling your character, learning how to play wow, when do you use soulshatter? How about dragon's breath? All that arena does is take all of the abilities you learn while leveling (bar a very few ones) and force you to learn to use them well against thinking opponents. To be sure, arena has a few limitations of its own, but they are nothing like the staggering suspension of disbelief required to deal with pve because of the completely different ruleset created by the aggro system, combined with the majority of mobs being immune to various defining class skills.

So what is the real "mini-game"? What is the real wow? I'm not so sure I'd necessarily chalk anything up to being the real wow. WoW is a package deal. Even rated bgs will still have their own ruleset, I expect that (sadly) stuff like swiftness potions won't be allowed, and I'm not sure playing capture the flag truly captures the essence of warcraft. But one thing is for sure, having almost all of your abilities actually useful is a big part of what makes pvp so involving, so fun, and raid encounter designers would benefit alot from taking that on-board.