Yesterday, I thought I’d do some unranked BGs and try my luck at PvP on my 203 ilvl Survival Hunter, so I could push for Honor cap and gear my character up when Season 2 launches. It would be good to actually be able to compete in Arenas/RBGs for a change.
My experience yesterday was awful, to the point of even making me want to quit for Endwalker because even the one thing that Blizzard do better than Square Enix is done terribly.
This perspective is from a Horde player btw, if you haven’t guessed already.
Problem 1 - Queue times:
The queues are ridiculously long. At peak time (around the evening) the queue to enter a Regular Battleground is around 20 minutes, add several minutes onto this timer if you select Epic Battleground instead.
Tried again this morning and it was a 31 minute estimated wait to enter a regular BG and 37 minutes to enter an epic BG. Not even when Warlords of Draenor was in the midst of its 15 month content drought did I see BG queues this lengthy. And I’ll give WoD the benefit of the doubt for being an expansion pack where Blizzard swindled their player base out of €50 and abandoned the content release cycle halfway through.
For battleground queues to be this long right after the release of a major content patch is unacceptable.
Shadowlands has “dead game” written all over it.
It seems the only viable way to hit the Honor cap of 15,000 is to deliberately build your character as a twink and go seal clubbing in low level BGs. In my experience 10-19 and 20-29 seem to be the only truly active PvP brackets, and that’s because Watcher and Holinka have completely and utterly failed in the balance department. A select few classes (particularly Hunters and Rogues) are overpowered as hell in low level PvP.
Problem 2 - Ranked is a massive elitist catch-22:
Before you tell me to go play Rated, that is simply out of the question, not only due to my low item level but also the (lack of) PvP gear my character has and my (lack of) existing rating. More on the gear issue later…
You see, WoW’s PvP community is one of the most elitist, most toxic, most exclusionary communities I’ve ever seen, and I used to play both Dota 2 and League of Legends avidly so I definitely know what true toxicity looks like. Players treat you worse than crap if you aren’t up in their 2200 rating ivory tower.
I rip apart Mythic+ for having the same issues but at least you can run your own keys there and have some potential to climb. PvP ain’t like that. It’s far, far more dependent on gear, coordination, reaction times, composition, focus target macros, cast-cancelling to avoid interrupts/stunlock chains, and skill than M+. PvM content is incredibly predictable by comparison, players are not.
Classic had a far better PvP progression system because it was a pure Honor grind that rewarded hard work rather than having highly ranked chums or paid boosters. It was a time sink and a meritocracy and that was a good thing. I wish something like that was kept in WoW after Burning Crusade.
Yes, this is how players behave in any kind of competitive video game, but you know why other esports don’t suffer from this problem? THEY HAVE SOLO QUEUES, which is something that Blizzard have time and time again refused to put into the game.
Problem 3 - Gear:
You know why Legion and (to a lesser extent) BFA were decent PvP experiences?
Both expansions gave you a baseline PvP trinket to bust out of stuns to use in combat. Shadowlands is far more stingy about that, so if you go into PvP without having purchased a PvP trinket, you’ll feel each stun and you’ll likely be 0 to death’d out of the fight.
Legion also had PvP gear scaling with predetermined stat sheets which helped even the playing field and stop turning BGs into turkey-shoots. My only problem with this system is that the template eliminated most gear differences and made PvP gear far less rewarding as a result.
With Shadowlands your only choice to even enter PvP (albeit at a major disadvantage) is to grind for PvP gear, not only for its increased item level but for the 40% increased Versatility in PvP combat. It also helps to min-max on versatility because rather than add Resilience and PvP Power back into the game to truly differentiate PvP and PvE gear, Blizz went the lazy route instead.
Problem 4 - Faction imbalances:
It’s no secret that Alliance have better racials for PvP. The situation was once so bad during WoD that Blizzard had to introduce merc mode to BGs to give the dominant faction better queues.
This situation is currently ongoing with Burning Crusade Classic, and Blizzard’s solution of adding same faction BGs poses an even greater risk of endangering Alliance server populations. But that’s a different topic.
So how does this affect me?
Barely any Horde players queue for BGs because all the PvPers are on Alliance. My queue times are massive because of this faction imbalance. Horde are also discouraged from playing PvP because the Alliance have all the gear from tryharding both unranked and ranked content. This turns any battleground into an imbalanced crap-fest.
Out of four battlegrounds I did yesterday, I won 0. Three of them were about as fair and balanced as Fox News. One was a very close loss.
You can understand my frustration here, surely?
Proposed solutions:
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Add Resilience and PvP Power back into the game, exclusive to PvP gear of all levels. PvP should feel like its own separate progression system.
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Add PvP exclusive weapon enchants into low & mid level PvP. These can either be crafted easily for a low cost using Shadowlands materials or would drop from participating in (not necessarily winning) a BG. This would kill twinking for good, which is only a good thing.
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Homogenize racial abilities to some degree to improve faction imbalances in PvM and PvP content. Problematic meta racials like Berserking, Blood Fury, Every Man for Himself, Escape Artist and Shadowmeld should have opposite faction equivalents - a bit like what Trion Worlds did with both factions in RIFT, or what you recently did with Seal of Blood & Seal of Vengeance in TBC Classic.
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Remove Rating requirements from PvP gear. They were scrapped in Cataclysm for a reason… because said gear was almost inaccessible and made climbing into higher brackets nearly impossible. Higher rating should increase your weekly Conquest cap and allow you to obtain the best gear faster, not be the requirement to obtain the best gear.
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To balance this out, add Justice Points back into the game and allow PvM players to purchase gear upgrades with them. Or better yet, allow players to purchase said gear with anima, which would give the useless currency an actual use.
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Add a solo queue for Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds with separate rating systems, fixed amounts of players in specific roles, and with a further matchmaking algorithm to produce somewhat balanced comps. It’s 2021. The fact that WoW doesn’t have any kind of solo queue matchmaking system is frankly disgraceful.
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Do a balance pass for low level PvP and make as many classes & specs viable as possible. Some classes like Rogues and Hunters have been overpowered for far too long. You may act like low level PvP doesn’t matter but a new player being ROFLstomped in these brackets is going to level up thinking that the game’s PvP is a dumpster fire, and rightly so.
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Give players PvP trinkets baseline again. This was a good change and I can’t see for the life in me why it was reverted.