Looking at the development of PVP since Legion it is easy to see why participation has tailed off so much. Changes are being made that either undo previous balance attempts or to fix issues that have been created by developers, instead of working towards a more balanced PVP environment developing abilities at the existing power level and pruning ones that are over or under tuned. Looking at the changes most specific to PVP for each expansion this can be easily seen below:
Legion
Prepatch -
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Undead racial was nerfed so that during the damned rounds the damage is reduced by 25%
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AOE ~15% nerfs to pretty much all of the aoe abilities due to these dominating the bulk of games.
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Shell Armor buff duration nerf from three to two rounds.
During expansion -
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Added Iron Skin which is Shell Armour but with 4 round CD
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Added Jar of Smelly Liquid, a higher damage version of Weakness.
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Added fast Haunt user in Wicked Soul this made countering the free dot and pet swap much harder.
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Added 50 base damage aoe in Twilight Meteorite existing 5 round CD aoe abilities did 33 base damage, 51% increase in damage.
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Added aoe dots in Poison Protocol and Great Sting. Poison protocol does 60 base damage on a 5 round CD 81% increase compared to existing AOE splash and Great Sting does 54 base damage on a 4 round CD.
BFA
Pre patch -
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Haunt nerfed as it became too dominant with Wicked Soul able to benefit from the free dot and pet swap.
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Cyclone nerfed due to it doing too much aoe damage. 35% hit chance at 7 damage over 5 rounds ~ 44 damage. Nerfed to 3-7 damage or ~ 35 damage.
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Teroclaw nerfed as dodge and backline healing too strong combined with flying racial.
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Darkness/Nocturnal Strike users nerfed due to power level of the combo and how common it had become.
During expansion -
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Added inflated stats pets like Hermit Crab that had more stats allocated to them than existing stat template.
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Call Blizzard, Call of Winter and Mudslide buffed as these weather’s underused compared to more powerful weather abilities.
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Toxic Fumes added
Shadowlands
Pre patch -
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Jar of Smelly Liquid nerfed to 2 round cd as increased damage compared to Weakness made it too powerful.
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Righteous Inspiration nerf as outside of specific teams it was not counterable in a practical/consistent way.
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Call of Winter nerfed as this did too much damage following earlier buff.
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Buffed most weather abilities to fit new power to cooldown increments. E.g. Sandstorm base damage increased from 30 to 45 a 50% buff. Standalone 5 round CD abilities do 40 damage without added weather effect.
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Nerfed 50 base aoe abilities to 45 base.
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Buffed most aoe’s to the same damage scaling compared to CD as weather abilities but not all Carpnado remains 33 base damage on 5 round CD.
During Expansion -
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Added Chompy and a Baubleworm that have inflated stats.
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Meat hook a 2 round CD swap has the same base damage as 4 round CD swap abilities.
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Ashes of Outland does 25 base damage and 100% blind on 5 round CD. Blinding poison 100% blind 0 base damage on 4 round CD.
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Whirling talons aoe dot ability does 75 base damage.
Dragonflight
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Fight or Flight looks like a better version of Shell Rush as it has an added damage buff
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Sticky Surge debuffs speed for 25% and is also an item removal. This is a lot of utility for an ability with an extra 2 round CD compared to Temporal Anomaly. In practice it is unlikely you would be using this type of ability on CD.
You can see from these changes that:
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AOE was nerfed for being too strong then buffed to be stronger than previous levels then slightly nerfed while still being at it strongest level ever to then have nearly all AOE abilities buffed to their strongest ever levels.
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Haunt was nerfed once a fast pet with this ability was introduced.
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Numerous better versions of preexisting abilities have been added, some then nerfed like Jar of Smelly Liquid.
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Cyclone nerfed for doing too much damage despite the only viable use of this is a 3 round combination something that Poison Protocol or Whirling Talons can easily out compete across 3 rounds.
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Nerfed Call Darkness pets for being too strong to then buff Darkness damage to a higher level than before.
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Somehow inflated stat pets were introduced despite them being far stronger than the regular statline. The increased stat pets were nerfed only to introduce another pet with the same inflated stats.
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Buffed weather Call of Winter due to it being underused and underpowered to only then nerf it almost immediately afterwards.
The theme from the majority of these changes is that the developers are creating the issues they then need to address rather than focusing on other problems and balancing.
Abilities/mechanics not changed and overlooked
Photosynthesis, Sunlight and backline healing in general.
- The combination of Sunlight and Photosynthesis especially when pets can be swapped out to the backline and receive 1k healing is too strong. Sunlight also breaks some other healing abilities like Wish and Drain Blood. The health increase element should be removed from Sunlight to prevent the crazy healing values.
Sandstorm weather effect
- The damage reduction weather effect from Sandstorm counters too many archetypes available such as aoe, dot, plagued blood and speed based multi hits.
10% miss chance weathers
- The 10% miss chance is a hangover from earlier in the game where most abilities had a miss chance. In the current game the miss chance just leads to frustration when you are unlucky, the exact reason hit chance was previously removed.
Trap
- Trap activation has no effective ways to play around without specifically countering it and the activation is too punishing even if cleansed or removed.
Always first abilities
- There are multiple tiers of always goes first abilities that are misleading when facing opponent’s who also use their always goes first abilities.
Hit modifiers not affecting every ability
- Numerous abilities can only have their first barrage or hit affected by hit modifiers which is misleading and unintuitive.
Toxic Fumes
- Multiple abilities interact with Toxic Fumes that are not intended to work in that way e.g. Huge Fang, Elemental Racial and Agony
Bend time
- Ability never worked correctly and this was then completely disabled and has never worked since.
Rays of Light
- This ability does not work as the tooltip describes and if it did it would be too powerful.
Pet battlegroups
- The artificial locks on which players you can face have created whole groups where there is only one or two players queuing pretty much all day. It’s generally believed that this is to prevent win trading between players who are not able to earn the achievement in the designed way. All players should be in the same queue but restrictions should be placed on how many times the same players can be matched per hour. The achievement should be changed to only count teams at level 25 as this prevents lower bracket win trading where queuing players are pretty much non-existent.
TLDR
Developers are using the pet battle resources fixing their mistakes rather than improving the gameplay. AOE nerfed, buffed, nerfed and buffed. Darkness teams nerfed then buffed. Abilities added that are better versions than existing. Inflated stat pets added nerfed then more added again.