I think just making a rated deep six would be a good avenue to take pvp. It is still small scale, but changes the environment to something a lot more players are more comfortable in. Also it could allow for two healers, which would make them feel less stressed, and therefore more willing to play.
The arena path has been done to death, and simply has no reason to be the only main source of pvp. There are too many players right now, that do not necessarily like arenas, and don’t play pvp competitively because RBG takes too long to get going, and can end with a loss or they dislike arena so much to the point they just do not play it.
This week’s brawl has been quite eye opening, in that it is fun to play BG maps with small numbers, but the numbers are enough to take off the pressure you would usually find in arena. I really do believe this is an opportunity for blizzard to actually do something that could help PvP and bring up engagement and also just provide something fresh for the community.
The more moving parts you have the harder it is to balance, most PvP games that are succesfull in balance and gameplay are either 1-3 players, or have very low co-dependence of the players in the match, like CSGO or something.
3v3 in WoW is already a mess with everything going on at the same time, but it’s peanuts compared to something like League or Dota that literally goes belly up with every patch and is well balanced once in a blue moon, and that is with 3-4 abilities per toon maybe some active items, how many buttons does the average wow spec have? 20? 30?, 6v6 is even more moving parts, it sounds fun to imagine it as a game mode but it would just be super frustrating
This isn’t true, as balance is less of a problem than I think people realise, the problem of balance is hyper focused in something as small scale as arena. If we had 6 v 6 a lot more people would just relieved to have more of the laod shared, especially healers. More room for environmental skill expression and mini 2 v 2 or 4 v 4 etc.
It probably sounds like an outlandish take to a some, but I really believe 6v6 is the way to go within a BG environment, the engagement numbers would be astronomically higher than arena.