I’ve played WoW since the original Vanilla, I used to raid in Vanilla, BC, WoTLK and WoD. I’m super casual now. I’m 33, I have a family and a business. I can only spend 2h per day to play max and I mostly play the game solo. I come back to WoW at the beginning of each expansion so I get to play PvP (which used to be the primary “fun” part of the game for me.) But recently I find it increasingly difficuly to get into PvP.
Why can’t I PvP?
- There are too many buttons for almost every class/spec. Havoc DH seems to come the closest to sanity, but there are just too many buttons that you need to rotate… and most buttons aren’t fun buttons to press. Why do I need 6 buttons to do dps? Why not just give me 4 more dynamic buttons to press instead. The decision between buttons for single target dps and AOE dps is not not an interesting decision. Make them the same buttons.
- Even with the gear scaling in PvP I get steamrolled by high end players. So I can’t have fun in PvP before I grind boring repeated content on PvE. I should be beaten based on skill, not based on my ability to suffer through boring stuff I don’t care about.
- PvP only has players in it. It would be good to have something like a Battleground+Warfront. Where a noob like me can ease into the PvP by helping the team do some PvE objectives. PvE objectives serve as a long term goal and PvP between those objectives serves as a short term goal. Lean into that (that’s what used to make Alterac Valley so cool in Vanilla).
- Not all Battleground maps are fun. Some totally suck. (Battle for Gilneas and Vehicle based Battlegrounds suck the most). They are just not dynamic enough as environments. The situations are highly repeatable and wear out their welcome after after a few runs.
- PvE bosses in PvP are totally okay. You should not need a tank to beat them tho, just keep dpsing and ignore huge telegraphed AoE damage. The players will find an ability to navigate that situation. Heroes of the Storm (blizzard dota) handled that amazingly.
- Too many abilities makes fights with more then 3 people at a time too chaotic. Less abilities would make bigger fights more understandable.
Why is PvP the best part of WoW?
PvP isn’t a copy-paste experience like PvE. Player behaviour is always dynamic and players will surprize you with unexpected combat behaviour and strategies. Comparetively PvE offers much less dynamic situations and its not fun to do the same content over and over and over…
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We already got Alterac Valley and some other epic bg’s, let’s not add more. Let’s keep PvE and PvP separated.
I never do epic bg’s unless I am honor farming and there is a quest up for it. I totally dislike PvE content in PvP.
Can you explain how it works in heros of the storm?
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Well WoW is not Heroes of the Storm, Lost Ark, Diablo etc and i think that you have played a lot of these type of games. WoW is and MMORPG not ARPG and that means there are multiple helpful and also harmful spells divided for each class.
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Tbh I can understand some spec got a lot or too much button (almost need to play with 2 keyboards) but from my pov it’s not fun to play something that you have only 3 button to press and do nothing else than dmg.
I think mmo in general try to make you a bit a ‘’ slave’’ in a way that you have to be here playing a certain amount of time to farm and get better but you kinda have to if you wanna perform and be competitive.
Otherwise you cna play chill and do really well even when playing like 2hours a day but sure you can’ t expect to be R1 or mythic raider while not investing that much time.
I do wish they made the warfronts into bgs… That’d be awesome I think. The warfront idea was cool to me, just (as with most else in modern wow) poorly executed… Shame.
More wasted potential.
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Yeah… Except… The catalyst might require a PvE currency to use, like it did in SL. So… Have fun grinding that tier set.
And of course, getting rating to upgrade the PvE ilvl on the gear will make that easier for you. Have fun grinding that too.
10 years ago they sold a World of Warcraft mouse with 8 buttons. My mouse has 2 side buttons and mousewheel up/down is an option.
i mean, i get your points… but if DH is CLOSE to sanity it might be you.
I like the complexity and depth of the game.
If i play dh or fury I get quickly bored. If every class was as simple as those I would probably quit playing world of Warcraft.
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Game 1= The game is made so a player can enjoy both PvP and PvE.
Game 2= I want to play only PvP (or only PvE).
The devs have designed Game 1, if you want to play Game 2 that’s on you. Play something else.
So…
You want to play mmorpg but you dont want to spend time on growing your character…
You want PvP to be about skill but you don’t want more than 4 buttons in your rotation…
You want to play PvP but you would rather fight PvE scripted bosses in battlegrounds…
Yeah, I disagree with all of your points and hope they will never cater to people like you. Have a nice day.
3 Likes
In Heroes of the Storm you have PvP bosses. Anyone can tank them, but they hit away about 20% of your health per hit. But the bosses always attack the player closest to them (there is unit collision). So players rotate in and out of the boss hitting range to tank it.
The bosses also cast very telegraphed AOE spells that deal about 80% of your health as damage. This makes the players move around a bit so standing still too long is very risky.
If you kill the boss, then the boss becomes your ally and helps assault the opposing team base.
Because the boss is a powerful ally, but a high-risk-high-reward strategy so a lot of PvP happens around the boss. Opposing teams meet and try to CC players in the Boss’s AoE damage sometimes the boss fight is even abandoned half way through due to the risks involved.
That’s their version of Roshan from dota2 (although dota2 is a copy of a mod for a Blizzard IP xD), and I’m sure LoL has its own copypasta of that as moba games tend to have.
But that’s objective-based PvP, not deathmatch PvP. Do you want it added to BGs? Because you’ve already got bosses to kill, and bosses to summon in BGs like AV.
Because it really seems like you’re asking for something that’s already in the game, just in different shapes.
The PvE elements in current PvP battlegrounds are handled really badly. The PvE currently substracts from the Player vs Player combat as opposed to adding to it.
Getting swarmed by 30 unkillable units in Alterac isn’t fun.
Getting oneshot by the boss is not fun.
PvP also has a completely different dynamic in large scale player combat. It is not fun at all as a melee character. It’s just a ranged AoE pokefight.
PvE in PvP should be a risk-vs-reward decision.
Imagine this: Periodic bosses spawn in the middle of Warsong Glutch.
If your team claims the kill, awards different random benefits on the map for you like:
- An area of the map is walled or flooded. Forcing players to change their movement a bit.
- A speed buff appears for your team in the middle of the map.
- A health buff appears for your team in the middle of the map.
- A tower appears with archers on top of it, dealing AoE damage to opposing players in range.
- Your flag is placed in a different location on top of the base.
- The opponents side of the map experiences an earthquake changing the landscape and making it more difficult to navigate.
So there is an optional objective that makes the PvP more dynamic and increases your chance of completing the map objective.
So what you’re saying is that you want BGs to be different? Maybe you should post your thread in the BG section of this forum, then? Doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with arenas, if you want BGs to infuse PvE elements better.
That’s not the only thing I was talking about tho. Arenas suffer the most due to gear difference. That’s why in tournaments they actually get the same Ilevel gear to balance the scales.
The gear difference will be mitigated a bit next expansion, and will be limited to the lower ratings by the 2nd season probably.
And yes, I’ve never liked gear differences, but there are some fanatics who enjoys the gearing process for some reason and Blizzard seems stuck on keeping that part.
If it were up to me I’d just use the templates system with no ilvl differences whatsoever, and have a system that lets people place stats points where they want and let 'em save it just like they save gear sets and how they save talent builds now, and let 'em change it in the starting area before the gates open.
Customization is a healthy skill expression in PvP. Ilvl differences are not.
Agreed. Customization, combat decisions, counter play etc all these things make player expression matter and combat fun.
I would argue that with less buttons (and those buttons would need to be dynamic and interesting buttons) PvP combat could be opened up to more players.
In PvP you should not be thinking how to play your character. You should be thinking about how to outplay the opponent. With the amount of “boring or semi-useless” buttons to press, you have too many choices and thus it takes a long time investment to be able to have fun in PvP.
It should be Easy-To-Learn and Exciting to Master.
One can argue about how many buttons there should be, but this isn’t a moba. You can’t have skill expressions squeezed into just a few buttons, it doesn’t work that way. You’d not end up with a lot of variety in how to play or a wide variety in decision-making that way, thus making the game more monotonous instead of dynamic, which is the complete opposite of what you want.
The reason moba games can pull it off, is because they’re constantly fighting against environmental mechanisms as well, and there are tactical decisions due to the time to travel and the size of the maps. That simply isn’t the case for deathmatch PvP.
So no, they should definitely not prune. You can’t have it easy while also being difficult to master in a game mode like WoW arenas. It’s not a moba.
What’s better is investing in a mentorship program. There are 3rd-party mentorship programs for PvP in WoW called “coaching” which is the hands-on version, but there’s also the more guided variety from a place called skill capped (google it).
The problem is that all of these are 3rd parties, and while their existence increases the quality of the service, that service could be spread to so many more places if Blizzard would adopt their own mentorship programs.
For example, the percentage of multi-r1s doing stuff like coaching is probably higher than people with 2k experience, but to a beginner then anyone would suffice really. They’d just need to be given a motivation in the game to do it, both the beginners and the would-be mentors.
Sure, the quality wouldn’t be great, but once the beginner catches up to the 2k level, then they can either continue to play together or someone with a little higher exp can take over, and round and round it goes.
It has a lot of social benefits as well as a chance to increase engagement in the game mode itself.
So the problem isn’t the difficulty of learning to use the buttons per se. It’s more that the game doesn’t offer good enough ways to learn it, which decreases the amount of people that bothers to learn how to do it.