With 8.3 there were a handful of super strong AOE pets, Anomalus, Voidglower and Void-Scarred Cat, that had a large impact on the meta as they could just cleave to win with very little thought.
Now the meta has become a Sandstorm lottery where you pretty much baseline need to run it to counter those overpowered AOE comps and if you run any guise of AOE you simply lose on the match up vs Sandstorm. The issue is compounded as Sandstorm was already strong vs a mix of other potential strategies and often in those match ups it would determine the game at the match up.
Hopefully the OP AOE abilities will be tuned to a more appropriate level that allows strategies other than only running Sandstorm counters.
You can always run a sandstorm counter team in a hope to beat these teams but it will likely just get wrecked by the AOE strats that are pretty much the only other teams being played.
imagine being new to pvp right now or just starting with your brawler achievements…
aoe/clonedance opponent: it’s over in 9 rounds before you realize what even happened
sandstorm (with control/stall elements): you’ll likely end up bringing one of the opponent’s pets down to like 50% before they slowly have beaten you and you’re unable to deal any significant damage
as a competitive player you are mostly forced to play either one of those teams, when you for 8/10 matches already know from the very first second who will win since pet pvp often basically comes down to just rock, paper, scissors.
and that is especially the case when you face off someone else who is competitive and the queue becomes a lottery for the ones who have luck picking the right counter combo.
i’m not saying that this is abnormal pvp behaviour (that has been the case for a long time), but atm the roster of competitive team set-ups has dumbed down to an absolute minimum, mixed in with just a few tier 1 pets (most of them can be countered by sandstorm )
i would really love to see cleave and cyclone being nerfed when it comes to the background damage…right now it deals far too much damage while it requires little to no skill and decision making.
as for sandstorm it (in my opinion) is mostly played as a counter to those and probably wouldn’t be played as much when cleaves are less of a worry.
but still the 10% miss chance of sandstorm (and darkness) are a relic of MoP rng and i believe no one would miss that if it would be removed, which also would playing with and against it more comfortable
The worst thing is that these issues won’t likely be fixed in 9.0 because the pet battle Devs are too stubborn to fix their mistakes. If you think that TCS and FAS were released at the end of Legion and they have not addressed these meta defining pets. The FAS is still not set to be nerfed despite it having minimal viable counters and often determining the game in 3 or 4 moves.
A handful of overpowered pets actually hurts PVP pet battles significantly:
Only really able run the OP pets to be consistently successful
Stale meta pushes existing players away
New players get stomped running anything that isn’t meta so are pushed away.
Rectifying poor design decisions take resources away from improving balance, eg Hermit Crab or TCS shouldn’t have gone live in present state so now instead of issues that needed to be fixed prior to these pets being released they waste resources on nerfs that should have been avoided.
There is also the argument that if they are insistent on creating a handful of meta pets why waste time creating the 90% of pets that never see use? Time would be better spent of polishing existing pets or abilities.
The second and third points are the most important here as this actively hurts PVP participation. With better balance there would definitely be more active players which is why i struggle to understand the Devs decisions and direction.
i would not mind at all if for one big patch there were no new pets but rather balance changes to exisiting pets and abilities.
there is so much exisiting stuff concerning pet pvp and pve that has become pretty much meaningless and therefor doesn’t get used at all (did you guys know there are actually dozends of pet trainers in kalimdor and eastern kingdoms )
also already existing systems that are in a bad state since for ever and really need an overhaul, e.g. the pvp rewards or leveling
but coming back to the pvp topic: i’d take an expansion with few new (but well thought out) pets and balance/system changes over BfA; an expansion that gave us tons of new pets that are mostly random dust collectors with moveset-stat relations that make absolutely no sense
)
)