Today I played some arena skirmish and I actually liked it more than arena and that is because you play as a random comp vs another random comp.
There were no meta comps in my games today and that was more fun than I had in weeks. I wish they would finally implement soloq where I don’t play against meta comps all day.
EDIT: fixed a typo in the first sentence
funny way to type “I like random clown fiesta games” :Y
If you like skirmish so much… continue queuein skirmish?
Skirmish shows that rated soloqueue wouldn’t work too well, though. You can see the difference if something like armswarrior+havoc dh gets thrown in against two random hybrids, or if double fire mage-rsham fights two melees with pressure teamed up with a rdruid. Even among random comps, some are way worse than others.
The reason why it kinda works in skirmish is that there’s no rating bound to it, and you lose nothing if your random comp is worse than the enemy random comp.
I’ve been called some funny things in skirmish sometimes. It’s not what I’d call a friendly place, although the most common is nobody saying anything. At all.
And that’s with nobody losing anything other than their time.
I’ve also met some friendly Joes occasionally, but the vast majority is absolute silence. The friendly Joes and the hateful haters appear occasionally.
And just to reiterate, that’s with nobody losing anything other than their time.
Skirmish is more fun indeed, I always cailmed that playing meta setup is low skill stuff, true skill shines from randomness…
Probably because you’re 226 and the average person queuing skirmishes is 170-200ish
no there were also some people with full 226 gear. its just that fighting meta comps as non meta spec in 2s is cancerous. while fighting as FDK and lock vs rogue and DH is way more fun than fighting arms+heal all day long
Yes skirmish is fun when you need 20 games for a win cause you end up being fighting oneshot rogues, fire mages, retri paladins with 40k hp. No soloQ pls, we want pvp balance.
PvP balance is as good as it has ever been. Literally every class is viable in 1 or more brackets 2v2 3v3 or RBGs.
The thing we lack in rated pvp is activity. Main reason for that is that we dont have easy acces rated pvp. Why would anyone sit in LFG for half of his game time…when he could play another game and be in rated pvp within 2-3 minutes after logging in?
Its so funny how 99% of the naysayers dont even play rated pvp. Soloq will be there to tackle the struggles rated pvpers have been going through. You havent played a single rated pvp game this expac and even before that u barely played any rated games at all. It would be similar if i adviced your boss that you dont need a payraise “since you dont need it”…eventho i have nfc if you actually do.
Soloq will give players like you acces to rated pvp. Something you dont have acces to now. So you of all ppl should advocate for soloq.
The charm of soloq is that randomness… but then with proper matchmaking.
Im 53-3 last 56 skirmishes. Steamrolling ppl isnt my idea of fun.
If “rules” change every game then it really doesn’t allow people to play their comp to their fullest potential. Playing with random element of course introduces another difficulty element but it’s more along the lines of how well you do under unknown circumstances and not about peak performance due to honing your craft over and over again.
I disagree.
While it might be the case for you playing 1 specific comp to the fullest. A player who is able to push ratings while playing a wide variety of comps is without a doubt better at his craft than a 1 trick pony playing 1 or 2 comps.
If you have olympic athlete who can compete in multiple sports in world class level then athlete is obviously “better” but when we come back to reality we see that people only get really really good at something if they stick to one niche and focus on it.
I disagree. Your comparison falls flat since a lot of elements in wow arena carry over. Where that isnt always the case in Olympic sports.
In GW2 we started out with teamq only. All the top teams where set teams that practiced together for ages.
A few years ago soloq got introduced. It produced a lot of very versatile pvpers that could adapt to any situation. The second top soloq players grouped up they blew away the reigning elite teams.
They where just far superiour in terms of mechanics, awareness, flexbility, abbility to make plays that carry your teams to wins. Soloq forced them to be like that and it carried over in teamplay.
Viable, sure, one spec per class is prob viable. But let’s be honest, if you check the class-representstion you quickly notice how some classes are beyond over-representated.
Priests and Paladins take 35% of the spots in 2v2.
Priests and Paladins take 37% of the spots in 3v3.
Druids and Priests occupy 37% of the spots in RBG (with Paladin close 3rd (with a 5% gap behind them)).
I am not so sure it’s that well balanced. There’s a clear bias towards some classes (and specs).
You have to keep a few things in mind.
Looking at representation doenst say a lot. If i look at my own class it shows that disc has more then twice the numbers as holy. Most top pvpers will tell you that holy is stronger than disc atm.
If we look at ele and compre it to arms. Most will tell you ele is on par if not better than arms. Yet 4 x lower representation.
Etc etc.
We have 5 healing classes and only two that really stand out.
You talked about viable classes. But eh, specs are not much better representated. Let’s look at dps specs, we have 24 of them and the top 5 take over 50% of the spots in every bracket. How are the specs balanced?
That surely is a valid point, but only affects recent changes. It’s still a decent overview of the entire season. And even a spec which became popular later on reached the top 5 already.
That it was never better doesn’t mean that it is so balanced now.
Holy paladin got nerfed so the numbers dont reflect its strength anymore.
Holy priest is arguably better than disc atm. Yet you claim we have only 2 viable healing specs based on the lower representation of holy. Rdruid, rshaman, hpriest and dpriest numbers are comparable above 3k. Holy pala has higher numbers, but they got nerfed so … they are on par with the others right now. The only one that is sub par is MW.
Of course you need talk about specs. We have 29 dps specs and 6 healing specs. Doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that the number of healers will always be higher.
An overview of the entire season doesn’t reflect what the situation is now. Rdruids were relatively weak at the start of the season for example. There were next to nonexcistant in arena’s. Look at some streams of top players right now and you’ll see quite a lot of Rdruids.
Its an MMO so 100% balance is a pipedream. It will never happen.
What needs to happen is systems that create activity. …a properly structured and incentivized soloq system for example.
what needs to happen is that they finally balance the specs that are broken since the start of SL. nobody cares if they gutted a spec midseason. i cant stand the sight of warriors, fmages, convoking druids, rogues and discpriests anymore.
the excuse that they dont balance midseason is nothing but a bad excuse. wow esports is a joke and nobody cares about it. AWC yesterday didnt even have 10k viewers. asmongold gets double the number 1 minute after his stream starts.
nobody takes wow esports seriously. not even blizzard, otherwise they would not let 5 classes dominate the game for 5months+
You only play RBGs. Frost DK is comparable or stronger than most of the specs you mentioned. Only moonkins are stronger.
In RBGs almost anything is viable anyways. Sure moonkins are OP but thats the only spec that really dominates.
You forgot my most important remark: