Sandstorm is the best PVP ability from Shadowlands onwards and a top 5 meta ability since Legion. It’s dominance is highly damaging for the meta and directly reduces PVP participation.
What makes it so overpowered:
Damage
It is one of the strongest damage cooldowns available, higher than a significant portion of other 5 round CDs. Simply put it one of the best abilities purely used for damage on CD.
Weather effect passive damage reduction
The weather effect itself is the strongest and most impactful of all the weathers. It reduces damage to every attack something that will always get value. The only comparative example of a weather that will always get value is Call Lightning where a damage tick is added to every attack. There’s a significant disparity in damage values between Sandstorm reduction and Call Lightning ticks, Sandstorm blocks 150% more damage than Call Lightning adds.
Weather effect 10% miss chance
Sandstorm also bakes in a 10% hit reduction effect to all damaging abilities. This level of RNG when reducing the hit chance from 100% to 90% is more impactful on average than 20% crit chance. As PVP games are often between 10 - 20 rounds it’s common for one player to be disproportionately affected by missed abilities. Essentially close games are regularly determined not by the decisions players make throughout a game but by the roll of a dice. (Elemental pets can compensate for this miss chance but more on this below)
Archetypes countered by the weather effect
There is no other ability that counters soo many different possible team archetypes, it counters: AOE, Cyclone, DOT (including bleed, burn, poison and dot/swap), multi-hit abilities (speed based, barrage, turrets, field effects and stampede type), plagued blood type abilities and other weather comps. If you compared it to Darkness that only reduces heal, hot and plagued blood type teams or Arcane Winds that only prevents stun or sleep type teams, you almost can’t compare the effective counters the weather’s provide.
Nature of Sandstorm teams composition
When playing Sandstorm it’s fairly obvious that you are best running specific types of abilities or pets. Generally this is single hit damaging abilities, elemental pets and team healing options. Most other weather you play into rely on the effect or buff it provides for example Call Blizzard you play into elemental damage and/or chill effect abilities. If Call Blizzard isn’t active some of your abilities won’t be as effective. With Sandstorm this drawback doesn’t exist as nothing synergizes with the Sandstorm weather being active.
Best change that could be made to Sandstorm?
Realistically the best change that the Devs could make would be to reduce the damage reduction from Sandstorm being active from base 5 to base 2 damage, essentially the same as Call Lightning adds.
In a perfect world they’d also look at the damage level and the 10% miss chance whilst adding some abilities that synergize with the weather being active.
Until changes are made PVP will continue to be damaged probably permanently by the inaction of the Dev team. That would be such a shame when the issues were amplified by the disastrous weather buffs implemented by the Devs team to bring us to this point.