This will act as my thoughts on leaping back into pvp as someone with previous experience (casually) and the struggles for friends that recently started playing.
A bit of backstory: I PVP’d fairly much up until mop, when personal rating were introduced. Playing somewhat on my own got harder from that point on. I couldn’t sell arena wins for gold etc unless I wanted to deal with the hassle of lowering my rating to keep on doing that. I’ve always been a huge fan of playing several classes and specs, so I could never stick to a main only.
I have been playing on and off every expansion, mainly moving into M+ instead of arena and it’s been fun. But with dragonflight, some of my PVP friends returned to the game. After they told me its easy to gear, or at least gear to “begin” pvping, I said why not and joined. The current gearing for pvp is brilliant (buy green pvp set from professions/ah > get blue gear with honor > get epic gear from conquest). That deserves a topic of it’s own.
When we started to play pvp however, I quickly felt overwhelmed… I have to look over PVP talents that I were oblivious to (not that fact that they were a thing, but I knew none of them) and then learn every other specs what PVP talents they tend to use. This is already the first big red flag for a returning player, and a even bigger one for new players I would guess. Not a fan of PVP talents in the slightest. Bad game design imo. There shouldn’t be a “version of the game” that is different to my class & spec. I get my toolkit and that’s it. Not a “you can only use that in PVP”…
Then I meet heavy pet builds and I am just overrun by nameplates and an chaotic stampede and I completely panic because I have no way of dealing with 10-30 pets suddenly on me + I can’t see what’s going on anymore because of NAMEPLATES and damage numbers everywhere. Having a “pet build” where you deck out your pet is fine. Having a herd of pets is not. Yes, I’m talking about both BM pets and ESPECIALLY demo locks. I don’t get what’s fun with pet builds, but that’s besides the point. The sheer chaos they introduce in a pvp setting is overwhelming and tragic.
The point of this pet rant is not specifically “pet builds are dumb” (which they are) but more some hate on the UI of the game and how pets work. How a pet behaves is not obvious and it varies quite a lot. Warlock pets seems to be able to get rooted and frozen… Hunter pets seems immune to everything.
And with all this UI improvements in the spotlight these days, give the PVP UI some love. You are dependant on Gladius or sArena to have proper info about the enemy team in arena. When an addon is required, then its about time to implement their features into the base game. I wish I could play wow without any addons, that just aint the case in most end game content. This is a big part as to why MDI & AWC is hard to watch also. Why aren’t there an icon for each specific DR for example? DR indicators are non-existent in the game without an addon. Same with simple things in PVE. Why aren’t DR an indicatior on PVE mobs? Like what mobs can and cannot be CC’d? Do I really have to “learn by doing” or get an addon for this HUGE part of the game? I think these are core features that needs to be improved on.
With dragonflight I have introduced some new friends to wow, and it’s been hard to having to explain a lot of these things to them. They struggle with picking up a class and a spec, they would never get into pvp. They are competitive guys, but getting into pvp for a new player is the same as getting into a huge series or anime… When you have to watch/look up 30+ seasons you just wont do it.