You misunderstand the biggest issue with PvP right now.
Toxicity is everywhere, always has been, always will be. It’s not specific to WoW PvP, and it’s not even specific to PvP at all - plenty of M+ folks are quite awful too.
But that’s fine. Most PvP players can stomach it.
The issue we’re facing right now, is that while solo shuffle was a great addition that brought many players back to PvP in season 1, the queue times of 45 minutes for DPS players mean that people are getting tilted and losing interest.
The frustrating bit with all of this is that the playerbase has figured out the “why” and the “how to fix it” a very long time ago:
The queue times are long because there is a healer shortage. There is a healer shortage because healing in PvP currently does not feel rewarding. It does not feel rewarding because dampening is huge, and baseline healing throughput is already kind of low.
This means that:
- When we press our healing spells, nothing happens, and we feel like we have next to no impact, and next to no control over what happens during the fights.
- We can’t use the non-healing spells of our toolkit. Healing throughput is so low that every GCD that we don’t spend spamming heals is a massive gamble, and often a game losing one. So, we’re healboting 24/7, and HP bars are stagnating nonetheless.
And yet, what have Blizzard done in the latest balance patch?
They nerfed Disc & Mistweaver, the only two healers people are still playing.
They’re balancing the game by making OK-tier specs worse, so that they’re in line with the other garbage tier specs. Awful decision making.
In the next few weeks, plenty of Dis & Mistweavers will stop playing, and the already long queue times will increase even more.
This is what’s frustrating in PvP right now.
We have everything we’ve asked for: an alt-friendly expansion, great gearing system, we’re neither forced to play PvE nor to complete the campaign, and we have a solo queue system to play ranked PvP when our friends are offline.
But we can’t enjoy it because queue times are too long, and Blizzard are oblivious to the obvious solution to this issue.
As a side note, the current season also has a deflation issue which means that we are facing gladiators and even literal rank 1 players are 1900 rating.
See my thread here: Screenshots from 1900 MMR solo shuffle games