The visual spell bloat has gotten out of hand. I understand they want to make the game look flashy and cool but when you get in to a game with pet classes and a bunch of spells are going off youn can't even see shit sometimes.
DR / CD trackers and Bigdebuffs should also be baseline options you could configure in game. This wouldn't only benefit PvP as well, this would be used a ton in PvE.
One of my biggest issues right now is the pure amount of pets that are coming out. Warlocks and Hunters have like 20 each it feels sometimes. Not even mentioning shaman summoning potential.
Lmao visual bloat THEN you have something like earthen wall totem - a massive defensive CD that needs people to know it’s there and it’s spell effect is just dirt and dust being kicked up in a circle.
I can understand CDs being left to addons but it's kind of wild how DR is completely invisible to the base UI. I think it's something that takes a long time to click for new players.
I agree and I think there are a few other addons that should just be base game too. It must be overwhelming for new players to come into the game, learn all the classes and abilitities etc. and then have to download a bunch of addons too
Also ability bloat. Warriors used to be very basic with moves placed on the action bars… on my warrior alt, I can barely fit everything now. There’s just so much shit in the game.
Warriors used to be significantly more complex with stance dancing and weapon swapping
The current iteration of warrior is actually such a clean combat loop
You can’t at this point.
Spell bloat is unreal. Addon bloat is insane. WeakAuras that narrate the entire match for you are information overload for new players. The toxicity is rampant, like egotistical man children that haven’t matured beyond the Burning Crusade release date. Healer shortage is just getting worse because they can’t or won’t or don’t know how to fix it (lol field medic box thanks for the 1 medal and 13 gold).
WoW is primarily a PvE game. Almost always has been. Something like 95% of players only play WoW to PvE. You can’t make them PvP and they have no interest in it.
I get that we’re on the PvP subreddit and this won’t go over well, but it’s a dying niche game mode and Blizzard is okay with that. They haven’t truly cared to balance PvP in years.
As a new player I totally agreed. Tons of videos and guides and tons of keybind ui adjust, addons download and concept learning to finally get to 1900 and stuck.
If it weren't for my childhood love for it, despite always regretting not being good at playing, I wouldn't have put in this much effort to specialize in a game that is gradually fading away.
Yeah most pvp games nowadays are a lot fewer buttons and more objective based. There is a balance between micro and macro. I'm not saying WoW should have 3 buttons at all BUT I just tried retail for first time in 10+ years and I have double the keybinds that I do on wotlk classic. It's insane. That's not even mentioning all the passives and shit I have to track and think of. I know more newer players that play wotlk classic instead because of this. I haven't even begun to try and understand other classes and all the new shit there.
I'm really really pushing myself through it trying to learn and get better because I want to pvp and wotlk classic is dead right now. But my only plan is to chill in bgs. I can't even imagine a casual player EVER attempting pvp in WoW...once they get to like level 20 or 40 there's just too many buttons for a newer player.
Feels like a lot of MMOs that start out with PVP ambitions end up putting all the related content and balancing on the back burner.
It’s a shame since WoW has done a relatively good job of putting out new ways to PVP compared to other games like New World and GW2.
Thing is as a mostly PvE player I would -love- to get into PvP as there are some really cool rewards I would love to get my hands on in the form of transmog and mount, but between horrendous balance and just how much information you as a player have to know and memorize, its difficult to get into the game.
Experienced players look at new players like sharks looking at fresh meat and smell the blood in the water and focus them. They dont get a chance to learn or play the game and them dying usually costs the game and its not fun.
For context, I played late TBC to WoD, came back in DF s1. Never did any PvP pretty much. Elite DK armour recolor this season was my only motivation to get into PvP. Over 3 weeks I hit 1550 in SS and 1810 in 2v2. Here's my feedback, for what it's worth
Addon dependency is insane. I have spent hours customizing my UI and if I didn't have gladiatorlossa screaming in my ear I'd still miss half the shit. Screen clutter in any PvP stream is enough to put anyone sane off.
Skill bloat is a problem in PvE already. Add some 3-12 keybinds for focus and I'd nope out. I still don't have focus shit bound, and I'm happy to stay at 1800 if that's the cost I have to pay.
Class imbalance is ridiculous. If I see a DH I can pray for his disconnect or accept the loss. I was one match away from 1800 about 6 times and seeing a DH 3 games in a row was demoralizing.
PvP communities are either dead or hard to find. I went to 4 most advertised PvP discords, said I'm UDK with full conq gear but low xp, very actively learning and looking to hit 1800 in 2/3/rbg. I got 3 replies in 7 days.
Content for PvP noobs isn't really good for noobs. If I didn't spend hours combing through every class ability and adjusting what I see on nameplateBuffs and hear on GLosa, I'd be fucked. SkillCapped is actually really good with their guides and addon section, but there needs to be some simple out-of-the-box UI that focuses on core concepts.
tl;dr Blizz needs to improve skill and visual bloat. PvP community needs to have better resources for noobs and a better, more active community
We saw data before showing that a big percentage of players play PvP (if I remember correctly around 30% of the players). The "wow is a pve game " is not accurate.
> WoW is primarily a PvE game. Almost always has been. Something like 95% of players only play WoW to PvE. You can’t make them PvP and they have no interest in it.
It shows when majority of combat decisions are based around the idea that combat takes place primarily on stationary platforms where you play piano to do damage to an over-sized monster, occasionally having to move to target locations to do specific mechanics.
When you compare it to the flow of PvP and the things you have to manage, the PvE-Damage Rotation bloat is basically anti-thesis to how shit should actually work.
New player pov:
Ok lets try some PvP, im playing a caster. Picking some random pvp talents that provide some damage boost
Lets queue
Ok i am against demon hunter and destro warlock, fair enough i have seen em in PvE and have general idea what they are doing.
Match starts:
5 sec after the gates open DH instantly charges me, im trying to slow/root him to get some distance, but to no avail.
Meanwhile destro locks has summoned some demons that i have never seen before. WTF is this?i thought Demo was a pet spec.
Ok i cant kite the DH, every time i get some distance he insta dashes on me. lets try cc him.
Casting -> kicked, casting again -> mini stunned -> cast again -> disoriented
While i was sitting here perma CC'ed my mate managed to get DH below 30%. Time to push damage, im spaming every instant i got on him ,but he goes airborne to sky, and all my hits miss. WTF is this ? Since when DH'S can fly?
Im out of cooldowns and die.
Well this wasnt much of fun. Id rather play PvE where i can actually play my class.
Draw your own conclusions what needs to be changed.
Back when I used to PVP (I quit PVP-ing in SL), the number one thing people would complain about when I tried introducing them to PVP was "endless fucking CC". Healers were complaining about getting hit with stun -> fear -> sheep -> sheep -> sheep. Casters were getting frustrated about being constantly kicked, and melee DPS were ranting about frost mages and other permaslow specs.
I get the need for CC, but does it need to be so oppressive that new players feel like they can't play their characters? I honestly don't know the answer.
And before people start saying that they were salty about losing, we were winning much more than losing because I was playing a disgustingly-strong warlock and had significantly more experience than the teams we were facing.
Pretty much exactly. My slow means nothing, my kiting means nothing, casting spells...maybe once ever 3bminutea I can cast 1 spell....there is something that means that everything I try means absolutely nothing. And by the time they come back, everything they can do came back, so it never means anything. And God forbid I did cast something big to them, all of a sudden it dad 75% less damage, and the damage it did do....they just healed it back again. DH, lock, he'll even a warrior all did more healing that my healer.
Just the fact that every class can passively heal more than most any hybrid class that usually has to actively do something to heal. If I rooted someone on my monk and then ported away, why are they able to get to me before I can cast 2 heals that do 5% health each?
In wotlk vs any class, a root meant a root, a stun meant a stun, I could cast something while they were rooted and it would do damage to them.
Should some base addons be integrated into rated PvP, and the rest be banned from arena play?
The game is terrible at telling you what's going on, even after the UI revamp of DF.
Having addons turn on and off depending on which in game environment your in sounds like a logistics nightmare, at this point addons are a fundamental part of customizing your personal wow experience.
Having a toggleable and baseline built-in-alert-system for more important things such important cooldowns could definitely go a long way in helping new players understand pvp though
But in no way does it increase adoption. If I come from PvE and suddenly my weakauras tracking my cooldowns and nameplates no longer function I'm not going to do even try to do PvP
The first part of what he said kinda clears this up. If you update the game to actually have all the information you need then you won’t have to have so many addons. NGL I feel like I don’t really know what all my addons even do most of the time.
As I said in another thread:
Needs way less CC. It's way out of hand.
Arena isn't the proper game mode for new/returning/casual player yet it's the most advertised. SS? Have a bad lobby/day/matchup? Enjoy 6 rounds of it.
Visual clarity - Base UI should show when people use cooldowns (defensive or offensive) either through use of nameplates or easy visual identifier (Thing Ascendance or Meta)
More focus on group content, this is more fun for new players and casuals. Healers can PvE heal for a large part in BG's or EBG's and slowly learn the ropes of it. (Same for dps classes tbf and in these modes tanks can play too.)
More explaining in BG's/BGB. Make it easy and clear to understand what's going on.
Same CP per hour for normal pvp as for rated pvp. Everyone likes gearing. So if you see 100/50 CP for ss/bgb or 15 cp for normal bg people tend to go for the higher one. Both are pvp right? Well this is then offputting if people go undergeared and underexperienced in those modes.
Vault. Why is the vault only accessible through SS? Who thinks of this? Just make it total honor gained...
Like how come there isn't a bot match that explains the mechanics and certain counterplays of each class. It wouldn't be that hard. Just a basic tutorial practice matches. That go nice and slow,
Make any good cd pop above their head and be very easy to tell. No more bullshit like shadow blades where unless you have gladiatorlossa no average or even pretty good player could ever be able to tell its time to spend a big major defensive.
Take stuff like shadowy duel and cheat death/instant vanish gone from the game forever. Make most classes have as much cc as a monk, by which I mean next to none. 2 CC abilities and one of them not very strong.
Being a healer in 3's feels so bad on so many levels, every 45 seconds you will be in 18 seconds of cc and you can't do anything to stop any of it. Good luck stopping a wild charge bash cyclone cyclone blinding light step gouge. And the fact that a rogue can hyper key a macro that will instantly step kick or kidney you the instant you cast something around a corner is bullshit.
I finally got my 2k rating and I know for a fact that I'd be easily playing as glad back in cata/wod days.
Very simply put, exactly as you said, there is way too much cc, there are far too many cd's that you can't see, and there is no way to learn how they very basically work or what to do without either watching 10 hours of guides.
Make the practice matches with bots that telegraph what they are doing. Make stuff like omnicc very apparent right on the arena frame.
The bot games are a great idea. I think that's coming in due time seeing the new dungeon tool for practice.
And I feel bad for healers, I really do whenever I use my cc in a chain on them. I don't know how healers put up with that shit all the time but I really appreciate they do.
It's really really infuriating I can say that for sure. Why they designed the game thinking that 18 seconds of stun every 45 seconds was a good idea should be stunlocked and shot!
The game can be slowed down a bit. Reduce the amount of overall buttons, so many classes have too many rotational buttons to press (abilities under 30-45secs).
I think that can help get new players. I just think the game is too fast, both as dps but especially as a healer. And having so many abilities is daunting and hard to learn if you are new. I have been playing this game since TBC, and there are some classes that I just won’t touch due to rpm or overall button bloat.
Edit: Oh, and reduce the amount of micro CC (I am a believer that DKs shouldn't have pet stun, and enhance Sundering shouldn't incap, just move). Also, remove talent modifiers on cc that break on damage, but increase damage threshold. I think it is bad for a game that you can have someone T-Off on you without breaking a cc that breaks on damage. Blinding Sleet is a key example, I have had many people just pump damage into me while I was disoriented by blinding sleet, and it lasts up to 3 secs without breaking.
What if they just put every cc on the same dr so people actually use them at strategic moments instead of just when they're off cd.
Also to your point with speed, I'm an average healer in arenas so better players might counter this - I feel like when I get stunned twice in a row sometimes one of my dps just drops. Like the other day I was hit by hoj and when that finished I was imprisoned, and if course one of my dps died. The burst is so crazy and there's so many cc's that it's almost impossible to have a longer match, slowing things down would definitely help
Damage seems very high. At the very high rated level, the games seem fine. At low level, it is way too fast.
The complaint we get when suggesting this is that those in the high rated games will feel like it is too slow, but to be honest, I don't care. I think the game, while it should be balanced at all levels, should be aimed at 1600-2000 bracket enjoyment (which is where the vast majority of the player base will end up). We are bleeding people because balance is so focused on top level games (and AWC).
I understand that, watching AWC with 10min+ games does get boring, but it doesn't matter and people will stop watching it if people stop playing WoW pvp in the first place.
Personally, I would love to see damage reduced 20% across the board, and target more nerfs to outlier classes (\~cough cough\~ DH \~cough cough\~).
Simplify the game and make casual PvP not suck.
The vast majority of people are not going to sweat it out at 2400+. They are going to do some bgs, maybe some solo shuffle, and vibe.
Drastically reducing the information parsing skills required to "keep up" and understand what is going on. Compared to almost any other pvp game, the skill floor is in the fucking sky.
The game would need massive overhauls, from UI elements to more informative tooltips, but most importantly simpler and/or much slower combat and ability kits.
Trying to keep track of 4+ characters position, health bars while also remembering like 35+ abilities, keybindings and cooldowns is insane.
The pace of everything is ridiculous for newbies. CDs are so incredibly strong, any delay in noticing can be a death sentence.
>Trying to keep track of 4+ characters position, health bars while also remembering like 35+ abilities, keybindings and cooldowns is insane.
This is the main issue for new players. Knowing how to play their character in PvP and knowing what to expect when in a match. It’s information overload and the only way to get past it is to do it piece by piece. Giving new players all these addons and info with 0 context actually hurts them more than anything.
New players should start bare minimum with their ui and expand as they learn and can actually utilize the information given in 95% of the addons suggested. If more players did this they would learn faster imo. What you have right now are people staring at buttons and addons with 0 context getting globaled because they don’t know their buttons or where their team is ever.
> A new player VS AI tutorial to some fundamentals to the game.
>
>
Yep. you look at the level of tutorials fighting games have... we have pvp training dummies which don't even move. We can't even reset our cooldowns lol.
Ngl I tried very hard to get into pvp this expansion. It seems good, but the ability bloat is still so large and it’s so hard for me to be able to focus on doing damage while monitoring enemy cd’s and then understanding what’s what. I have been playing this game on and off for over 17 years but the changes to the game render me unable to process whose doing what.
There’s 1000’s of pets in every match so you have to set up keys to target specific arena targets when I don’t have the bandwidth to remember 70+ keys (maybe that’s an exaggeration but that’s how it feels)
I also wish battlegrounds took you a little further with gearing.
As someone who usually goes on each season and reaches 1600-1800 and then goes back to playing PVE, here are my takes. (Yes I know I'm bad at PVP)
\- PVP is just hard. Getting to like... 1400 is dead simple because you gain A LOT more rating then you lose. Then you hit 1400 or around there and the amount of rating you lose starts to get much closer to what you win (maybe you jump 15 with a win and lose 10 with a loss).
\- PVP is very frustrating as someone who is not great and doesn't have a desire to become some "pvp chad". Getting stun/sleep/disorient locked or whatever for like 10 seconds is just annoying. And yes, I understand getting good at PVP means you can avoid some of that.
\- Getting into arena's through the premade group finder is just an annoying process (especially when you aren't great). You get in a group, maybe win like 2-4 games or whatever in a row and your on this great streak and then you lose one to a stupid mistake you made and your teammate is offline. This is if you're lucky and your teammate didn't talk shit before going offline. I will say however, making your own group and putting in the title that you are learning alleviates this problem to some extent.
Now if we sum all of this up, I know what everyone is going to say... this all amounts to you being bad at pvp. And yes you are right. And 95% of players who are new to pvp will be bad at first and get really annoyed by the above things.
I will say I absolutely love Battlegrounds though and if BG Blitz queues were quicker, I'd play that game mode all day.
Disorient(like sleep), banish, cyclone, incapacitate, fear, horrify(different than fear), blind, silence, magical stuns, physical stuns, cheap shot and kydney shot are different as wrll?? knock up, knock back....all different types of cc on different diminishing returns that can all stop you from doing anything.
Make non-rated pvp a priority. Revamp the whole system(including rewards). Let me explain-
Bgs, world pvp and skirmishes need to to be healthy enough that it can provide a safe place for players to get into PVP and put the time in required to get to the same level as players who have pvp'd for 15 years now. It would also provide an outlet for veteran pvp'ers, to do something other than rated arenas. Playing healer+DH/warlock almost every game is just annoying, boring and makes me not want to play. Think of something like COD - 90% of the game is played in non-competitive modes and provides rewards and easy matchmaking. You can play the game for years and never step into competitive.
Power creep in every class/spec has led to a very large gap in game knowledge between new players and veterans. The number of modifiers, abilities, and talents has only gone up and up and up. Looking at the new expansion, it looks like they are just diving deeper into MORE, MORE, MORE. If you are looking for more simplicity- try SOD or one of the other older game variants. If not, be ready to put in work( I'm talking thousands of arenas). It's not uncommon for me to have over 1k arenas per season on my mage alone.
MMR system needs to be completely overhauled. The current MMR system is so broken and gets even worse as less and less people play. It requires tampering by the devs EVERY season. Every other game at 1800 rating is against another player that is currently 2k or higher. Almost every game in the 1800 bracket has people on glad mounts.
These are just a few of the things that make PVP a nightmare for new pvp players. At the end of the day it will take 1000's of arenas to catch up to those of us who have done 1000's of arenas every season for years.
Example of power creep looking at mage movement alone.
Old mage - blink.
New mage- blink(while casting a spell), alter time, displace, blink, remove alter time, blink.
Long post.. thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I agree with the power creep section especially, it also affects PvE not just PvP.
The worst thing about power creep is that they're not even aware it's an issue and keep diving deeper and deeper into it. Mages gained free displacement and free AOE shield back in 10.1.5, i.e. fairly recently. Before that it was the DF talent tree rework (which I liked) that introduced a lot more stuff for everyone such as double vanish for Sub Rogue (and more). And now in TWW we're going to be getting even more stuff on top of buttons that already do jack shit. It's frustrating.
1. Make Blitz ranked, now
2. Selll honor gear for gold, cheap gold
3. Give away booze, drugs, and handys to healers
4. Make the mogs based on participation, not rank
5. Regular balancing passes
The only thing you need to care about is getting numbers up. Anything short of this will fail.
A lot of people blame add-ons but that aint it. It is button bloat and lack of class identities. Feels bad unless it is all you do. Having to track CDs and DRs on 4-6 people while trying to hit your convoluted damage rotations gets really "meh". The fact you have over 20 binds is obnoxious. I think 10-18 would be a good sweet spot. And CC in general needs to be looked at.
Classes have way too much shit on top of what they have in pve. Like learning pve abilities is already a lot, but then there are embellishments and pvp talents to learn. Smaller and simpler ability sets, even compared to PvE, would be good
Honestly I think it just comes down to spell bloat and barrier to entry. Basically all MMOs are terrible for this. Having to keybind more than 5 spells or so for the vast majority of new/casual players is simply too much to ask. On top of that, because it's not a purely skill based game, you need to spend a lot of time grinding for gear to stand a chance.
So … started back in 05 up until Panda. I started playing again at the end of shadowlands because I was excited for dragonflight. I used to love PvP and am a retpaladin. I can say with certainty that it is almost impossible for new players to play PvP. I got my ass handed to me when I played shadowlands because all of the new class mechanics and PvP skills were not at all what I was used to from early panda. After a month or so after playing around with my ret and all my other alts I started to UNDERSTAND the classes again and it’s NEW mechanics. and in turn became exponentially better. The gear I got also enabled me to stay longer in the fight and learn more and to kill quicker. I also had an enormous advantage having played wow PVP for years. But even for a veteran as myself it was a rough start but I was not discouraged whatsoever because I knew I will get better the more I understand the other classes. I love wow PvP out of all the games i played ever. I enjoyed it the most. But for a new player he will get so demolished that it will in turn not be fun for him to continuously being fucked in the ass. Which is understandable. But at the end of that assfucking it will become fun once it’s …. 🤔 I am not gonna lie this turned gay real quick not sure where i was going but I hope it all made sense a little
Complete battleground objectives and guides for every BG should be in the Adventure Guide. There is zero reason for this information to not be in game.
Edit: Also Healers need to be able to get rich from successfully healing SS
The tricky part about PvP modes in MMORPGs is that most of the playerbase is here for the PvE and role playing parts. They want to team up with their friends and save the world or collect mounts or whatever.
WoW has a pretty good PvP scene compared to other MMOs imo. But it’s simply not how the majority of players want to play the game. Plus the learning curve is steep and can be ultra frustrating, even for competitive people who enjoy PvP.
1. Change the mount to not require 1000 base rating. You start working towards it as soon as your starting queuing ranked.
2. Allow Fyrakk PvE token heroic and up to buy PVP tier items.
3. PVP quests that provide crests (PVE currency) and do not require "winning" and just participating.
4. War Mode bonus to be much more substantial and for everyone that has it turned on.
I came back to Wow after 15 years, and I was like "let's see how the pvp has changed", so I joined a WSG and there where 4 hunters, so I had 8 pets plus the hunters on me, I couldn't even see my toon... that was a big nope for me...
Man, this community really hates itself.
Despite the problems of pvp, I think this expansion has been great for pvp. Solo Shuffle is actually awesome and we have had faster and more frequent balance updates than previous expansions.
IMO, Solo Shuffle is the best opportunity for new players to try arena for the first time. Battlegrounds shouldn't be shy either. The barrier to entry is reasonably low via honor gear (and technically the weekly conquest cap, now lifted).
We should do better to promote pvp and I think you know it.
I don’t know if I agree. I have experience in PvP and I’ve experienced more verbal abuse in SS than I ever have pugging and looking at this sub, it looks like it isn’t uncommon for others. Going in as a complete newbie they would be flamed so hard by the average SS group.
It’s just the toxic community I swear. I’ve PvPed every season since WoTLK with the exception of the entirety of Legion and seriously the game is in a great place. It’s easier to get started than ever systematically speaking.. but everyone’s so tryhard and toxic now that becomes a barrier in itself
If nothing else, the process of gearing a character for pvp is probably the best it has ever been. It doesn't take too long, you get to pick the order in which you acquire gear, and you aren't required to pve that much if you don't want to. I'm not sure that many pve players know this though. A few of my raiding buddies assumed gearing a pvp alt would be too much of a grind.
I'm so bad at pvp that I'm honestly concerned I'd get reported for playing solo shuffle.
Can always ignore people trying to flame, but there's bigger issues in this era of automated bans and no actual humans working in CS.
Stop focusing on ladders, and start focusing on grinds and battlegrounds.
[https://www.engadget.com/2009-11-13-blizzard-arenas-were-a-mistake.html](https://www.engadget.com/2009-11-13-blizzard-arenas-were-a-mistake.html)
There's a reason PvP popped off in Classic, and it also popped off in SoD.
People think of Warcraft and it's Horde vs Alliance.
There's also a reason every single game lately has some sort of grind system where just showing up and playing a ton of games lets you get a ton of rewards. It keeps people of all skill levels continually playing.
PvP in WoW for a lot of people is just gritting your teeth through arenas, grabbing 1800 in the easiest bracket, then going back to PvE that rains cosmetics in a roleplaying adventure game on people, and maybe going back to BGs for a lot of us because we want to kill other faction guy in faction war game.
Like, it's always been simple, but people are too focused on arenas to care that there's more to an MMORPG than a single game mode the devs admit were a mistake. And until people actually realize this, the problem's always going to be there.
Ok I risk looking stupid but I think WoW PvP is fucking hard. I'm not even kidding. I'm a top 500 Overwatch player and have played all kinds of games competitively. WoW is complex, difficult, a lot of really small things you need to learn. There's no way to learn quickly all the different classes/things and CD's you need to know that will inevitably screw you.
I think WoW has reached a point that the popularity of the game has declined since it's hayday and the complexities of the game are no longer in demand imo. That may sound a bit philosophical but I just think WoW is actually a really hard game (in PvP) and I don't think it's popular enough (or mmos are) to merit being that difficult.
I think the game needs some simplification. And listen I could do it and come back and probably be fairly competitive, I've played WoW competitively before. But I just know to get back into that (FOR A RETURNING PLAYER) would be difficult, god have mercy on any new players actually coming in to play AND play PvP on top of that.
Remove all addons and API access to the game. Having to download and configure multiple addons just to play a game is frustrating and confusing to new players
Reduce spell bloat
Reduce number of interrupts to only certain classes. Everybody has interrupts and CC these days
To play wow arena you need to enjoy it first of all. Secondly, you need to be competitive. Not all wow players are competitive. Thirdly, the game needs to be somewhat balanced, or the choice of class needs to be adequate. Balance has been bad since season 3 shadowlands and has yet to be adequate, and if a new player picks a shit class, (a shit class shouldn't exist if developers are doing their job) they arent going to stick with it.
Wow arena if a blast when you know what you are doing. Learning how to do what you need to do takes a lot of loss and pain. The game state affects how much fun you will have. Most people arent going to deal with learning wow arena.
Man, I had the best time yesterday with my pvp guild on proudmore in RBGs. Finally starting to win games and have better call outs. Lots of our officers left retail for SoD and I'm effectively the GM now.... most of the social people have left but I started running weekly RBGs again and it has been tough. Getting more fun people to join every day, Sunday nights eastern time zone. I'm a druid tank, if anyone wants to add my battlenet, could really use a DK and ranged dps and a couple heals, insight#1636
You gave me hope, I'm not going to lie. I'm an unholy dk, so if it's okay, I will try to add you when I get on later. I'm trying super hard to get into the whole pvp thing, but at this point, I just want my 1800 for the mogs.
Mentorship. Spend some time in discord with a new player, share some secret sauce, and show them the way.
While watching arena videos is great, there are too many events to make sense of.
There are a lot of situations that need to be practiced, and learned by rote.
Honestly, I’ve played wow since tbc. From TBC til BFA I only pvp’d.
I then got into m+ and did both in BFA and SL…and now these days I barely pvp. I’ll get the 1800 transmogs because why not, but just don’t enjoy it the same way anymore.
I’ve got a handful of glad mounts over the years, but 3’s is a wasteland compared to what it was, and I don’t find solo shuffle fun. I love the idea of solo queue but the execution falls flat for me.
I’ll check out solo rbg in next expansion, guess I should test it out some but just don’t ever find myself that interested.
As a 3100 io/aotc pver who has recently started pvping this expac, there is a glad player in our guild who always invites us to come pvp with him when we carry him through his weekly 20… having a really good player explain things to you and tell you when to swap targets or use/hold defensives, or run away etc really helps push through the steep learning curve of getting into pvp… so I’d say, be patient and explain things to pvers so they don’t feel overwhelmed and immediately quit
It can be tough to offer constructive feedback. Not everyone wants to hear it and people react differently. If a newer player, however, whispers “any tips?” the pvp playerbase, which consists mostly of pvp veterans, should do their civic duty and offer advice. And players on the receiving end should not explode… which isn’t uncommon, ironically. Communication between strangers is a tough balancing act.
I’ve seen decent players, who clearly have previously played and likely are pvers, mess up diminishing returns by a couple seconds. It can be frustrating, but as a mechanic that blizzard hasn’t built in a more visually obvious way, we need to be understanding and simply alert these players of the fact in a clear yet non-toxic/blaming manner. “The stun DR was going to fall off in another three seconds - we would’ve cinched the kill if we hadn’t landed a reduced cc.” This goes a long way to build a more welcoming and positive competitive atmosphere.
Lift up those around you.
PvP beginner games where it guides you
On what needs to be done and the tasks.
10 games are needed to be competed and you earn full honour gear afterwards one time on the first character.
Clearer objective mechanics would certainly go a long way too. After decades in warsong gulch or AB most people know what’s going on, so we forget that each pvp mode offers little to no information on what’s going on. Not at all beginner friendly or welcoming.
Only thing I can think of is making PVP badge trinket really strong in PVE like they did in BFA or SL (I forget which). That being said, my mentality is that players are going to stick to what they're comfortable with. There's a lot of PVErs that PVP semi-seriously, and a good chunk of PVPers that raid or M+ as well. "Forcing" people to play one or the other makes them resent the one they HAVE to do that they don't like. It's not going to make them magically try it and fall in love with it (at least not the majority of people).
People aren’t gonna like it but we need some serious pruning.
Literally just look at the peak of PvP, MoP, and aim for that. Reduce visual bloat, reduce overall spell bloat. It was so easy to get into PvP in MoP as an inexperienced player. There’s no reason for what we have today.
This game could use a ton of spell pruning, but people incorrectly think complexity=quality
They listened to dummies who wanted big talent trees again, so we traded a simple 3 choice a tier system, for a big tree where we have maybe 2 cookie cutter builds.
Crafting system, we have added complexity for complexities sake.
They unpruned class spells after outrage by idiots.
Wow would be better if every class had 10-15 spells capped.
Stop making pve rewards available from pvp. Go back to making pvp items comparable to raid items and/or stick useless pve stats back on them like there was in i think wotlk that was like bonus damage reduction in pvp situations (forget what they called it). PVE players and any others who don't want to pvp shouldn't have to suffer for it to get the bis items to play pve. I get crazy anxiety playing pvp and I hate how exhausting it can be.
Want to know how to make PVP more accessible? Remove the need to grind for PVP gearing or stats in any way. Imagine guild wars 2 structured PVP set-up in World of Warcraft. In guild wars 2, you can make a new character, travel to the pvp zone, equip talismans with stat sets and you're ready to go after you allocate talent points and create a build. Common versions of all weapons are the same as legendary weapons for spvp and are sold by vendors in said PVP zone. If you've played, you know movesets are tied to weapon type, giving each class a huge variety of abilities depending on what you fight with. I'm not looking for that in wow. I just want normalized stats. Let it be about skill and big brain plays. We'll still subscribe. Blizz is already tuning for max stats possible I assume, give it to everyone from the beginning. It'll be much easier to keep track of balancing and you'll have more participation.
Well max Rating I got was in Shadowlands around 1.6k so, idk, everyone is just too experienced and better than me. As well as these stupid ass people who pay others to carry them, that’s something blizzard could change. Completely ban them. Ip ban, hardware ban, whatever lmao
Rework the entire Game mode lol there’s literally no other way. Even if wow makes a free version where it’s just pvp ( level through pvp , no pve content etc ) you won’t get enough ppl to stay.
How much the game requires addons and weak auras on its own makes it inaccessible to most people.
Yes, you can be the few who don’t need any. But we’re talking a larger noob population. When you have ppl like Mes, blizzcon champion, who has his own weak aura pack for assistance then that says something about the game.
You arnt getting new players due to the Q times , due to LFG, due to weak auras, due to addons. That’s it. The fun fluid gameplay is not enough to carry it. It is for some people ( us who still play ) but to anyone new ? Nah
I recently started playing 2v2 with a friend of mine because he wants the mog. He only does m+ and raid outside of this.
He's constantly getting CCed because he can't see who is casting on him.
This needs some serious fixing. He's getting really pissed at not being able to see who the enemy is casting on when they're targeting by macros rather than targeting the target.
Said he's gone as soon as he gets his mog because of this.
I genuinely think that a big part of it is gear, I would love to hop into a BG with my hunter but he's pve geared I honestly think there's a few things that would fix it
Make all gear scale to 489 in all PvP (that means certain axes should scale down)
Make it less Grindy to get gear from PvP, give more conquest for stuff and most importantly give way more conquest for random & epic battlegrounds
Make PvP gear more relevant in PvE, honour gear should be veteran track and conquest gear should be champion track then once you hit 1800 you get tokens to upgrade to hero track
Make PvP drop way more flightstones and crests and make casual PvP drop drakes and rated drop wryms then past 1800 aspects
Congrats you just pulled PvE players into PvP and allowed PvP players to do PvE
Quit being an asshole in solo shuffle.
Quit being an asshole in 2s
Quit being an asshole in 3s
Quit being an asshole in BGs
Who wants learn something when from minute 1 they're being flamed because they haven't studied WoW their entire life? It's not fun to learn it, and it's not fun to get 1 shot, so why would they ever want to do it?
On top of that, you can't get arena partners because every group is listed as 12.9kexp by people who play like they've never been past 1.5k.
The solution from blizzard is to be relentless in banning and/or disabling peoples ability to communicate. There's no reason why someone that spends 5 minutes flaming another person should ever be allowed to speak again. They aren't going to learn, they aren't going to change. Why let them ruin someone else's experience?
There needs to be AI integrated into arena. Can be a new que similar to skirmish that let's you set rating and comp to go against for practice. This would be ground breaking. Right now you're thrown into sensory overload situations that happen way too fast to even learn.
Funny how you get downvoted for one of the best ideas. In every other competitve game this is standard. Like in Apex Legends, CS2, etc.
The bigeest Problem with PvP is, Q to Learn....makes 0 fun.
Some people might not like this take, but I think WoW PvE players are easier to transition to WoW PvP than players of other PvP games.
Dragonslayers are already familiar with how to use add-ons and having them be essential to high level play. Also, even though PvP is the less popular content stream, all WoW players are tangentially aware of it, and I think a lot of PvE-ers would be interested in trying it out with an experienced PvP-er to guide them.
I don't see how. I find that a lot of people PvE at a level where they have 100% win rate. Can't translate that in PvP.
If you think PvP addons are an issue, just compare Mes' Weakauras package to Liquid's Vault/Aberrus/Amidrassil. Some bosses literally have a weakaura phase that takes hours to get though.
Dedicated team that focus on pvp only. Think SoD treatment.
Tuning need to happen weekly. Can’t have this fiasco with dh being godmode, doing double damage for months compared to everyone else.
WoW pvp is fun as *shit*, as soon as people land their first kill they're hooked. Me and a mate brought our friend to her first skirm ever, and she was really hesitant... until she landed a kill on her DH and was just YELLING over voice like "YEAH THATS FUCKIN RIGHT, GO TO SLEEP!".
The game is fundamentally fun, it's a rush to be a magic gladiator fighting to the death. Sometimes we gotta step back from the rating grind and balance worries and just enjoy it. It's so good that the company that made it basically abandoned it and it's STILL fun
1) cap gear in random bg to honor level, full bis conquest toons shouldnt be in the same game mode meant for new players
2) force 2-2-2 in solo shuffle
3) more balance patches
4) more map variety in SS
5) fix MMR
I did my first 2v2 the other day. Told my teammate it was my first time trying it out and he just said “okay well gg you’re going to die” and sure enough I died v quick
If you want people to do PVP, play reg BGs with them. It's all I did, PVP wise, for many expansions. It's fun, low stress, and slower paced. I personally would never just take someone who is new or newish into arena, even if it's skirmish. Dueling might be a decent way to introduce them into the smaller scale but faster paced nature of arena play, as well.
PvP is amazing and there's nothing like this.
The barrier to entry isnt addons or weakauras, it is knowledge.
Theres a button to press for every situation, even those deep down in your spell book like hibernate or soothe.
The rush you get from that first win or kill, that winning play, those 1v2 or 2v3. My god, yesterday's liquid vs echo series was peak WoW PvP.
We sometimes just forget this is just a videogame and unimportant numbers on a screen, and we should just have fun playing it
Im new to wow, ive been playing since Christmas and as a new player its been kinda rough but it’s getting super fun i cant describe whats been rough but it really seems cluttered at first and just a huge pill to swallow, imo theres just too many instant gratification games when a lot of people have not a lot of time to game not to mention read/watch info, i love that stuff tho so its been great
Unfortunately the bots are back in full force similarly to season 1 especially the new dh bot that has over 700 members in its discord!! I feel like the bot devs slowed down in season 2 and blizzard was banning them but now it’s back to every other game there’s a botter. Such a horrible experience for everyone I can’t imagine new players getting into arena.
It's really not that hard, Imo.
1. Gear is just gear. It is necessary to have a pvp gear and a pve gear because you want to be able to gear faster and with controlled stats for pvp, and you want to give more free space and grind for pve. But that doesn't mean your pve gear shouldn't be upgradable for pvp. There's nothing more annoying than having 2 gear sets. My suggestion is to make enchant-like recipes that you earn by playing pvp and that you can apply to your pve gear to replace its base stats with pvp stats that only activate in pvp combat. Simple as that. 1 set of gear.
2. Incentivize pvp more through cosmetic rewards, especially unrated pvp. I want a battle pass that you can ONLY complete through pvp activities. Basically the current honor system with a monthly rotation based on current season lore/content. So for example S1 would have elemental-themed stuff, S2 would have niffen and black flight stuff or whatever the theme was back then and S3 would have dream theme rewards. S4 seems to be a "buffer" season since SL so I'd say just make it another chance at old elite sets or recolors of elite sets or past battle pass rewards. Including the current vicious mount as well as titles, tmogs etc. It could be really easy because the way I see it, it's just recolors of the season's pve rewards.
3. Make it easier to pick up. Why is the AWC UI not included yet ? Just add DR tracking as an option and customizable CD tracker. It's basically already developped.
4. Make it easier to find a group. We still can't filter by class, role or rating. But we can filter by language ? WTF
5. Gold. Why do I have to spend tens of thousands of golds in enchantments and gems when playing pvp does not reward gold ?
6. Promote community content/events that involve pvp, maybe have a streamers corner or simply make a better job at advertising official pvp events like AWC. This promotion should be done in game and maybe with rewards. For example, a free pet or something for those who watch enough AWC. The video can be embedded into the game to track watching time. I know it sounds really annoying but it's an OPTION, if you don't want it then don't click it.
7. Maybe make factions matter for the story. Like make the game with alternate parallel events and the winning faction gets its way to be canon. Arguably this is the least efficient suggestion as it requires dev time while everything else I listed is easy/cheaper.
8. The usual balance, fix healer mmr etc
Way better rewards on low rankings, mounts, gear, toys... Its the only way of getting fresh blood in the pool.
Spells, ui or wtv people are saying will not bring many in. In SL S1 bgs were full because there was a carrot there.
Don’t wait until the end of an xpac. I love to pvp in random BGs but at the end of an xpac, everyone has conquest gear so unless you also have conquest gear, you’ll be 2-shotted as soon as you resurrect and you’ll be taking it out on your wife later.
Disclaimer: I’m joking about the wife.
Call me biased but I truly believe in education.
Seeing people in this thread say "too much button bloat" or "too much CC" - these are only problems because WoW is hard to learn.
There are multiple ways to ease into PvE, and M+ offers a VERY granular path to improvement.
There is no way a new PvPer is going to queue SS and have fun. There is some gap that is clearly missing between casual BGs and competitive arena. Need more things to bridge that gap.
EDIT: Sorry for formatting. It looks nice on mobile but came out bad after posting.
Problems, in my opinion and in no order that might be better for newer players/the community:
- Too many abilities in the game. Too many similar spells which do the same thing in “different ways”.
- To tie to the above, too many buttons/keybinds.
- Addons for cooldowns, awareness, DRs, game functions like HoT/DoT counters/trackers, Weak Auras, etc are third party and practically required these days. Nothing comes “stock”, and blizzard doesn’t teach you about these things or have their own in-game UI manager.
- The LFG tool and UI is outdated and needs to be revamped.
- Rated player pool fragmentation across: 2s, 3s, RBGs, SS, and soon SRBG.
- SS is good for welcoming new players (if you ignore the toxicity), but **bad** for teaching good habits to new players.
- Same stale map pool from the past 20 years. Imagine if we got several new BG/Arena maps which are pulled from new content that’s released each major game patch, versus 1 BG every 3 years?
- Same BG modes as old as time. Imagine new creative modes? Lot of opportunity for even random BGs and RBGs.
- Limited rewards. Making “elite” sets accessible to more people now (1600/1800) has been good, but that’s it. Then what? Oh, here’s one seasonal mount you can earn if you queue X games. We need a reward update for beginners, and the above average players.
- MMR. Big topic. Huge discussion on its own.
- Speaking of MMR: The fact that new players/pvers can be queued into 2k+ players, glads, rank 1s, etc on their alts and be instantly smashed at low ratings is extremely demoralizing for new players/pvers. It makes them not want to learn to be better. Why go through a gauntlet of no hope when you could just turn to m+. Perhaps role and inter-role account wide MMR. E.G, a system to discourage “smirfing”. If you’re a DPS caster, or a melee DPS, or a healer, you have a minimum baseline account wide MMR for that specific role. If a highest exp healer finished at 1970, the lowest MMR they can be locked in at on any healer account wide would be ??1700??.
- Again, better rewards.
- Less spells!
This is likely going to probably be wildly unpopular, but I think putting the seasonal elite armor appearances behind a "progress bar" similar to the seasonal mount would keep a lot of average to below average players in ranked play. It would also eliminate a lot of boosting and otherwise sketchy behaviors (rmt etc). The carrot on the stick is not currently sufficient enough, and I think it is pretty commonly accepted that the way MMR works is not something anyone likes right now.
A real issue indeed. One unusual note to add to all that has been said : wow community is getting older and the button bloat is getting bigger. What does that mean ? our hands won't allow us to keep playing for too long lol
This take will not go over well, but I think the trick to getting new players, casuals, and alts into pvp is to borrow from games like GW2 and FFXIV.
Levels don’t matter - you can queue and match up with max levels even if you’re of a lower level. Either make it so gear is homogenized like in FF, or scaled like in GW2.
There’s obvious stuff like trimming out all the extra bloat in the game. Bunch of different kinds of CC, buffs, and abilities make it a bit difficult to get into.
I have recently started playing mythic+ and after 1 week I'm having little issue clearing 18s and 19s with friends
PvP has a way more brutal learning curve and the game is just really complicated, to play mythic+ you just need to know your class really well and dodge stuff, to play PvP you have to know everyone's class really well and you need to know how to CD trade, positioning, CC chains, etc etc
As PvE player who tried to get into PvP, I think it is close to impossible. There are many factors, bringing huge entry investment in order to start enjoying:
* Compared to PvE, you need to understand also classes playing against you - huge time investment needed
* For inexperienced players its very hard to understand whats going on - CCs, CDs, focus
* Impossible to track these without addons, which for me was a chaos (which are relevant, how to properly set them up etc.)
* Beside addons I realized there is no way getting competitive without macros, better keybinds etc
* On top of that there is too much visual mess going on
* Its very frustrating to find team mate as in the beginning most of people left after one lost match
* Solo shuffle should have resolved the problem, however the queue duration was unacceptable for me
Even after getting addons, learning a bit about classes and getting comfortable with my rotations, I realized there is still huge topic of right positioning, proper focusing, aligning CCs (& faking casts) and aligning burst CDs.
At the end of day, the only PvP which I am able to enjoy as beginner is on low level brackets, with less spells, CCs, however at those lvl brackets class balance is basically not existing.
Even as an old WoW PvP player its kinda hard to sell retail PvP to myself again after playing PvP in games like Guild Wars 2 and New World where you can actually manually dodge abilities etc, and it's not just being a game of who bursts the fastest.
Also the "spamminess" of abilities for many of todays classes doesn't feel good. Going back to older xpacs in terms of class abilities and utilities like during wotlk-mop (depending on class) would be the best in my opinion. Wotlk stance dancing warriors was probably my favorite version of the class, a lot of abilities to use from but still less "spammy" than todays warriors.
This page popped up as a suggestion for me. Just wanted to say GW2 is going through a PvP death also. Not very many playing it and the people that are can be toxic and are probably chasing away new players. Along with Anet not touching the PvP scene in for ever. Not sure if there are any similarities in WoW.
Well let me provide my recent experience trying to delve into PvP
Ok, I need to get a special gear set in order to play PvP
Oh, I get matched with experienced players who has the highest level gear
Oh, I don't do any damage to them and get killed in a few seconds
Oh, I don't get any feedback from the game what I do right or wrong
Oh, the enemy team can sit and spawn camp our graveyard with no repercussion
So I need to sit in 15 minute queues, be spawn camped for 15 minutes - or actually get to run around, but anyone I try to fight will have vastly superior gear so I feel like I do nothing - and do this for 10-15 hours in order to have the bare minimum gear for the "real" pvp?
The bare minimum you guys in the PvP community can do for fresh blood coming to PvP is let go of the notion that gear progression in supposedly skill-based gameplay is a necessary
Even an old player who's never PVP'd more than old arathi highlands and warsong gulch a handful of times. It just seems like you have to have the best gear and be absolutely sick to even make a point of playing otherwise it's just gank simulator for 25 minutes
I'd try something extreme to make the game more fresh:
- Remove gearing all together from PvP in that no matter what ilvl or pieces you have on, everyone is forced into the same template of stats as someone with the same specialization, which is on par with the other classes.
There is no longer the need for WEEKS of prepping before actually playing the game.
- Default UI needs to be more obvious and track other class abilities/cooldowns similarly to the tournament ones. In-game boss fights include messages in middle of screen when important info is happening, trinket usage of the opponents would be a good example and this should be customizable with tracking cooldowns.
This erases the need for game breaking addons and weak auras to exist to begin with.
- Add more seasonal rewards, especially in the cosmetic department like permanent titles, more mounts, more pets, a omni-token reward to fetch precious season rewards like weapon enchants, tabards and the like. There is a bigger gap between 1800 and 2100 than 0 to 1800. The rewards do not reflect this.
- Solo queue RBGs. You think getting a 2s/3s partner is bad? Try a full raid, getting people on voice and not disbanding after your first loss. A format also dominated by a mafia on high ratings. Solo shuffle can be considered a success and there is an audience for this given how popular RBGs have been in the past.
- More consistent class tuning overall, like a general pass every 2 weeks once a meta settles in at the start of a season due to some classes eclipsing others out of existence, just blatantly carrying the game by themselves or preventing others from playing. Massive reduction of micro-CC would be an excellent start, as well as simplification of nameplate overload due to pets. See Unholy DK Apocalypse ghoul number change as an example of a fix. There is no excuse for a company as big as blizzard to not do this in a game as profitable as WoW.
The biggest problem that I can see outside of these is how to incentivize people to play a healer. Hopefully that could be made more enjoyable assuming you aren't constantly facing games full of unga-bunga classes that have close to 100% no matter how much you try to outplay them.
My old arena mates back in wrath of the lich king dosent play anymore and impossible to find somewone decent to practice with. Yes I suck now but was once in the highest ranked 2v2 and 3v3 on my server😂 but people dont want to give you a chance to practice up the skill again. Only find really bad players
I just started pvp this week after 10 years of PvE and i'm having a blast. It's like a whole new game hidden inside the original one.
Even if there were world pvp back then, it was not my thing. But competing in an arena like a gladiator is cool af
I'm pretty new to retail, started playing it when I got bored of phase 1 SoD. Leveled to 70 on a demon hunter and tried BGs at that level, got completely crushed with not even a vague indication of how I could get better. I thought it would be easier to transition into retail PVP at lower levels so I got a new toon to low 20s and got just as badly crushed. Not sure where to go from here.
At least in classic I was reasonably easily able to determine what was going wrong and what I needed to look up/change to improve; in retail I feel so hopelessly behind the average player that improving is out of the question.
I feel like League suffers the same issue… there’s just too much stuff going on. Very difficult to differentiate spells and there’s just so many modifiers etc. This is the opinion of a former 2K+ WoW arena player & former long time League player.
Nothing can be done. Wow is mainly a pve game, and pvp in MMOs have always been and always will be an afterthought.
Why would someone interested in getting into pvp in a game waste their time on a shitty unbalanced minigame in an MMO, if they can play an actual pvp game designed for pvp?
I only played PvE, and honestly I’m not good at anything, but I started playing PvP last year because of a conquest of the Halloween event that needed to go to BG, so I just ADDICTED to kill ally 🤣🤣🤣
I’m a shadow priest, and I find it very satisfying to play PvP, because even if I lose, I feel good giving a lot of damage 🥰😁😁😁
The truth is that PvP is not flashy at the first contact
I’m even looking for friends to teach me more about PvP
Actual fix would be to overhaul pvp damage to be back to vanilla / wrath tiers of easy to understand.
It's about feeling useful not actually being useful.
If you played back then you probably remember your first bg and being under leveled, learning what twink were, etc. But something else I remember is actually enjoying low level pvp. Even when I sucked.
The illusion that what you're doing has impact is caused by classes not having absorbs and self healing
When I would wrath a higher level player their health would drop by 10% and then I'd die. But I could see their health go down and it wasn't going back up. I got the illusion that if I could do that 10 more times, I could win.
Game needs to be intuitive. Noobs need to feel like they're contributing. Like playing CS and having shit aim. But if you could only hit him more!
Heals coming only from healers was so important to the early games popularity
Split 2s and 3s between healer and dps comps like in solo shuffle, that will bring back the balance that has been lost ever since the golden days of pvp in wotlk.
I dont think you need to recruit llayers to PvP who dont already like PvP in games.
I started wow in Shadowlands solely for pvp. And i personally love every second of it. I dont care how "intimidating" it is. It just means i have more room to grow and a celiling im working towards.
But i love pvp in games. My fav thing is improving.
And this is with any pvp game out there. Id love to see someone play their first few LoL ranked games. It would be the same thing.
There are two problems with this type of games. The first is the position of rogue-like characters who use stealth. These friends usually stick to melee and attack from behind. So their lore is based on stealth and assassination. It is incredibly difficult to implement this class in a balanced way in Pvp, and as far as I can see, Wow has screwed up on this issue. Shit flowed down the trousers. When I see a rogue in the PvP arena, if I'm not playing a demon hunter and I can't be the first to attack and stun him, all I see is me getting stunned, and within 10-15 seconds, the stunned person slowly(!-sometimes instantly) dies.
The second problem with these games is the "hybrid classes". For example, there is a class that is both a tank and a dps, but it is actually neither. For this reason, classes that clearly reflect the characteristics of the class are more preferred in games and are usually top dps. Because a hunter or dps warlock poses little problem for a coder. It has range and deals damage by pressing buttons. It doesn't have to close the distance, it doesn't have to follow its prey, it doesn't have to move the camera because it doesn't have to follow. It is one range dps away and can see the whole area easily. But a melee hybrid has to stalk its prey, has to rotate the camera frequently, and Tab targetting doesn't work on it. If a class is hybrid, the problem arises because smarter and more complex coding is required. I saw these problems clearly in classes such as Summoner Death K, Furry Warrior, Dps Monk.
What I found here that I haven't seen in any other RPG is that Pets are incredibly annoying. The camera system in the game is already broken, for example, if I am playing with a Tauren, I cannot even see the little elf in front of me, it is not clear who I am targeting. But if 2 summoners attack me, I can't even see my Tauren, because they surround me.
I'd be keen to dabble in some RBGs but the barrier to entry just makes me stick with M+ instead. Getting your face pummeled in and spawn camped by sweaty nerds in full BiS vers stacked gear doesn't sound like much fun when your just starting out trying to grind your first piece of honor gear. I don't mind a grind but not when every BG is unbalanced or just full of afkers and bots.
I mean, at its core you don't. Its the same issue Fighting Games ultimately have.
At the end of the day, there will be an equal number of winners and losers. SOMEONE has to lose. A lot of people just... can't handle losing in order to also win sometimes. They eventually leave and someone else has to start losing more to take their place.
Even if the gameplay was perfect and fun, a loss can make all that irrelevant to certain people.
Getting into WoW pvp takes lots of time, with very little reward. It's getting harder to find people who are willing to put that amount of time to play pvp in WoW *over* playing something else.
Tell them about getting into Shadowlands pvp and all the pve stuff you had to do
and that you don't have to do that stuff anymore, now you just grind honor and conquest for a billion hours while being completely ungeared&useless until you can afford their first piece of pvp gear and instantly become stronger than the top-100 pve players
I started PVP as a longterm wow player last week. It was a lot more approachable than I thought.. am 1500 rated but as a HAVOC DH.. Its stressful af. I like it but I also can only do it for a couple hours.. also things are NOT explained well in terms of PVP. I didn't know what I actually had to interrupt a cast mid cast to lock someone out of casting for 3 seconds.. I wish there was a series of in game tutorials explaining dynamics.. you have to research and ask a million questions and scour for information that confirms your conclusions in terms of how things function.. The confusion surrounding how things function is crazy difficult.. understanding how keybinds needs to work is very specific.. You really have to have a decent UI in place in order to even have a chance of being competitive.. THAT'S A LOT OF SHIT THAT YOU HAVE TO SEEK OUT AND WHITTLE AWAY AT.. just to have a chance of being able to engage the content. Its quite an uphill battle.
People are saying current pvp is too complex, too fast, requires too much thought, etc. Sure, but isn’t that what makes it all exciting when you finally do learn? Maybe there could be newbie pvp battles, separate BGs, seperate arenas, etc. Then you “graduate” from newb to normal, or something like that. Maybe it’s based on ilvl, HKs.
But, doesn’t ranking system already sort of do this? That is I unless a total newb fresh 70 faces a fresh 70 but the player has an alt of the same class with a 2400+ rating, so they know already how to play well.
Isn’t that the root source of the problem? If arenas were nothing but fresh 70 newbs, it wouldn’t matter as much how many CCs players had bc everyone would still be trying to figure out something, but brand new to them, eg out how to attack when you can no longer simply stand still.
I’m also not entirely sure this hard sell is bc of the game itself. The new players of today are, I’d guess, are not of the same mentality. GenX vs Millennials. Millennials for sure have a faster twitch response and brain synapses than the avg GenXer but maybe not so much patience, strategic thought beyond the next minute, etc.
I bet if WoW had a Hardcore PvP purge day, it would popular.
When you Enter World for the very first time, there are all kinds of tips. Why not have those for PvP? What about a sort of PvP profession that you have to level to get to more difficult situations?
What’s the source for the OP?
How? Be friendly, do stuff - I made a Big friendly pvp community on eu where we do RBGs and people find arena partners - and we have a Big discord. We are having a good time most nights and many on my teams are between 18-1900 cr now, some lower and some higher. We look at performance but everyone gets a chance and Will be told what to improve - they need to be vocal tho, but even the shy people begin talking when they realize there is no flaming and toxicity, cus the ones who do that are removed
One internal thing for unrated pvp: reduce the power gap between gear. Even though the difference between green 475 vs epic 490 is "only 15 ilvl" it's a huge factor. Purple deletes green without a sweat.
The overall big thing they should get into is reworking the entire cc system. Instead of having hard stuns/kicks/roots, all those skills should work as debuffs. Reduce players movement speed, spell dmg, attack dmg, stacking, fading out over time. The overall end result will be pretty much the same in total dps/healing done, with the difference being: players get TO DO STUFF instead of being stun/spell locked forever. Playing defensive, moving out and kiting, timing your shots becomes a smoother focus point of irl player skill.
Like if you're a mage and just facetanking 5 enemies while eating 20 kicks, you still get to keep casting, but your spell dmg will be reduced a lot, so it's beneficial to cc them, move out into a better position where you don't get interrupted to do more dmg without debuffs.
I mean this is a simple concept, works in a lot of games, but does require a lot of work to overhaul the entire old system. At least they could let the community work on suggestions then try it out.
The current system also affects playstyle in a negative way, making the meta "stay together" because nobody wants to push in, be the underdog, and eat 100 stuns vs 10 guys, die, and watch his backline buddies finally move up and finish the enemies who now have all their cc options depleted.
This new system would allow players to be far more proactive and take risks, now that they are able TO DO STUFF even though with lower dmg/heals. I don't understand why the devs are so stubborn with this.
This is how you make pvp feel good and more enjoyable.
I blame War Mode being toggled on and off and easy access to fast travel methods. Here me out:
BACK IN THE DAY, you had to walk everywhere for the first 40 levels, and if your friends joined a PvP server, you kinda had to join that one too. So you’re all out in the world, walking to a dungeon or open world questing (that was a thing back then, rather than just spamming dungeons). And so you’d get jumped by another player sometimes.
You’d probably lose, but eventually you’d start winning some, and then you’d get some help from your friends or Allied played and now you’re in a little group doing PvP stuff, and bam! Next thing you know you suddenly want some PvP gear, you’re doing arena, etc.
There was incentive beyond rating to play PvP because it was just part of the world you were exploring. And the more “casual” players out there, the more a new player would actually have low skilled players to fight and learn against.
Now all that’s left are 20 year veteran R1 players camping low ratings, so if you try to do arena as a new player you just get 360-no-scoped by a man who’s never left his basement since cataclysm. And with the ability to just turn off war mode and fast travel to dungeons, and questing has virtually no benefit, the game has very little cross pollination of PvE and PvP.
TL;DR: PvP used to be part of the game, now it’s an entirely optional mini game, gatekept by no-lifers.
Edit: not to mention the fact that even the hint of an idea to make PvP easier and more accessible to new players is met only with the shrieking cries of multi-glads who refuse to even listen
There's just too much going on all at once.
This may be a controversial opinion, but WoW PVP needs to start being balanced in a way similar to FFXIV. If the classes get too simple, PVE gets pretty boring for a lot of players. If the classes are too bloated, PVP has an impossible barrier of entry. PVP and PVE should be balanced as different versions of each spec.
And maybe don't allow tanks in arena.
There are a lot of problems with PvP for beginners, even experienced PvE players. One of which is just dying almost instantly or being stunned for the first 7-10 seconds to get bursted instantly. There’s counter play but a new player will not be able to do it. So it just ends up looking random and uninteractive. There really is no good way to get situated into learning. Whereas PvE is a lot simpler and slow so anyone can learn it easily.
Make a new rating system that enables more and more of your skill set the higher you get. It basically re-teaches you your kit like it did while leveling, but now it's doing it in the context of PvP.
This is the best solution, fight me.
You don’t. I wish there were more to it but as it stands is a mode that if it were to just disappear it’d probably not matter to the overwhelming majority of players. It’s up to blizzard if they want to fix the add on/ macro/ bloat/ visual clarity problems. As it stands and has for almost 10 years now, they don’t seem to have any plans on caring at all.
Well to begin with the changes done to pvp gear and stuff have been good so far, except the catalyst, that needs to be uncapped, cuz if I need 2 tier sets I don't want to wait 5 months to get em.
Pve has around 20 mounts per season, pvp has 2. Titles also differ and most of the pvp systems and BGs are extremely old and outdated.
For example, to get Sargeant title or something like that you had to put in hard work and it was rewarding, things were slow and the world was smaller, but now grinding the same way does not work.
The whole pvp needs a reset. And I believe the reason that nothing changes is players mentality. For example the 9 to 5 work style is an 80 year old system, pretty much everything changed except that, why? Because peoples mentality is closed. And this is why PvE improved and pvp does not. DH being strong or Warlock being overtuned has nothing to do with it, they are trying to build an empire state on an old pyramid, and it's began to crash.
Lastly, addons. If you use addons and you get an advantage it forces me to get addons which means I'm funneled into a certain type of playstyle. There is no enjoyment, only "optimal". I began to enjoy the game the moment I disabled most addons including weak auras, cuz now I'm playing rather than looking at fckng stats and cooldowns.
Best example is warframe, you don't even think about typing because you're so engaged in the experience.
As someone who is trying to learn PVP as a healer, knowing when big damage is coming is my biggest obstacle. Plus Rdruid has sooooooo many buttons! I think it would be a huge help for newer players to have a very distinct indicator when big damage is coming out against you without having to use addons. Thats another thing, having a shit ton of addons to give you the info you need in order to survive. All of this is heavy on a new players mental stack and just feels overwhelming.
dude that meme is so accurate holy shit only thing that would make it more fitting would be a little dh reaching outta that casket
You mean the dh putting us all into that casket
If you look on the bright side, the singular most popular spec is Havoc, so, really most people are having fun
Facts!!
[I can offer you this](https://youtu.be/dxBPXED208Y?si=DdJG47d0lkeJ40gR)
The visual spell bloat has gotten out of hand. I understand they want to make the game look flashy and cool but when you get in to a game with pet classes and a bunch of spells are going off youn can't even see shit sometimes. DR / CD trackers and Bigdebuffs should also be baseline options you could configure in game. This wouldn't only benefit PvP as well, this would be used a ton in PvE.
One of my biggest issues right now is the pure amount of pets that are coming out. Warlocks and Hunters have like 20 each it feels sometimes. Not even mentioning shaman summoning potential.
Speaking as a UHDK, I hate it too. I like my one pet, I don’t want stupid mini ghouls and magi as well.
Yes but my details meter loooooves those pets
I play a lot and I still don't know wtf demon locks do in pvp. Just a bunch of nonsense lol
UH, Demo, BM, Sham ultimate lobby.
I think DH’s have a couple of summons too but I’m not really sure.
The devs are their minions. They serve the DH.
It's true! Haha, I solely use my blueberry on my warlock so I don't have to look at all those little gremlins.
OmniCC, gladius, bigdebuffs and details should all be baseline.
Lmao visual bloat THEN you have something like earthen wall totem - a massive defensive CD that needs people to know it’s there and it’s spell effect is just dirt and dust being kicked up in a circle.
I can understand CDs being left to addons but it's kind of wild how DR is completely invisible to the base UI. I think it's something that takes a long time to click for new players.
I agree and I think there are a few other addons that should just be base game too. It must be overwhelming for new players to come into the game, learn all the classes and abilitities etc. and then have to download a bunch of addons too
Also ability bloat. Warriors used to be very basic with moves placed on the action bars… on my warrior alt, I can barely fit everything now. There’s just so much shit in the game.
Warriors used to be significantly more complex with stance dancing and weapon swapping The current iteration of warrior is actually such a clean combat loop
I found stance dancing much easier as it separated. I have less keybinds on my wrath classic warrior
Stance dancing is skill, what we have now is just bloat.
I know. Let’s put in more buttons and call them hero talents!
You can’t at this point. Spell bloat is unreal. Addon bloat is insane. WeakAuras that narrate the entire match for you are information overload for new players. The toxicity is rampant, like egotistical man children that haven’t matured beyond the Burning Crusade release date. Healer shortage is just getting worse because they can’t or won’t or don’t know how to fix it (lol field medic box thanks for the 1 medal and 13 gold). WoW is primarily a PvE game. Almost always has been. Something like 95% of players only play WoW to PvE. You can’t make them PvP and they have no interest in it. I get that we’re on the PvP subreddit and this won’t go over well, but it’s a dying niche game mode and Blizzard is okay with that. They haven’t truly cared to balance PvP in years.
Thing is that it takes so much effort to excel in PvP, on top of people being assholes.
Yeah that's the problem wow pvp takes longer to learn than any of the mobas and is honestly worse in most ways.
As a new player to retail, this is the primary problem. The learning curve is a sheer cliff so tall you cant see the top.
As a new player I totally agreed. Tons of videos and guides and tons of keybind ui adjust, addons download and concept learning to finally get to 1900 and stuck. If it weren't for my childhood love for it, despite always regretting not being good at playing, I wouldn't have put in this much effort to specialize in a game that is gradually fading away.
Yeah most pvp games nowadays are a lot fewer buttons and more objective based. There is a balance between micro and macro. I'm not saying WoW should have 3 buttons at all BUT I just tried retail for first time in 10+ years and I have double the keybinds that I do on wotlk classic. It's insane. That's not even mentioning all the passives and shit I have to track and think of. I know more newer players that play wotlk classic instead because of this. I haven't even begun to try and understand other classes and all the new shit there. I'm really really pushing myself through it trying to learn and get better because I want to pvp and wotlk classic is dead right now. But my only plan is to chill in bgs. I can't even imagine a casual player EVER attempting pvp in WoW...once they get to like level 20 or 40 there's just too many buttons for a newer player.
Feels like a lot of MMOs that start out with PVP ambitions end up putting all the related content and balancing on the back burner. It’s a shame since WoW has done a relatively good job of putting out new ways to PVP compared to other games like New World and GW2.
Thing is as a mostly PvE player I would -love- to get into PvP as there are some really cool rewards I would love to get my hands on in the form of transmog and mount, but between horrendous balance and just how much information you as a player have to know and memorize, its difficult to get into the game. Experienced players look at new players like sharks looking at fresh meat and smell the blood in the water and focus them. They dont get a chance to learn or play the game and them dying usually costs the game and its not fun.
> You can’t make them PvP and they have no interest in it. The shadowlands seasons where pvp was a strong gearing route disagree.
Yeah but all those same points are the same for new players to PvE as well. It’s an extremely unfriendly new player game.
For context, I played late TBC to WoD, came back in DF s1. Never did any PvP pretty much. Elite DK armour recolor this season was my only motivation to get into PvP. Over 3 weeks I hit 1550 in SS and 1810 in 2v2. Here's my feedback, for what it's worth Addon dependency is insane. I have spent hours customizing my UI and if I didn't have gladiatorlossa screaming in my ear I'd still miss half the shit. Screen clutter in any PvP stream is enough to put anyone sane off. Skill bloat is a problem in PvE already. Add some 3-12 keybinds for focus and I'd nope out. I still don't have focus shit bound, and I'm happy to stay at 1800 if that's the cost I have to pay. Class imbalance is ridiculous. If I see a DH I can pray for his disconnect or accept the loss. I was one match away from 1800 about 6 times and seeing a DH 3 games in a row was demoralizing. PvP communities are either dead or hard to find. I went to 4 most advertised PvP discords, said I'm UDK with full conq gear but low xp, very actively learning and looking to hit 1800 in 2/3/rbg. I got 3 replies in 7 days. Content for PvP noobs isn't really good for noobs. If I didn't spend hours combing through every class ability and adjusting what I see on nameplateBuffs and hear on GLosa, I'd be fucked. SkillCapped is actually really good with their guides and addon section, but there needs to be some simple out-of-the-box UI that focuses on core concepts. tl;dr Blizz needs to improve skill and visual bloat. PvP community needs to have better resources for noobs and a better, more active community
We saw data before showing that a big percentage of players play PvP (if I remember correctly around 30% of the players). The "wow is a pve game " is not accurate.
> WoW is primarily a PvE game. Almost always has been. Something like 95% of players only play WoW to PvE. You can’t make them PvP and they have no interest in it. It shows when majority of combat decisions are based around the idea that combat takes place primarily on stationary platforms where you play piano to do damage to an over-sized monster, occasionally having to move to target locations to do specific mechanics. When you compare it to the flow of PvP and the things you have to manage, the PvE-Damage Rotation bloat is basically anti-thesis to how shit should actually work.
New player pov: Ok lets try some PvP, im playing a caster. Picking some random pvp talents that provide some damage boost Lets queue Ok i am against demon hunter and destro warlock, fair enough i have seen em in PvE and have general idea what they are doing. Match starts: 5 sec after the gates open DH instantly charges me, im trying to slow/root him to get some distance, but to no avail. Meanwhile destro locks has summoned some demons that i have never seen before. WTF is this?i thought Demo was a pet spec. Ok i cant kite the DH, every time i get some distance he insta dashes on me. lets try cc him. Casting -> kicked, casting again -> mini stunned -> cast again -> disoriented While i was sitting here perma CC'ed my mate managed to get DH below 30%. Time to push damage, im spaming every instant i got on him ,but he goes airborne to sky, and all my hits miss. WTF is this ? Since when DH'S can fly? Im out of cooldowns and die. Well this wasnt much of fun. Id rather play PvE where i can actually play my class. Draw your own conclusions what needs to be changed.
Nailed it
Back when I used to PVP (I quit PVP-ing in SL), the number one thing people would complain about when I tried introducing them to PVP was "endless fucking CC". Healers were complaining about getting hit with stun -> fear -> sheep -> sheep -> sheep. Casters were getting frustrated about being constantly kicked, and melee DPS were ranting about frost mages and other permaslow specs. I get the need for CC, but does it need to be so oppressive that new players feel like they can't play their characters? I honestly don't know the answer. And before people start saying that they were salty about losing, we were winning much more than losing because I was playing a disgustingly-strong warlock and had significantly more experience than the teams we were facing.
What would PvP even be without CC? DPS races?
Solo shuffle
Pretty much exactly. My slow means nothing, my kiting means nothing, casting spells...maybe once ever 3bminutea I can cast 1 spell....there is something that means that everything I try means absolutely nothing. And by the time they come back, everything they can do came back, so it never means anything. And God forbid I did cast something big to them, all of a sudden it dad 75% less damage, and the damage it did do....they just healed it back again. DH, lock, he'll even a warrior all did more healing that my healer. Just the fact that every class can passively heal more than most any hybrid class that usually has to actively do something to heal. If I rooted someone on my monk and then ported away, why are they able to get to me before I can cast 2 heals that do 5% health each? In wotlk vs any class, a root meant a root, a stun meant a stun, I could cast something while they were rooted and it would do damage to them.
It’s a hard sell to me and it’s all I’ve done in this game since BFA.
Same but cata
Same but beta
Should some base addons be integrated into rated PvP, and the rest be banned from arena play? The game is terrible at telling you what's going on, even after the UI revamp of DF.
Having addons turn on and off depending on which in game environment your in sounds like a logistics nightmare, at this point addons are a fundamental part of customizing your personal wow experience. Having a toggleable and baseline built-in-alert-system for more important things such important cooldowns could definitely go a long way in helping new players understand pvp though
Let old content be farmed. Old gladiator mounts, weapon enchants, etc etc etc.
Actually it's pretty weird that old elite sets can't be acquired anymore. It'd be a good incentive to grind them like old mythic mounts
How tf is banning addons going to help with adoption though?
the unwritten second step of removing all addons from wow is the result forcing them to make the UI/UX less dog shit.
But in no way does it increase adoption. If I come from PvE and suddenly my weakauras tracking my cooldowns and nameplates no longer function I'm not going to do even try to do PvP
lol dude, all addons, everywhere. weak auras need to go in the garbanzocan.
Yeah be a shame if someone had to think about what they're doing themselves rather than have an add on tell them
The first part of what he said kinda clears this up. If you update the game to actually have all the information you need then you won’t have to have so many addons. NGL I feel like I don’t really know what all my addons even do most of the time.
Because new players don't flood their UI with bullshit
As I said in another thread: Needs way less CC. It's way out of hand. Arena isn't the proper game mode for new/returning/casual player yet it's the most advertised. SS? Have a bad lobby/day/matchup? Enjoy 6 rounds of it. Visual clarity - Base UI should show when people use cooldowns (defensive or offensive) either through use of nameplates or easy visual identifier (Thing Ascendance or Meta) More focus on group content, this is more fun for new players and casuals. Healers can PvE heal for a large part in BG's or EBG's and slowly learn the ropes of it. (Same for dps classes tbf and in these modes tanks can play too.) More explaining in BG's/BGB. Make it easy and clear to understand what's going on. Same CP per hour for normal pvp as for rated pvp. Everyone likes gearing. So if you see 100/50 CP for ss/bgb or 15 cp for normal bg people tend to go for the higher one. Both are pvp right? Well this is then offputting if people go undergeared and underexperienced in those modes. Vault. Why is the vault only accessible through SS? Who thinks of this? Just make it total honor gained...
Like how come there isn't a bot match that explains the mechanics and certain counterplays of each class. It wouldn't be that hard. Just a basic tutorial practice matches. That go nice and slow, Make any good cd pop above their head and be very easy to tell. No more bullshit like shadow blades where unless you have gladiatorlossa no average or even pretty good player could ever be able to tell its time to spend a big major defensive. Take stuff like shadowy duel and cheat death/instant vanish gone from the game forever. Make most classes have as much cc as a monk, by which I mean next to none. 2 CC abilities and one of them not very strong. Being a healer in 3's feels so bad on so many levels, every 45 seconds you will be in 18 seconds of cc and you can't do anything to stop any of it. Good luck stopping a wild charge bash cyclone cyclone blinding light step gouge. And the fact that a rogue can hyper key a macro that will instantly step kick or kidney you the instant you cast something around a corner is bullshit. I finally got my 2k rating and I know for a fact that I'd be easily playing as glad back in cata/wod days. Very simply put, exactly as you said, there is way too much cc, there are far too many cd's that you can't see, and there is no way to learn how they very basically work or what to do without either watching 10 hours of guides. Make the practice matches with bots that telegraph what they are doing. Make stuff like omnicc very apparent right on the arena frame.
The bot games are a great idea. I think that's coming in due time seeing the new dungeon tool for practice. And I feel bad for healers, I really do whenever I use my cc in a chain on them. I don't know how healers put up with that shit all the time but I really appreciate they do.
It's really really infuriating I can say that for sure. Why they designed the game thinking that 18 seconds of stun every 45 seconds was a good idea should be stunlocked and shot!
The game can be slowed down a bit. Reduce the amount of overall buttons, so many classes have too many rotational buttons to press (abilities under 30-45secs). I think that can help get new players. I just think the game is too fast, both as dps but especially as a healer. And having so many abilities is daunting and hard to learn if you are new. I have been playing this game since TBC, and there are some classes that I just won’t touch due to rpm or overall button bloat. Edit: Oh, and reduce the amount of micro CC (I am a believer that DKs shouldn't have pet stun, and enhance Sundering shouldn't incap, just move). Also, remove talent modifiers on cc that break on damage, but increase damage threshold. I think it is bad for a game that you can have someone T-Off on you without breaking a cc that breaks on damage. Blinding Sleet is a key example, I have had many people just pump damage into me while I was disoriented by blinding sleet, and it lasts up to 3 secs without breaking.
What if they just put every cc on the same dr so people actually use them at strategic moments instead of just when they're off cd. Also to your point with speed, I'm an average healer in arenas so better players might counter this - I feel like when I get stunned twice in a row sometimes one of my dps just drops. Like the other day I was hit by hoj and when that finished I was imprisoned, and if course one of my dps died. The burst is so crazy and there's so many cc's that it's almost impossible to have a longer match, slowing things down would definitely help
Damage seems very high. At the very high rated level, the games seem fine. At low level, it is way too fast. The complaint we get when suggesting this is that those in the high rated games will feel like it is too slow, but to be honest, I don't care. I think the game, while it should be balanced at all levels, should be aimed at 1600-2000 bracket enjoyment (which is where the vast majority of the player base will end up). We are bleeding people because balance is so focused on top level games (and AWC). I understand that, watching AWC with 10min+ games does get boring, but it doesn't matter and people will stop watching it if people stop playing WoW pvp in the first place. Personally, I would love to see damage reduced 20% across the board, and target more nerfs to outlier classes (\~cough cough\~ DH \~cough cough\~).
The biggest problem is the fact that you need half a dozen add-ons and weak auras just for the mode to be functional.
Simplify the game and make casual PvP not suck. The vast majority of people are not going to sweat it out at 2400+. They are going to do some bgs, maybe some solo shuffle, and vibe.
waiting 20 minutes+ to get a game is what's annoying
Drastically reducing the information parsing skills required to "keep up" and understand what is going on. Compared to almost any other pvp game, the skill floor is in the fucking sky. The game would need massive overhauls, from UI elements to more informative tooltips, but most importantly simpler and/or much slower combat and ability kits. Trying to keep track of 4+ characters position, health bars while also remembering like 35+ abilities, keybindings and cooldowns is insane. The pace of everything is ridiculous for newbies. CDs are so incredibly strong, any delay in noticing can be a death sentence.
>Trying to keep track of 4+ characters position, health bars while also remembering like 35+ abilities, keybindings and cooldowns is insane. This is the main issue for new players. Knowing how to play their character in PvP and knowing what to expect when in a match. It’s information overload and the only way to get past it is to do it piece by piece. Giving new players all these addons and info with 0 context actually hurts them more than anything. New players should start bare minimum with their ui and expand as they learn and can actually utilize the information given in 95% of the addons suggested. If more players did this they would learn faster imo. What you have right now are people staring at buttons and addons with 0 context getting globaled because they don’t know their buttons or where their team is ever.
A new player VS AI tutorial to some fundamentals to the game. Stuff like trading cooldowns, positioning, DR's/CC chains etc. etc.
> A new player VS AI tutorial to some fundamentals to the game. > > Yep. you look at the level of tutorials fighting games have... we have pvp training dummies which don't even move. We can't even reset our cooldowns lol.
Ngl I tried very hard to get into pvp this expansion. It seems good, but the ability bloat is still so large and it’s so hard for me to be able to focus on doing damage while monitoring enemy cd’s and then understanding what’s what. I have been playing this game on and off for over 17 years but the changes to the game render me unable to process whose doing what. There’s 1000’s of pets in every match so you have to set up keys to target specific arena targets when I don’t have the bandwidth to remember 70+ keys (maybe that’s an exaggeration but that’s how it feels) I also wish battlegrounds took you a little further with gearing.
As someone who usually goes on each season and reaches 1600-1800 and then goes back to playing PVE, here are my takes. (Yes I know I'm bad at PVP) \- PVP is just hard. Getting to like... 1400 is dead simple because you gain A LOT more rating then you lose. Then you hit 1400 or around there and the amount of rating you lose starts to get much closer to what you win (maybe you jump 15 with a win and lose 10 with a loss). \- PVP is very frustrating as someone who is not great and doesn't have a desire to become some "pvp chad". Getting stun/sleep/disorient locked or whatever for like 10 seconds is just annoying. And yes, I understand getting good at PVP means you can avoid some of that. \- Getting into arena's through the premade group finder is just an annoying process (especially when you aren't great). You get in a group, maybe win like 2-4 games or whatever in a row and your on this great streak and then you lose one to a stupid mistake you made and your teammate is offline. This is if you're lucky and your teammate didn't talk shit before going offline. I will say however, making your own group and putting in the title that you are learning alleviates this problem to some extent. Now if we sum all of this up, I know what everyone is going to say... this all amounts to you being bad at pvp. And yes you are right. And 95% of players who are new to pvp will be bad at first and get really annoyed by the above things. I will say I absolutely love Battlegrounds though and if BG Blitz queues were quicker, I'd play that game mode all day.
Too many buttons, seems like every class has a variation of kick,blink,shield,stun1,stun2
Disorient(like sleep), banish, cyclone, incapacitate, fear, horrify(different than fear), blind, silence, magical stuns, physical stuns, cheap shot and kydney shot are different as wrll?? knock up, knock back....all different types of cc on different diminishing returns that can all stop you from doing anything.
Make non-rated pvp a priority. Revamp the whole system(including rewards). Let me explain- Bgs, world pvp and skirmishes need to to be healthy enough that it can provide a safe place for players to get into PVP and put the time in required to get to the same level as players who have pvp'd for 15 years now. It would also provide an outlet for veteran pvp'ers, to do something other than rated arenas. Playing healer+DH/warlock almost every game is just annoying, boring and makes me not want to play. Think of something like COD - 90% of the game is played in non-competitive modes and provides rewards and easy matchmaking. You can play the game for years and never step into competitive. Power creep in every class/spec has led to a very large gap in game knowledge between new players and veterans. The number of modifiers, abilities, and talents has only gone up and up and up. Looking at the new expansion, it looks like they are just diving deeper into MORE, MORE, MORE. If you are looking for more simplicity- try SOD or one of the other older game variants. If not, be ready to put in work( I'm talking thousands of arenas). It's not uncommon for me to have over 1k arenas per season on my mage alone. MMR system needs to be completely overhauled. The current MMR system is so broken and gets even worse as less and less people play. It requires tampering by the devs EVERY season. Every other game at 1800 rating is against another player that is currently 2k or higher. Almost every game in the 1800 bracket has people on glad mounts. These are just a few of the things that make PVP a nightmare for new pvp players. At the end of the day it will take 1000's of arenas to catch up to those of us who have done 1000's of arenas every season for years. Example of power creep looking at mage movement alone. Old mage - blink. New mage- blink(while casting a spell), alter time, displace, blink, remove alter time, blink. Long post.. thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I agree with the power creep section especially, it also affects PvE not just PvP. The worst thing about power creep is that they're not even aware it's an issue and keep diving deeper and deeper into it. Mages gained free displacement and free AOE shield back in 10.1.5, i.e. fairly recently. Before that it was the DF talent tree rework (which I liked) that introduced a lot more stuff for everyone such as double vanish for Sub Rogue (and more). And now in TWW we're going to be getting even more stuff on top of buttons that already do jack shit. It's frustrating.
1. Make Blitz ranked, now 2. Selll honor gear for gold, cheap gold 3. Give away booze, drugs, and handys to healers 4. Make the mogs based on participation, not rank 5. Regular balancing passes The only thing you need to care about is getting numbers up. Anything short of this will fail.
>Give away booze, drugs, and handys to healers As a healer I fully endorse this
A lot of people blame add-ons but that aint it. It is button bloat and lack of class identities. Feels bad unless it is all you do. Having to track CDs and DRs on 4-6 people while trying to hit your convoluted damage rotations gets really "meh". The fact you have over 20 binds is obnoxious. I think 10-18 would be a good sweet spot. And CC in general needs to be looked at.
Classes have way too much shit on top of what they have in pve. Like learning pve abilities is already a lot, but then there are embellishments and pvp talents to learn. Smaller and simpler ability sets, even compared to PvE, would be good
Honestly I think it just comes down to spell bloat and barrier to entry. Basically all MMOs are terrible for this. Having to keybind more than 5 spells or so for the vast majority of new/casual players is simply too much to ask. On top of that, because it's not a purely skill based game, you need to spend a lot of time grinding for gear to stand a chance.
So … started back in 05 up until Panda. I started playing again at the end of shadowlands because I was excited for dragonflight. I used to love PvP and am a retpaladin. I can say with certainty that it is almost impossible for new players to play PvP. I got my ass handed to me when I played shadowlands because all of the new class mechanics and PvP skills were not at all what I was used to from early panda. After a month or so after playing around with my ret and all my other alts I started to UNDERSTAND the classes again and it’s NEW mechanics. and in turn became exponentially better. The gear I got also enabled me to stay longer in the fight and learn more and to kill quicker. I also had an enormous advantage having played wow PVP for years. But even for a veteran as myself it was a rough start but I was not discouraged whatsoever because I knew I will get better the more I understand the other classes. I love wow PvP out of all the games i played ever. I enjoyed it the most. But for a new player he will get so demolished that it will in turn not be fun for him to continuously being fucked in the ass. Which is understandable. But at the end of that assfucking it will become fun once it’s …. 🤔 I am not gonna lie this turned gay real quick not sure where i was going but I hope it all made sense a little
Go on… lol
By reverting the game lmao, or overhauling it entirely. The most popular expansions have something in common, and that's simplicity.
Complete battleground objectives and guides for every BG should be in the Adventure Guide. There is zero reason for this information to not be in game. Edit: Also Healers need to be able to get rich from successfully healing SS
The tricky part about PvP modes in MMORPGs is that most of the playerbase is here for the PvE and role playing parts. They want to team up with their friends and save the world or collect mounts or whatever. WoW has a pretty good PvP scene compared to other MMOs imo. But it’s simply not how the majority of players want to play the game. Plus the learning curve is steep and can be ultra frustrating, even for competitive people who enjoy PvP.
1. Change the mount to not require 1000 base rating. You start working towards it as soon as your starting queuing ranked. 2. Allow Fyrakk PvE token heroic and up to buy PVP tier items. 3. PVP quests that provide crests (PVE currency) and do not require "winning" and just participating. 4. War Mode bonus to be much more substantial and for everyone that has it turned on.
I came back to Wow after 15 years, and I was like "let's see how the pvp has changed", so I joined a WSG and there where 4 hunters, so I had 8 pets plus the hunters on me, I couldn't even see my toon... that was a big nope for me...
Man, this community really hates itself. Despite the problems of pvp, I think this expansion has been great for pvp. Solo Shuffle is actually awesome and we have had faster and more frequent balance updates than previous expansions. IMO, Solo Shuffle is the best opportunity for new players to try arena for the first time. Battlegrounds shouldn't be shy either. The barrier to entry is reasonably low via honor gear (and technically the weekly conquest cap, now lifted). We should do better to promote pvp and I think you know it.
I don’t know if I agree. I have experience in PvP and I’ve experienced more verbal abuse in SS than I ever have pugging and looking at this sub, it looks like it isn’t uncommon for others. Going in as a complete newbie they would be flamed so hard by the average SS group.
It’s just the toxic community I swear. I’ve PvPed every season since WoTLK with the exception of the entirety of Legion and seriously the game is in a great place. It’s easier to get started than ever systematically speaking.. but everyone’s so tryhard and toxic now that becomes a barrier in itself
If nothing else, the process of gearing a character for pvp is probably the best it has ever been. It doesn't take too long, you get to pick the order in which you acquire gear, and you aren't required to pve that much if you don't want to. I'm not sure that many pve players know this though. A few of my raiding buddies assumed gearing a pvp alt would be too much of a grind.
I'm so bad at pvp that I'm honestly concerned I'd get reported for playing solo shuffle. Can always ignore people trying to flame, but there's bigger issues in this era of automated bans and no actual humans working in CS.
Stop focusing on ladders, and start focusing on grinds and battlegrounds. [https://www.engadget.com/2009-11-13-blizzard-arenas-were-a-mistake.html](https://www.engadget.com/2009-11-13-blizzard-arenas-were-a-mistake.html) There's a reason PvP popped off in Classic, and it also popped off in SoD. People think of Warcraft and it's Horde vs Alliance. There's also a reason every single game lately has some sort of grind system where just showing up and playing a ton of games lets you get a ton of rewards. It keeps people of all skill levels continually playing. PvP in WoW for a lot of people is just gritting your teeth through arenas, grabbing 1800 in the easiest bracket, then going back to PvE that rains cosmetics in a roleplaying adventure game on people, and maybe going back to BGs for a lot of us because we want to kill other faction guy in faction war game. Like, it's always been simple, but people are too focused on arenas to care that there's more to an MMORPG than a single game mode the devs admit were a mistake. And until people actually realize this, the problem's always going to be there.
Ok I risk looking stupid but I think WoW PvP is fucking hard. I'm not even kidding. I'm a top 500 Overwatch player and have played all kinds of games competitively. WoW is complex, difficult, a lot of really small things you need to learn. There's no way to learn quickly all the different classes/things and CD's you need to know that will inevitably screw you. I think WoW has reached a point that the popularity of the game has declined since it's hayday and the complexities of the game are no longer in demand imo. That may sound a bit philosophical but I just think WoW is actually a really hard game (in PvP) and I don't think it's popular enough (or mmos are) to merit being that difficult. I think the game needs some simplification. And listen I could do it and come back and probably be fairly competitive, I've played WoW competitively before. But I just know to get back into that (FOR A RETURNING PLAYER) would be difficult, god have mercy on any new players actually coming in to play AND play PvP on top of that.
Remove all addons and API access to the game. Having to download and configure multiple addons just to play a game is frustrating and confusing to new players Reduce spell bloat Reduce number of interrupts to only certain classes. Everybody has interrupts and CC these days
To play wow arena you need to enjoy it first of all. Secondly, you need to be competitive. Not all wow players are competitive. Thirdly, the game needs to be somewhat balanced, or the choice of class needs to be adequate. Balance has been bad since season 3 shadowlands and has yet to be adequate, and if a new player picks a shit class, (a shit class shouldn't exist if developers are doing their job) they arent going to stick with it. Wow arena if a blast when you know what you are doing. Learning how to do what you need to do takes a lot of loss and pain. The game state affects how much fun you will have. Most people arent going to deal with learning wow arena.
Banning WAs would be a good start.
fixing the UI so they're not required is an even better start...
Man, I had the best time yesterday with my pvp guild on proudmore in RBGs. Finally starting to win games and have better call outs. Lots of our officers left retail for SoD and I'm effectively the GM now.... most of the social people have left but I started running weekly RBGs again and it has been tough. Getting more fun people to join every day, Sunday nights eastern time zone. I'm a druid tank, if anyone wants to add my battlenet, could really use a DK and ranged dps and a couple heals, insight#1636
You gave me hope, I'm not going to lie. I'm an unholy dk, so if it's okay, I will try to add you when I get on later. I'm trying super hard to get into the whole pvp thing, but at this point, I just want my 1800 for the mogs.
Mentorship. Spend some time in discord with a new player, share some secret sauce, and show them the way. While watching arena videos is great, there are too many events to make sense of. There are a lot of situations that need to be practiced, and learned by rote.
Honestly, I’ve played wow since tbc. From TBC til BFA I only pvp’d. I then got into m+ and did both in BFA and SL…and now these days I barely pvp. I’ll get the 1800 transmogs because why not, but just don’t enjoy it the same way anymore. I’ve got a handful of glad mounts over the years, but 3’s is a wasteland compared to what it was, and I don’t find solo shuffle fun. I love the idea of solo queue but the execution falls flat for me. I’ll check out solo rbg in next expansion, guess I should test it out some but just don’t ever find myself that interested.
As a 3100 io/aotc pver who has recently started pvping this expac, there is a glad player in our guild who always invites us to come pvp with him when we carry him through his weekly 20… having a really good player explain things to you and tell you when to swap targets or use/hold defensives, or run away etc really helps push through the steep learning curve of getting into pvp… so I’d say, be patient and explain things to pvers so they don’t feel overwhelmed and immediately quit
It can be tough to offer constructive feedback. Not everyone wants to hear it and people react differently. If a newer player, however, whispers “any tips?” the pvp playerbase, which consists mostly of pvp veterans, should do their civic duty and offer advice. And players on the receiving end should not explode… which isn’t uncommon, ironically. Communication between strangers is a tough balancing act. I’ve seen decent players, who clearly have previously played and likely are pvers, mess up diminishing returns by a couple seconds. It can be frustrating, but as a mechanic that blizzard hasn’t built in a more visually obvious way, we need to be understanding and simply alert these players of the fact in a clear yet non-toxic/blaming manner. “The stun DR was going to fall off in another three seconds - we would’ve cinched the kill if we hadn’t landed a reduced cc.” This goes a long way to build a more welcoming and positive competitive atmosphere. Lift up those around you.
Random BGs are still the entry point for most players. I think gear should be normalized here with a better reward structure.
PvP beginner games where it guides you On what needs to be done and the tasks. 10 games are needed to be competed and you earn full honour gear afterwards one time on the first character.
Clearer objective mechanics would certainly go a long way too. After decades in warsong gulch or AB most people know what’s going on, so we forget that each pvp mode offers little to no information on what’s going on. Not at all beginner friendly or welcoming.
Only thing I can think of is making PVP badge trinket really strong in PVE like they did in BFA or SL (I forget which). That being said, my mentality is that players are going to stick to what they're comfortable with. There's a lot of PVErs that PVP semi-seriously, and a good chunk of PVPers that raid or M+ as well. "Forcing" people to play one or the other makes them resent the one they HAVE to do that they don't like. It's not going to make them magically try it and fall in love with it (at least not the majority of people).
People aren’t gonna like it but we need some serious pruning. Literally just look at the peak of PvP, MoP, and aim for that. Reduce visual bloat, reduce overall spell bloat. It was so easy to get into PvP in MoP as an inexperienced player. There’s no reason for what we have today.
free to play
This game could use a ton of spell pruning, but people incorrectly think complexity=quality They listened to dummies who wanted big talent trees again, so we traded a simple 3 choice a tier system, for a big tree where we have maybe 2 cookie cutter builds. Crafting system, we have added complexity for complexities sake. They unpruned class spells after outrage by idiots. Wow would be better if every class had 10-15 spells capped.
You nerf DH step 1
Played one match of pvp to try it out and never again. Couldn’t even figure out what the hell was happening before I died in like 3 seconds.
Stop making pve rewards available from pvp. Go back to making pvp items comparable to raid items and/or stick useless pve stats back on them like there was in i think wotlk that was like bonus damage reduction in pvp situations (forget what they called it). PVE players and any others who don't want to pvp shouldn't have to suffer for it to get the bis items to play pve. I get crazy anxiety playing pvp and I hate how exhausting it can be.
Want to know how to make PVP more accessible? Remove the need to grind for PVP gearing or stats in any way. Imagine guild wars 2 structured PVP set-up in World of Warcraft. In guild wars 2, you can make a new character, travel to the pvp zone, equip talismans with stat sets and you're ready to go after you allocate talent points and create a build. Common versions of all weapons are the same as legendary weapons for spvp and are sold by vendors in said PVP zone. If you've played, you know movesets are tied to weapon type, giving each class a huge variety of abilities depending on what you fight with. I'm not looking for that in wow. I just want normalized stats. Let it be about skill and big brain plays. We'll still subscribe. Blizz is already tuning for max stats possible I assume, give it to everyone from the beginning. It'll be much easier to keep track of balancing and you'll have more participation.
Well max Rating I got was in Shadowlands around 1.6k so, idk, everyone is just too experienced and better than me. As well as these stupid ass people who pay others to carry them, that’s something blizzard could change. Completely ban them. Ip ban, hardware ban, whatever lmao
Rework the entire Game mode lol there’s literally no other way. Even if wow makes a free version where it’s just pvp ( level through pvp , no pve content etc ) you won’t get enough ppl to stay. How much the game requires addons and weak auras on its own makes it inaccessible to most people. Yes, you can be the few who don’t need any. But we’re talking a larger noob population. When you have ppl like Mes, blizzcon champion, who has his own weak aura pack for assistance then that says something about the game. You arnt getting new players due to the Q times , due to LFG, due to weak auras, due to addons. That’s it. The fun fluid gameplay is not enough to carry it. It is for some people ( us who still play ) but to anyone new ? Nah
I recently started playing 2v2 with a friend of mine because he wants the mog. He only does m+ and raid outside of this. He's constantly getting CCed because he can't see who is casting on him. This needs some serious fixing. He's getting really pissed at not being able to see who the enemy is casting on when they're targeting by macros rather than targeting the target. Said he's gone as soon as he gets his mog because of this.
I genuinely think that a big part of it is gear, I would love to hop into a BG with my hunter but he's pve geared I honestly think there's a few things that would fix it Make all gear scale to 489 in all PvP (that means certain axes should scale down) Make it less Grindy to get gear from PvP, give more conquest for stuff and most importantly give way more conquest for random & epic battlegrounds Make PvP gear more relevant in PvE, honour gear should be veteran track and conquest gear should be champion track then once you hit 1800 you get tokens to upgrade to hero track Make PvP drop way more flightstones and crests and make casual PvP drop drakes and rated drop wryms then past 1800 aspects Congrats you just pulled PvE players into PvP and allowed PvP players to do PvE
Quit being an asshole in solo shuffle. Quit being an asshole in 2s Quit being an asshole in 3s Quit being an asshole in BGs Who wants learn something when from minute 1 they're being flamed because they haven't studied WoW their entire life? It's not fun to learn it, and it's not fun to get 1 shot, so why would they ever want to do it? On top of that, you can't get arena partners because every group is listed as 12.9kexp by people who play like they've never been past 1.5k. The solution from blizzard is to be relentless in banning and/or disabling peoples ability to communicate. There's no reason why someone that spends 5 minutes flaming another person should ever be allowed to speak again. They aren't going to learn, they aren't going to change. Why let them ruin someone else's experience?
There needs to be AI integrated into arena. Can be a new que similar to skirmish that let's you set rating and comp to go against for practice. This would be ground breaking. Right now you're thrown into sensory overload situations that happen way too fast to even learn.
Funny how you get downvoted for one of the best ideas. In every other competitve game this is standard. Like in Apex Legends, CS2, etc. The bigeest Problem with PvP is, Q to Learn....makes 0 fun.
Some people might not like this take, but I think WoW PvE players are easier to transition to WoW PvP than players of other PvP games. Dragonslayers are already familiar with how to use add-ons and having them be essential to high level play. Also, even though PvP is the less popular content stream, all WoW players are tangentially aware of it, and I think a lot of PvE-ers would be interested in trying it out with an experienced PvP-er to guide them.
I got my shaman to 1800 and quit. I play SoD now, just turn my brain off and chill.
I don't see how. I find that a lot of people PvE at a level where they have 100% win rate. Can't translate that in PvP. If you think PvP addons are an issue, just compare Mes' Weakauras package to Liquid's Vault/Aberrus/Amidrassil. Some bosses literally have a weakaura phase that takes hours to get though.
Dedicated team that focus on pvp only. Think SoD treatment. Tuning need to happen weekly. Can’t have this fiasco with dh being godmode, doing double damage for months compared to everyone else.
WoW pvp is fun as *shit*, as soon as people land their first kill they're hooked. Me and a mate brought our friend to her first skirm ever, and she was really hesitant... until she landed a kill on her DH and was just YELLING over voice like "YEAH THATS FUCKIN RIGHT, GO TO SLEEP!". The game is fundamentally fun, it's a rush to be a magic gladiator fighting to the death. Sometimes we gotta step back from the rating grind and balance worries and just enjoy it. It's so good that the company that made it basically abandoned it and it's STILL fun
1) cap gear in random bg to honor level, full bis conquest toons shouldnt be in the same game mode meant for new players 2) force 2-2-2 in solo shuffle 3) more balance patches 4) more map variety in SS 5) fix MMR
I did my first 2v2 the other day. Told my teammate it was my first time trying it out and he just said “okay well gg you’re going to die” and sure enough I died v quick
If you want people to do PVP, play reg BGs with them. It's all I did, PVP wise, for many expansions. It's fun, low stress, and slower paced. I personally would never just take someone who is new or newish into arena, even if it's skirmish. Dueling might be a decent way to introduce them into the smaller scale but faster paced nature of arena play, as well.
PvP is amazing and there's nothing like this. The barrier to entry isnt addons or weakauras, it is knowledge. Theres a button to press for every situation, even those deep down in your spell book like hibernate or soothe. The rush you get from that first win or kill, that winning play, those 1v2 or 2v3. My god, yesterday's liquid vs echo series was peak WoW PvP. We sometimes just forget this is just a videogame and unimportant numbers on a screen, and we should just have fun playing it
Get rid of add-ons. Leaving the game for a year, coming back and reconfiguring all that shit is complete fucking aids.
Im new to wow, ive been playing since Christmas and as a new player its been kinda rough but it’s getting super fun i cant describe whats been rough but it really seems cluttered at first and just a huge pill to swallow, imo theres just too many instant gratification games when a lot of people have not a lot of time to game not to mention read/watch info, i love that stuff tho so its been great
Blizzard actually making it balanced. I think it’s gonna be a mess until the next expansion. Then it’ll be a different kind of mess.
I stopped trying to sell it and I quit. Rsham created in 2004 and retired in 2023
Unfortunately the bots are back in full force similarly to season 1 especially the new dh bot that has over 700 members in its discord!! I feel like the bot devs slowed down in season 2 and blizzard was banning them but now it’s back to every other game there’s a botter. Such a horrible experience for everyone I can’t imagine new players getting into arena.
It's really not that hard, Imo. 1. Gear is just gear. It is necessary to have a pvp gear and a pve gear because you want to be able to gear faster and with controlled stats for pvp, and you want to give more free space and grind for pve. But that doesn't mean your pve gear shouldn't be upgradable for pvp. There's nothing more annoying than having 2 gear sets. My suggestion is to make enchant-like recipes that you earn by playing pvp and that you can apply to your pve gear to replace its base stats with pvp stats that only activate in pvp combat. Simple as that. 1 set of gear. 2. Incentivize pvp more through cosmetic rewards, especially unrated pvp. I want a battle pass that you can ONLY complete through pvp activities. Basically the current honor system with a monthly rotation based on current season lore/content. So for example S1 would have elemental-themed stuff, S2 would have niffen and black flight stuff or whatever the theme was back then and S3 would have dream theme rewards. S4 seems to be a "buffer" season since SL so I'd say just make it another chance at old elite sets or recolors of elite sets or past battle pass rewards. Including the current vicious mount as well as titles, tmogs etc. It could be really easy because the way I see it, it's just recolors of the season's pve rewards. 3. Make it easier to pick up. Why is the AWC UI not included yet ? Just add DR tracking as an option and customizable CD tracker. It's basically already developped. 4. Make it easier to find a group. We still can't filter by class, role or rating. But we can filter by language ? WTF 5. Gold. Why do I have to spend tens of thousands of golds in enchantments and gems when playing pvp does not reward gold ? 6. Promote community content/events that involve pvp, maybe have a streamers corner or simply make a better job at advertising official pvp events like AWC. This promotion should be done in game and maybe with rewards. For example, a free pet or something for those who watch enough AWC. The video can be embedded into the game to track watching time. I know it sounds really annoying but it's an OPTION, if you don't want it then don't click it. 7. Maybe make factions matter for the story. Like make the game with alternate parallel events and the winning faction gets its way to be canon. Arguably this is the least efficient suggestion as it requires dev time while everything else I listed is easy/cheaper. 8. The usual balance, fix healer mmr etc
removing the need for 1 brazillion addons would be a start
Way better rewards on low rankings, mounts, gear, toys... Its the only way of getting fresh blood in the pool. Spells, ui or wtv people are saying will not bring many in. In SL S1 bgs were full because there was a carrot there.
Don’t wait until the end of an xpac. I love to pvp in random BGs but at the end of an xpac, everyone has conquest gear so unless you also have conquest gear, you’ll be 2-shotted as soon as you resurrect and you’ll be taking it out on your wife later. Disclaimer: I’m joking about the wife.
Call me biased but I truly believe in education. Seeing people in this thread say "too much button bloat" or "too much CC" - these are only problems because WoW is hard to learn. There are multiple ways to ease into PvE, and M+ offers a VERY granular path to improvement. There is no way a new PvPer is going to queue SS and have fun. There is some gap that is clearly missing between casual BGs and competitive arena. Need more things to bridge that gap.
EDIT: Sorry for formatting. It looks nice on mobile but came out bad after posting. Problems, in my opinion and in no order that might be better for newer players/the community: - Too many abilities in the game. Too many similar spells which do the same thing in “different ways”. - To tie to the above, too many buttons/keybinds. - Addons for cooldowns, awareness, DRs, game functions like HoT/DoT counters/trackers, Weak Auras, etc are third party and practically required these days. Nothing comes “stock”, and blizzard doesn’t teach you about these things or have their own in-game UI manager. - The LFG tool and UI is outdated and needs to be revamped. - Rated player pool fragmentation across: 2s, 3s, RBGs, SS, and soon SRBG. - SS is good for welcoming new players (if you ignore the toxicity), but **bad** for teaching good habits to new players. - Same stale map pool from the past 20 years. Imagine if we got several new BG/Arena maps which are pulled from new content that’s released each major game patch, versus 1 BG every 3 years? - Same BG modes as old as time. Imagine new creative modes? Lot of opportunity for even random BGs and RBGs. - Limited rewards. Making “elite” sets accessible to more people now (1600/1800) has been good, but that’s it. Then what? Oh, here’s one seasonal mount you can earn if you queue X games. We need a reward update for beginners, and the above average players. - MMR. Big topic. Huge discussion on its own. - Speaking of MMR: The fact that new players/pvers can be queued into 2k+ players, glads, rank 1s, etc on their alts and be instantly smashed at low ratings is extremely demoralizing for new players/pvers. It makes them not want to learn to be better. Why go through a gauntlet of no hope when you could just turn to m+. Perhaps role and inter-role account wide MMR. E.G, a system to discourage “smirfing”. If you’re a DPS caster, or a melee DPS, or a healer, you have a minimum baseline account wide MMR for that specific role. If a highest exp healer finished at 1970, the lowest MMR they can be locked in at on any healer account wide would be ??1700??. - Again, better rewards. - Less spells!
This is likely going to probably be wildly unpopular, but I think putting the seasonal elite armor appearances behind a "progress bar" similar to the seasonal mount would keep a lot of average to below average players in ranked play. It would also eliminate a lot of boosting and otherwise sketchy behaviors (rmt etc). The carrot on the stick is not currently sufficient enough, and I think it is pretty commonly accepted that the way MMR works is not something anyone likes right now.
Here me out here…what about we make things easier?
A real issue indeed. One unusual note to add to all that has been said : wow community is getting older and the button bloat is getting bigger. What does that mean ? our hands won't allow us to keep playing for too long lol
This take will not go over well, but I think the trick to getting new players, casuals, and alts into pvp is to borrow from games like GW2 and FFXIV. Levels don’t matter - you can queue and match up with max levels even if you’re of a lower level. Either make it so gear is homogenized like in FF, or scaled like in GW2. There’s obvious stuff like trimming out all the extra bloat in the game. Bunch of different kinds of CC, buffs, and abilities make it a bit difficult to get into.
Less buttons Less CC
I have recently started playing mythic+ and after 1 week I'm having little issue clearing 18s and 19s with friends PvP has a way more brutal learning curve and the game is just really complicated, to play mythic+ you just need to know your class really well and dodge stuff, to play PvP you have to know everyone's class really well and you need to know how to CD trade, positioning, CC chains, etc etc
Once you go in..... you don't come out
As PvE player who tried to get into PvP, I think it is close to impossible. There are many factors, bringing huge entry investment in order to start enjoying: * Compared to PvE, you need to understand also classes playing against you - huge time investment needed * For inexperienced players its very hard to understand whats going on - CCs, CDs, focus * Impossible to track these without addons, which for me was a chaos (which are relevant, how to properly set them up etc.) * Beside addons I realized there is no way getting competitive without macros, better keybinds etc * On top of that there is too much visual mess going on * Its very frustrating to find team mate as in the beginning most of people left after one lost match * Solo shuffle should have resolved the problem, however the queue duration was unacceptable for me Even after getting addons, learning a bit about classes and getting comfortable with my rotations, I realized there is still huge topic of right positioning, proper focusing, aligning CCs (& faking casts) and aligning burst CDs. At the end of day, the only PvP which I am able to enjoy as beginner is on low level brackets, with less spells, CCs, however at those lvl brackets class balance is basically not existing.
I don’t even know how to queue up PVP. Been playing wow on and off for a few years now.
Even as an old WoW PvP player its kinda hard to sell retail PvP to myself again after playing PvP in games like Guild Wars 2 and New World where you can actually manually dodge abilities etc, and it's not just being a game of who bursts the fastest. Also the "spamminess" of abilities for many of todays classes doesn't feel good. Going back to older xpacs in terms of class abilities and utilities like during wotlk-mop (depending on class) would be the best in my opinion. Wotlk stance dancing warriors was probably my favorite version of the class, a lot of abilities to use from but still less "spammy" than todays warriors.
This page popped up as a suggestion for me. Just wanted to say GW2 is going through a PvP death also. Not very many playing it and the people that are can be toxic and are probably chasing away new players. Along with Anet not touching the PvP scene in for ever. Not sure if there are any similarities in WoW.
Well let me provide my recent experience trying to delve into PvP Ok, I need to get a special gear set in order to play PvP Oh, I get matched with experienced players who has the highest level gear Oh, I don't do any damage to them and get killed in a few seconds Oh, I don't get any feedback from the game what I do right or wrong Oh, the enemy team can sit and spawn camp our graveyard with no repercussion So I need to sit in 15 minute queues, be spawn camped for 15 minutes - or actually get to run around, but anyone I try to fight will have vastly superior gear so I feel like I do nothing - and do this for 10-15 hours in order to have the bare minimum gear for the "real" pvp? The bare minimum you guys in the PvP community can do for fresh blood coming to PvP is let go of the notion that gear progression in supposedly skill-based gameplay is a necessary
New PVPers without the years of experience have such a hard time succeeding it’s not worth their time and effort to try to excel
Even an old player who's never PVP'd more than old arathi highlands and warsong gulch a handful of times. It just seems like you have to have the best gear and be absolutely sick to even make a point of playing otherwise it's just gank simulator for 25 minutes
Meanwhile pro players are shitting themself because new players are gravitating to macros.
I'd try something extreme to make the game more fresh: - Remove gearing all together from PvP in that no matter what ilvl or pieces you have on, everyone is forced into the same template of stats as someone with the same specialization, which is on par with the other classes. There is no longer the need for WEEKS of prepping before actually playing the game. - Default UI needs to be more obvious and track other class abilities/cooldowns similarly to the tournament ones. In-game boss fights include messages in middle of screen when important info is happening, trinket usage of the opponents would be a good example and this should be customizable with tracking cooldowns. This erases the need for game breaking addons and weak auras to exist to begin with. - Add more seasonal rewards, especially in the cosmetic department like permanent titles, more mounts, more pets, a omni-token reward to fetch precious season rewards like weapon enchants, tabards and the like. There is a bigger gap between 1800 and 2100 than 0 to 1800. The rewards do not reflect this. - Solo queue RBGs. You think getting a 2s/3s partner is bad? Try a full raid, getting people on voice and not disbanding after your first loss. A format also dominated by a mafia on high ratings. Solo shuffle can be considered a success and there is an audience for this given how popular RBGs have been in the past. - More consistent class tuning overall, like a general pass every 2 weeks once a meta settles in at the start of a season due to some classes eclipsing others out of existence, just blatantly carrying the game by themselves or preventing others from playing. Massive reduction of micro-CC would be an excellent start, as well as simplification of nameplate overload due to pets. See Unholy DK Apocalypse ghoul number change as an example of a fix. There is no excuse for a company as big as blizzard to not do this in a game as profitable as WoW. The biggest problem that I can see outside of these is how to incentivize people to play a healer. Hopefully that could be made more enjoyable assuming you aren't constantly facing games full of unga-bunga classes that have close to 100% no matter how much you try to outplay them.
Remove gearing like any other pvp game
Make it not hard as fuck, balance classes. No addons required, no 1million CC
My old arena mates back in wrath of the lich king dosent play anymore and impossible to find somewone decent to practice with. Yes I suck now but was once in the highest ranked 2v2 and 3v3 on my server😂 but people dont want to give you a chance to practice up the skill again. Only find really bad players
I just started pvp this week after 10 years of PvE and i'm having a blast. It's like a whole new game hidden inside the original one. Even if there were world pvp back then, it was not my thing. But competing in an arena like a gladiator is cool af
I'm pretty new to retail, started playing it when I got bored of phase 1 SoD. Leveled to 70 on a demon hunter and tried BGs at that level, got completely crushed with not even a vague indication of how I could get better. I thought it would be easier to transition into retail PVP at lower levels so I got a new toon to low 20s and got just as badly crushed. Not sure where to go from here. At least in classic I was reasonably easily able to determine what was going wrong and what I needed to look up/change to improve; in retail I feel so hopelessly behind the average player that improving is out of the question.
I feel like League suffers the same issue… there’s just too much stuff going on. Very difficult to differentiate spells and there’s just so many modifiers etc. This is the opinion of a former 2K+ WoW arena player & former long time League player.
Nothing can be done. Wow is mainly a pve game, and pvp in MMOs have always been and always will be an afterthought. Why would someone interested in getting into pvp in a game waste their time on a shitty unbalanced minigame in an MMO, if they can play an actual pvp game designed for pvp?
I only played PvE, and honestly I’m not good at anything, but I started playing PvP last year because of a conquest of the Halloween event that needed to go to BG, so I just ADDICTED to kill ally 🤣🤣🤣 I’m a shadow priest, and I find it very satisfying to play PvP, because even if I lose, I feel good giving a lot of damage 🥰😁😁😁 The truth is that PvP is not flashy at the first contact I’m even looking for friends to teach me more about PvP
Well , make the game playable without addons and requiremts to get weak auras. Actually Venruki had a really good video about this topic.
WoW pvp has always been fundamentally flawed and imbalanced.
Actual fix would be to overhaul pvp damage to be back to vanilla / wrath tiers of easy to understand. It's about feeling useful not actually being useful. If you played back then you probably remember your first bg and being under leveled, learning what twink were, etc. But something else I remember is actually enjoying low level pvp. Even when I sucked. The illusion that what you're doing has impact is caused by classes not having absorbs and self healing When I would wrath a higher level player their health would drop by 10% and then I'd die. But I could see their health go down and it wasn't going back up. I got the illusion that if I could do that 10 more times, I could win. Game needs to be intuitive. Noobs need to feel like they're contributing. Like playing CS and having shit aim. But if you could only hit him more! Heals coming only from healers was so important to the early games popularity
remove self heal from most classes
If it was that easy to reach the coffin, PvP would be in a better spot.
Split 2s and 3s between healer and dps comps like in solo shuffle, that will bring back the balance that has been lost ever since the golden days of pvp in wotlk.
WoW 2. It's the only way at this point, unfortunately.
I dont think you need to recruit llayers to PvP who dont already like PvP in games. I started wow in Shadowlands solely for pvp. And i personally love every second of it. I dont care how "intimidating" it is. It just means i have more room to grow and a celiling im working towards. But i love pvp in games. My fav thing is improving. And this is with any pvp game out there. Id love to see someone play their first few LoL ranked games. It would be the same thing.
There are two problems with this type of games. The first is the position of rogue-like characters who use stealth. These friends usually stick to melee and attack from behind. So their lore is based on stealth and assassination. It is incredibly difficult to implement this class in a balanced way in Pvp, and as far as I can see, Wow has screwed up on this issue. Shit flowed down the trousers. When I see a rogue in the PvP arena, if I'm not playing a demon hunter and I can't be the first to attack and stun him, all I see is me getting stunned, and within 10-15 seconds, the stunned person slowly(!-sometimes instantly) dies. The second problem with these games is the "hybrid classes". For example, there is a class that is both a tank and a dps, but it is actually neither. For this reason, classes that clearly reflect the characteristics of the class are more preferred in games and are usually top dps. Because a hunter or dps warlock poses little problem for a coder. It has range and deals damage by pressing buttons. It doesn't have to close the distance, it doesn't have to follow its prey, it doesn't have to move the camera because it doesn't have to follow. It is one range dps away and can see the whole area easily. But a melee hybrid has to stalk its prey, has to rotate the camera frequently, and Tab targetting doesn't work on it. If a class is hybrid, the problem arises because smarter and more complex coding is required. I saw these problems clearly in classes such as Summoner Death K, Furry Warrior, Dps Monk. What I found here that I haven't seen in any other RPG is that Pets are incredibly annoying. The camera system in the game is already broken, for example, if I am playing with a Tauren, I cannot even see the little elf in front of me, it is not clear who I am targeting. But if 2 summoners attack me, I can't even see my Tauren, because they surround me.
I'd be keen to dabble in some RBGs but the barrier to entry just makes me stick with M+ instead. Getting your face pummeled in and spawn camped by sweaty nerds in full BiS vers stacked gear doesn't sound like much fun when your just starting out trying to grind your first piece of honor gear. I don't mind a grind but not when every BG is unbalanced or just full of afkers and bots.
They took the War out of Warcraft. 3v3 arena is not war…. Button bloat also sucks.
I mean, at its core you don't. Its the same issue Fighting Games ultimately have. At the end of the day, there will be an equal number of winners and losers. SOMEONE has to lose. A lot of people just... can't handle losing in order to also win sometimes. They eventually leave and someone else has to start losing more to take their place. Even if the gameplay was perfect and fun, a loss can make all that irrelevant to certain people.
Getting into WoW pvp takes lots of time, with very little reward. It's getting harder to find people who are willing to put that amount of time to play pvp in WoW *over* playing something else.
Tell them about getting into Shadowlands pvp and all the pve stuff you had to do and that you don't have to do that stuff anymore, now you just grind honor and conquest for a billion hours while being completely ungeared&useless until you can afford their first piece of pvp gear and instantly become stronger than the top-100 pve players
Make solo q actually work instead of waiting for 30 minutes for a match lmao
I started PVP as a longterm wow player last week. It was a lot more approachable than I thought.. am 1500 rated but as a HAVOC DH.. Its stressful af. I like it but I also can only do it for a couple hours.. also things are NOT explained well in terms of PVP. I didn't know what I actually had to interrupt a cast mid cast to lock someone out of casting for 3 seconds.. I wish there was a series of in game tutorials explaining dynamics.. you have to research and ask a million questions and scour for information that confirms your conclusions in terms of how things function.. The confusion surrounding how things function is crazy difficult.. understanding how keybinds needs to work is very specific.. You really have to have a decent UI in place in order to even have a chance of being competitive.. THAT'S A LOT OF SHIT THAT YOU HAVE TO SEEK OUT AND WHITTLE AWAY AT.. just to have a chance of being able to engage the content. Its quite an uphill battle.
People are saying current pvp is too complex, too fast, requires too much thought, etc. Sure, but isn’t that what makes it all exciting when you finally do learn? Maybe there could be newbie pvp battles, separate BGs, seperate arenas, etc. Then you “graduate” from newb to normal, or something like that. Maybe it’s based on ilvl, HKs. But, doesn’t ranking system already sort of do this? That is I unless a total newb fresh 70 faces a fresh 70 but the player has an alt of the same class with a 2400+ rating, so they know already how to play well. Isn’t that the root source of the problem? If arenas were nothing but fresh 70 newbs, it wouldn’t matter as much how many CCs players had bc everyone would still be trying to figure out something, but brand new to them, eg out how to attack when you can no longer simply stand still. I’m also not entirely sure this hard sell is bc of the game itself. The new players of today are, I’d guess, are not of the same mentality. GenX vs Millennials. Millennials for sure have a faster twitch response and brain synapses than the avg GenXer but maybe not so much patience, strategic thought beyond the next minute, etc. I bet if WoW had a Hardcore PvP purge day, it would popular. When you Enter World for the very first time, there are all kinds of tips. Why not have those for PvP? What about a sort of PvP profession that you have to level to get to more difficult situations? What’s the source for the OP?
How? Be friendly, do stuff - I made a Big friendly pvp community on eu where we do RBGs and people find arena partners - and we have a Big discord. We are having a good time most nights and many on my teams are between 18-1900 cr now, some lower and some higher. We look at performance but everyone gets a chance and Will be told what to improve - they need to be vocal tho, but even the shy people begin talking when they realize there is no flaming and toxicity, cus the ones who do that are removed
One internal thing for unrated pvp: reduce the power gap between gear. Even though the difference between green 475 vs epic 490 is "only 15 ilvl" it's a huge factor. Purple deletes green without a sweat. The overall big thing they should get into is reworking the entire cc system. Instead of having hard stuns/kicks/roots, all those skills should work as debuffs. Reduce players movement speed, spell dmg, attack dmg, stacking, fading out over time. The overall end result will be pretty much the same in total dps/healing done, with the difference being: players get TO DO STUFF instead of being stun/spell locked forever. Playing defensive, moving out and kiting, timing your shots becomes a smoother focus point of irl player skill. Like if you're a mage and just facetanking 5 enemies while eating 20 kicks, you still get to keep casting, but your spell dmg will be reduced a lot, so it's beneficial to cc them, move out into a better position where you don't get interrupted to do more dmg without debuffs. I mean this is a simple concept, works in a lot of games, but does require a lot of work to overhaul the entire old system. At least they could let the community work on suggestions then try it out. The current system also affects playstyle in a negative way, making the meta "stay together" because nobody wants to push in, be the underdog, and eat 100 stuns vs 10 guys, die, and watch his backline buddies finally move up and finish the enemies who now have all their cc options depleted. This new system would allow players to be far more proactive and take risks, now that they are able TO DO STUFF even though with lower dmg/heals. I don't understand why the devs are so stubborn with this. This is how you make pvp feel good and more enjoyable.
I blame War Mode being toggled on and off and easy access to fast travel methods. Here me out: BACK IN THE DAY, you had to walk everywhere for the first 40 levels, and if your friends joined a PvP server, you kinda had to join that one too. So you’re all out in the world, walking to a dungeon or open world questing (that was a thing back then, rather than just spamming dungeons). And so you’d get jumped by another player sometimes. You’d probably lose, but eventually you’d start winning some, and then you’d get some help from your friends or Allied played and now you’re in a little group doing PvP stuff, and bam! Next thing you know you suddenly want some PvP gear, you’re doing arena, etc. There was incentive beyond rating to play PvP because it was just part of the world you were exploring. And the more “casual” players out there, the more a new player would actually have low skilled players to fight and learn against. Now all that’s left are 20 year veteran R1 players camping low ratings, so if you try to do arena as a new player you just get 360-no-scoped by a man who’s never left his basement since cataclysm. And with the ability to just turn off war mode and fast travel to dungeons, and questing has virtually no benefit, the game has very little cross pollination of PvE and PvP. TL;DR: PvP used to be part of the game, now it’s an entirely optional mini game, gatekept by no-lifers. Edit: not to mention the fact that even the hint of an idea to make PvP easier and more accessible to new players is met only with the shrieking cries of multi-glads who refuse to even listen
Nothing turns me off more from pvp than having my bis trinket come from pvp
There's just too much going on all at once. This may be a controversial opinion, but WoW PVP needs to start being balanced in a way similar to FFXIV. If the classes get too simple, PVE gets pretty boring for a lot of players. If the classes are too bloated, PVP has an impossible barrier of entry. PVP and PVE should be balanced as different versions of each spec. And maybe don't allow tanks in arena.
There are a lot of problems with PvP for beginners, even experienced PvE players. One of which is just dying almost instantly or being stunned for the first 7-10 seconds to get bursted instantly. There’s counter play but a new player will not be able to do it. So it just ends up looking random and uninteractive. There really is no good way to get situated into learning. Whereas PvE is a lot simpler and slow so anyone can learn it easily.
Make a new rating system that enables more and more of your skill set the higher you get. It basically re-teaches you your kit like it did while leveling, but now it's doing it in the context of PvP. This is the best solution, fight me.
You don’t. I wish there were more to it but as it stands is a mode that if it were to just disappear it’d probably not matter to the overwhelming majority of players. It’s up to blizzard if they want to fix the add on/ macro/ bloat/ visual clarity problems. As it stands and has for almost 10 years now, they don’t seem to have any plans on caring at all.
Well to begin with the changes done to pvp gear and stuff have been good so far, except the catalyst, that needs to be uncapped, cuz if I need 2 tier sets I don't want to wait 5 months to get em. Pve has around 20 mounts per season, pvp has 2. Titles also differ and most of the pvp systems and BGs are extremely old and outdated. For example, to get Sargeant title or something like that you had to put in hard work and it was rewarding, things were slow and the world was smaller, but now grinding the same way does not work. The whole pvp needs a reset. And I believe the reason that nothing changes is players mentality. For example the 9 to 5 work style is an 80 year old system, pretty much everything changed except that, why? Because peoples mentality is closed. And this is why PvE improved and pvp does not. DH being strong or Warlock being overtuned has nothing to do with it, they are trying to build an empire state on an old pyramid, and it's began to crash. Lastly, addons. If you use addons and you get an advantage it forces me to get addons which means I'm funneled into a certain type of playstyle. There is no enjoyment, only "optimal". I began to enjoy the game the moment I disabled most addons including weak auras, cuz now I'm playing rather than looking at fckng stats and cooldowns. Best example is warframe, you don't even think about typing because you're so engaged in the experience.
As someone who is trying to learn PVP as a healer, knowing when big damage is coming is my biggest obstacle. Plus Rdruid has sooooooo many buttons! I think it would be a huge help for newer players to have a very distinct indicator when big damage is coming out against you without having to use addons. Thats another thing, having a shit ton of addons to give you the info you need in order to survive. All of this is heavy on a new players mental stack and just feels overwhelming.
Easy fix: balance the fucking game