This xpack could have been a glorious PvP revival due to the amazing changes with gearing, creative crafted items and talent trees, minimal “chores” needed, easy accessibility to PvP through solo shuffle.
But despite having these items that check all the boxes people have been asking for years, Blizz chose to fumble the bag hard in the following obvious ways
•Ret rework. (completely decimated a season, will go down as one of the most appalling examples of self sabotage in game design)
•Healer imbalance. Weeks in S1 it felt helpless to que as anything else besides a disc priest. Followed by S2 mw, then hpal dominance. Makes for boring games.
•Healers getting shafted in rating, gameplay, MMR. On top of shuffle being generally infuriating to heal already, Blizz somehow neglected glaring healer rating disparity in third game mode for 10 months and counting
•Augment evoker. Introducing this spec at all is hilarious. Effectively broke all balance in PvE and PvP. And to do it mid season no less.
•S2 MMR Deflation. Self explanatory. (Not going to debate this point - if you disagree with this point, pivot to inconsistent season to season ranking creating frustration among players.)
Anyway this game continues to feel like some sort of masochistic hamster wheel where the devs hate the players, and a small circle of decades-addicted gatekeeping high ranking pvpers cheering them on not realizing they’re only making themselves more and more irrelevant as more people leave the game. It’s now a self perpetuating negative feedback cycle.
Sad to see such a massive bag fumble happen to a good game !