So far it’s been fun, but it feels like nothing’s being done to keep the flame alive until 9.2 lands.
PvP is an absolute blast, but the honor grind is atrocious. A week or so ago I dug up my alt paladin to see how far I can go totally fresh in 2s (basic gear acquired from the new conquest boxes). At 2k cr, 2.2mmr, it’s a total nightmare to progress further, because the honor gains are so weak I’d have to grind through thousands of 2s games to get rival gear, let alone duelist. For those who are curious, I was playing a Prot Pala at 229ilvl with a friend of mine playing WW in full Rival1 gear.
Due to the insane gear gaps, the barrier of entry for any kind of PvP at lvl60 is ludicrously high. New or lower skilled players feel discouraged to even attempt pushing their personal rating, because not only do they not have the required skills, reaction speeds and foresight to win PvP battles, but they don’t have gear as well. Generally, I recommend these players to attempt pushing rated BGs, as it’s more about learning the flow of the map first (which is super easy to grasp even if you are not an MMO player) than the intricacies of how classes play, or how positioning works, etc. However, participation is so low that even getting to rival range is nigh-on impossible because you are already facing Hero of the Faction players at 2k MMR. Hero titles start at high 2.2 (not even in Elite range!) as of right now, and before this for the longest time, it was much, much lower. Luduslabs showed that the 90th percentile was 1.7cr last season for RBGs, meaning that very few players can actually get Rival gear (let alone Duelist).
These issues are further compounded by rampant boosting, where you can essentially hire a top player to carry you to a point where you can (potentionally) carry yourself, and that these players missed out on weeks of weekly boxes. If you get lucky on a duelist weekly box, you have a chance to loot tens of thousands of honor (talking about 2handed weapons here). Even worse is the conduits, gem sockets and legendary grinds. Some conduits are fine at 145 (Royal Decree for example), but others you need to push them as far as you can (Ringing Clarity or Righteous Might for example) because the gains are too big to ignore. As for legendaries, they are quite costly and you want the free gem sockets and main stats from having a 262. There’s just simply too much to grind, especially for people with alts. And not having sockets means you’re missing out on hundreds of 2ndary stats.
The other day, a nerf landed for Prot Paladins, and I don’t think I’ve ever been this mad at a simple numerical change since BfA corruptions. An 80% reduction to the healing of WoG on others is massive, and it’s also not a nerf that was needed. If the goal was to get rid of Prot as a healer spec, that should have been done before the expansion launched. More healers for the game is a boon, as it means there are more healers in LFG, more healers to play with, and the ladder gets a mix-up. The issue with Prot right now is not it’s toolkit or numerical tuning – that has been fixed in 9.0.5 when you removed the CC immunity on Horse. The issue is Night Fae. The rampant oneshot comps running around is the problem. You can nerf Prot as much as you want, they’ll just go back to Holy and still use the Summer Legendary to oneshot cheese people.
A nerf that happened too late, and isn’t targeted at an actual issue. Here’s another reminder that a devblog is a must. We’re lucky if we get developer notes nowadays.
Here’s why nerfing the healing of prot does nothing good for the game: https://clips.twitch.tv/FurryAntediluvianFiddleheadsResidentSleeper-OPolEixsftS46k9W (keep in mind this clip is AFTER you nerfed Prot healing – and yes there are a plethora of buffs going on, but that’s the point. All this senseless dmg stacking needs to go – there should be some, but not THIS MUCH. A team well versed in game knowledge can counter this by stacking Disc dome and DK dome along with multiple personal defensives, but… really???).
I’ve also done a lot of leveler BGs. While they’re quite fun once you build your characters with basic enchants and heirlooms, the EXP and honor gains are super low and thus most people avoid it completely, with some classes such as MM and Arcane completely dominating early ladders. It’s also quite sad that XPoff people are not allowed to participate, as they’re an excellent way to play alts in WoW. Especially in modern WoW, the gap between an XPoff player and a leveler isn’t that big at all if the leveler fishes up some cheap enchants and consumables. Of course it’s not a welcoming environment for a new player, but I always believed in the community’s ability to help others out (which is something I’ve been trying to do for the longest time), and also, new players will still lose massively to a player that has 13+years of experience.
Haven’t dabbled in M+ or raids yet, got discouraged at the start when the AoE cap was introduced, and now I’m simply not excited to gear up from scratch (including Shards of Dom) knowing that 9.2 is on the horizon.
Overall, I’m having fun playing the game (although the fact that certain features such as being able to swap Covenants not being in the game from day1 onwards still boggles me), but there are still many obvious and easy ways to improve the experience. Of course, I will elaborate more in future threads, but for now, these are my experiences with 9.1.5.