Currently, to increase your rating with a caster, players heavily rely on the luck of not facing more than one melee opponent per round. It has become incredibly challenging to play against two warriors, two death knights, or two melee classes in general. Mages, warlocks, shamans—always remain and will be the primary target. It’s nearly impossible to cast any spell against two melee opponents who have a basic understanding of the game.
My criticism is as follows: there should be better balancing in Solo Shuffle PvP by limiting the number of melee classes per match. This would greatly improve the quality of life for many players who prefer playing as “powersquishy” characters.
And most on both sides of the game client, I’m afraid, don’t understand the chase / ebb&flow inherit to class philosophy in MMORPGs. Then again, I don’t think any one of us, or them, could have the proper full solution at hand… Tweaks and modifiers is all that can be done unfort… That, or have a huge televised segment on ability pruning, with devs, top players and community weighing in on what’s fun, testing things live etc.
I agree that 1 ranged 1 melee 1 healer on both teams is the best experience, but as a caster you need to learn to abuse the fact that you control the positioning of the melee attacking you, and by extension the positioning of their healer and therefore their entire team. Drag the melee to positions that force their healer to move (inherently disrupting their healing output to a degree) into a poor defensive position themselves, which opens them up to further disruption via CC and interrupts and having to move again if they want to get back to a more defensible position.
The next thing to learn is that your goal in the modern game isn’t to keep the melee off you 100% of the time. There’s a difference between dragging them and kiting them, and the latter you’re only going to be able to do in short bursts. You need to learn to cast with them on you and to kite during specific windows where you either want to protect your own casting by being out of range of their disruptive effects, or avoid their burst windows.
Obviously juking is an important skill to practice, but against most teams you can achieve a baseline level of uptime by just belligerently casting in their face, eating the interrupts, and casting again as soon as you can. Cycle spell schools as you are able, which most specs can do to some extent. In these situations you can easily screw yourself by trying to be too shifty. Also always keep in mind that resources spent on you are resources not spent on your teammates, so if you’re eating chain interrupts it means your healer is likely freecasting to an extent.
If you learn to do these two things it will make these melee-heavy lobbies feel a lot better to play in. It may not ever be fun to have two melee trying to burrow into your rectum for an entire match, but you’ll feel a much greater sense of agency and your success rate will rise.
casters rely heavily on their teamates, I have been in the gutter at 1200 on my lock and at 2100… I can tell you that its not much different anywhere.
There will be people who dont play around your port. You will get trained into the dirt. You will have to learn to play better.
The best advice I can give you is to not die. If you can live and not die before someone else does, thats how you win the shuffle game. That means kiting > anything else in melee lobbies.
I feel like everyone seems to think caster meta just because of boomie, spriest, and demo lock. A lot of the other casters are honestly not as good as a lot of melee, except now aug evokers breaking everything.
Whatever.