DF did have that ret rework that ruined arena for a bit. But i would say this latest patch and how buggy and unbalanced the game is, war within is the worst i have ever played. On top of all the MMR issues,
they killed the expansion for PVP before it even started everybody already stopped queueing. They need to look at the OP specs like spriest,feral,ele and BM and nerf them in pvp already
I had fun in WoD pvp on some classes, but others were mind numbingly boring compared to previous iterations (mage frostbolt doing 0 damage compared to ice nova/comet storm). Also I don’t think anyone really took rating seriously given all the shenanigans which went on.
It wasn’t meaningless, and boosting was really active back then. AWC was very relevant as well with in person conventions, which made arenas even more relevant.
TWW S1 has awful class balancing, I know the devs are trying as best as they can, also blizz is killing PVP participation with MMR squeeze at start of the season and removing PVP vault.
I’d strongly argue that TWW is much better for gearing than DF was.
I couldn’t jump into rated 2s and bang put my conquest back cap in 1 evening in DF.
I logged in the first time on Sunday finished to 80 monday and got most of my gear before logging out on Monday.
Heck the bloody tokens gear in DF was blue with a weekly allowing you 1 piece of the comparable to conquest warmode gear.
Currently bloody tokens gear is just 3ilvls under best conquest.