Feedback on the Solo Shuffle as a new healer

PVP Arenas
1

I’d like to share my thoughts and experiences regarding the Solo Shuffle mode as a new player and new healer. As a person who enjoys playing a healing class and PvP, I’ve found the current iteration of solo shuffle to be quite dissatisfying and frustrating.

The main issue arises when playing as a healer. I often find myself babysitting DPS players who seem to have little regard for positioning and coordination. These DPS players tend to engage enemies behind pillars, neglect using defensive abilities when enemies use offensive cooldowns, and frequently break line of sight, forcing me to leave cover and become vulnerable to getting CC’d. When they die, I find myself on the receiving end of unrelenting verbal abuse about how I should play my class.

Moreover, the damage output of many classes is currently overwhelming, leaving me with little time to cast any crowd control before someone is brought down from full health to zero in just a couple of global cooldowns. This fast-paced damage output forces me to always be on the edge of saving someone just in case, as I cannot trust them to Iceblock or turtle.

The matchmaking system also appears to have its flaws. I frequently encounter situations where the lobby consists of an uneven mix of melee and ranged DPS. This often results in one player feeling targeted and frustrated, leading to ragequits that waste everyone’s time and result in no rewards. Just yesterday, I queued for three solo shuffle matches in a row, all of which ended with a ragequit because that sole melee/caster was getting bullied to death. There is also no good way of punishing leavers, because most don’t care about their rating. Some would even haltingly just AFK the remaining rounds to punish people who trained them in the first few rounds.

Compared to playing regular 3s matches, where I could potentially play 8-10 games within the same time frame as a solo shuffle, the time and rewards are significantly lower. In regular matches, I often manage to average 600-700 conquest points, assuming my win rate is half decent. Furthermore, I have the freedom to choose the composition I prefer, and the overall player skill level tends to be higher and more patient.

In the LFG, it amazes me how frequently players with 2k - 2.4k+ ratings willingly take a healer who is way way below their rating. You get easier games because you’re technically getting carried by gladiators, and you also indirectly get coached and trained by them too, receiving valuable advice and tips on positioning and how to improve my own gameplay.

So, in conclusion, when comparing the rewards of regular 3s versus solo shuffle, why should I, as a healer, bother queuing up for solo shuffle only to end up feeling miserable? The 50 conquest point lootbox simply isn’t sufficient; in fact, most of the time, I don’t even receive this lootbox due to people ragequitting.

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It’s a meme bracket bud, don’t take it so seriously.

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Yea the game pace is way too fast. Unless your team is in advantage, it’s very hard to find windows to do anything as a healer. My resto druid I die 100-0 if I get caught in a stun with no trinket. Doesn’t even matter if I have hots up, barkskin, or anything. Windwalkers and rogues are laughably overtuned

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So I didn’t read all of this, but I just want to point out this is a very common misconception by bad healers. Good healers know how to move in with their dps to apply and maintain pressure and prevent the enemy from recovering or being allowed to avoid their damage. Bad healers think the most important thing is to just always sit back and maintain near constant los with each other. It’s definitely a balancing act and each player needs to know when it’s appropriate to push in or not, but I see it ALL THE TIME with low rated healers where they will blame teammates for lining when it could very well have been their fault instead for not moving with their dps and supporting them.

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This does get better as you climb. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to force some 4-2 games, but clever CC, clutch plays, etc. to get out of that MMR hell.

However, as a healer, you can be put with 2100 players or 1500 players, and the experience is vastly different. When you get good dps on your team, they understand what’s happening. When I lifegrip someone with high xp, they know we need to pillar to stablize before re-engaging. Meanwhile, the 1500 warrior just leaps right back in to die.

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the only problem is it took away a large portion of the player base from other brackets, so it’s quickly turned into the bracket with the most participation.

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Ok share how would a good healer position themselves in Mugambala when one of one of the dps is chasing the mage on the bottom far part behind the middle (Large pillar) and the other warrior is on the very top corner going toe to toe with the windwalker?

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You’re creating a bad scenario and asking how to miraculously fix it which isn’t possible. I specifically said it’s important for both the healer and dps to know when it’s time to chase or pull back. The point is lots of bad healers don’t know when it’s good to push in and support their dps.

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The meta is too fast to ever push in. If I’m ever in LoS of any ranged, I can get swapped to and die instantly

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This is the thing. Less experienced healers are scared to death of being cc’d or swapped to so they won’t push in when needed and I get it, healing isn’t easy. But good healers will know when they can and they will put themselves in the best possible position to reduce that from happening and keep certain cd’s to make it a lot harder for the enemy to do it.

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Yea I’m going to stick to staying as far away as possible. Any time I have remotely gotten close as a resto druid it ends in getting swapped to

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mmm yeah I’d say rdruid is the most susceptible to that and it takes a lot of xp on that spec to know when you’re gonna be safe. It’s the 1 spec I would most often prefer they never attempt to do anything but keep hots rolling and drink when they can. But good ones can pull it off and win games with clutch rake stuns, clones, vortexes, etc.

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I was able to do that a bit more last season, but it’s gotten a lot more volatile lately

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Right, but you often see more often than not DPS splitting
other examples are when you both decide to have X as the main Kill target but for some reason warrior123godxx… decides to chase the healer behind the pillar and leave you exposed to CC and or make you decide who to heal

it takes time , but you see more bad DPS moves even at higher levels than you see bad healers

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Once you play the game enough, you’ll start to realize that conquest is nothing more than a means to gear new alts.

3v3 has more rewards than shuffle, but if conquest is what you deem to be a reward, then I agree, you should try to grind it out in 2s/3s.

The vast majority of your post is just a bunch of excuse-andy nonsense. I don’t know what mmr you find yourself struggling at, but I’m guessing that as a new player, it’s a fairly low one. If you really think that your shortcomings are solely due to leavers, dps not being able to read your mind or playing poorly, matchmaking, etc., then congratulations, you are at your proper rating (e.g., the rating that is an accurate reflection of your skill).

Always a good read to see several paragraphs of excuses as to why someone is stuck or can’t climb rating, but zero mention that they have any shortcomings, things that they could improve on/do better, things that they could do to win more matches, etc.

I love it :slight_smile:

If you don’t enjoy healing in shuffle (or you feel that there is no point because of the reward structure), then don’t.

Boom! Bourbons selflessly helps another brother from another mother :slight_smile:

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Resto druids are at greater risk from my experience, but just as a general mentality for any role in any competitive game: you should never be playing to have the best rating today. You should play to improve, and that is going to mean plenty of individual days where you play in a way that will lose you rating in the short-term as you learn a skill which will raise your ceiling in the long-term. Remember, the only way to never fail is to never try.

When I swapped to using arena 123 that lost me rating. When I decided to change my honor talents the first time that lost me rating. When I decided to narrow the game down to ensuring that I was kicking well and consistently, and aware of what to kick at all, that lost me rating. All of this lost me rating that day or that week, because the process of practicing these individual skills sucks up my mental bandwidth and caused other parts of my play to suffer. For much of this season my devoker had a weird set that focused on a verse/haste prio, and believe-you-me that was a huge failure that also got me all kinds of hate in whispers.

If I were a resto druid that wanted to be able to be more aggressive I would choose to sacrifice the next however many games to specifically practicing getting my CCs off without dying. A successful game would be one where I got them off consistently and without death, regardless of my round score. An unsuccessful game would be repeatedly dying in the process of that action in specific. But even those unsuccessful games would then be successful if I turned around and learned why I died, and avoided the scenario next time. Once you have a good idea of what is possible, you can splice this new skill into the rest of your gameplay. You will identify safe CC opportunities, and you will see the opportunities that technically exist but which are not worth it, and with that knowledge not only do you avoid putting yourself in those positions, but you can learn to identify better when an enemy healer is choosing a bad time to CC and punish him for it.

The only time you should be playing to win over everything else is at the end of the season. So, practice for 6 months, and then in the final two weeks unleash the cumulative efforts you’ve put in and climb as high as you can. Then once that is over it’s right back to improvement mode for and moving into the next season.

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That’s actually a great perspective to have and I need to start thinking like that.

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And blizzard refuses to allow people to verbally fight back!.
TOS needs a revamp

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It pays off huge. I’ve sacrificed a ton of possible rep hours on Devastation for the sake of leveling and gearing out and figuring out four new characters, and it has just been so worth it. Leveled up my gameplay in a big way.

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Or when Blizzard releases a rework or patch that pushes your spec to S+ tier. Before the nerfs come in.

:wink:

1 Like