Healing solo shuffles miserable but doesnt have to be

PVP Arenas
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Perma Duelist here. I personally have 2100-2500 exp on 8 different classes. Not bragging; clearly not the best, or even close ,but I’ve been around the block and put some time in. Look me up. Ever since solo shuffle has come out I’ve noticed dps have it nearly 20x easier to attain rating mathematically. This season alone I’ve hit 2100 on two dps classes already one took 40 wins, the other took 50 wins. When going from 1400-1600 or sometimes even 1700 for all four dps I’m playing right now it happens in one lobby of getting 4-6 wins.

I’ve played 3 healers this season which I also have 2100-2500 exp on in 2s and 3s healing on and it took them 75, 54 and 46 wins on JUST to break 1600 in solo shuffle… BUT… WITH the exact same win to loss ratios as my dps have.

It’s infinitely harder to attain rating as a healer in solo shuffle. The extra rewards are nice, but they are not enough. Throw in a vantus rune. I’m not even positive we would need extra rewards if it was just as easy to attain rating healing as it is dpsing. Also if a dps is dead set on going 0-6 in the lobby, dps can still gain rating, however BOTH healers have to lose OR not gain any rating due to it being neither of their faults for the painful lobby that STILL rewards the dps but NEITHER healer.

People still struggle to understand why people don’t want to or enjoy healing solo shuffle and I believe these are the key issues making it be like it do. Thoughts?

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blizzard needs to solve the healer bottleneck problem whether queues are 40 20 or 10 minutes. they functionally have infinity dps players eager to play the game but they’re gated by the dripfeed of healer players.

for arena shuffles to ever meaningfully recover from that(odds of this outpacing the launch of rated bgb are very low imo) they’d need to design the game to be playable for longer than 10 seconds without healers. almost certainly won’t happen though

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Preach

I don’t understand why this seems to be such a hard concept for development. Please just fix healer MMR and there will be more people happy to heal shuffles. Right now it makes little sense.

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Playing dps is really fun cause you can sky rocket it rating and healing… you just simply can’t its an entirely different experience. You gain rating ridiculously slower and get forced losses or stalemates due to a dps who went 0-6.

I just hope its not a sinister ploy. Since nobody wants to heal solo shuffles… are they squeezing more healing out of the few who are willing and purposefully making it take 20x longer to attain the ratings of dps… just to get “more” healers?

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that is not why “playing dps is really fun” for most players

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Free tier slots from hitting 1600 and cosmetics and titles that distinguish what you have earned isn’t fun? People queue up for rated pvp just to have a good time? are you sure thats not what bgs are for?

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yes

rating junkies are overrepresented on this forum and in most feedback channels because that behavior is closely correlated with devoted whining.

bgs are ruined by matchmaking that doesn’t care about anything but a minimum ilvl and battlegroups, they’re full of robots and honor grinders and people who are deeply uninterested in even trying to win the game.

rated ladders are required to achieve the outcome of ‘allowing people who are playing to win matches to self-select into groups with people who share that goal’. the rating itself is not the fun part for anyone but ipad babies

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I hear you and I see you.

Waiting for 55 min queues as dps sucks, because healing sucks because of my above stated reasons. I enjoy healing. I don’t want healing to be 20x more difficult for me or other players to have the same experience as a dps.

So let’s fix or try some changes to make healing be at minimum as enjoyable as dps.

So we don’t have 55 minute dps queues? All i want. Were currently off topic here.

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I came back to wow to try out solo shuffle as I used to love pvp and don’t have the schedule or desire to deal with LfG arenas and the high expectations and constant disbanding of teams . Solo shuffle seemed a good way to get my pvp fix.

However the problem can’t be fixed by coding, it’s a social issue.

Just as in BGs and other aspects of the game, you can dumb something down as much as you want but the average player seems to always be below that threshold and it ruins it for everyone else.

I carry dps and push out 35 mil heals over the match, and I still get 0-6 or 2-4 due do dps each chasing opposite targets across both ends of the arena. Really silly stuff, and no communicating and instruction from me seems to help. They rinse and repeat every time.

Earlier tonight I had a mage who, after I asked if he could sheep the healer, double blinked right across the map into the enemy team and died. Then next game had a DH reroll who yolod in and died trying to solo the entire enemy team when me and the other dps hadn’t even moved out behind a pillar yet. He proceeded to berate me and PM me nasties. Then he made it his mission to tunnel vision me the rest of the 5 matches, as he never ended up on my team again after the first. He cost them their matches and my dps didn’t do much, everyone attacked completely randomly in long drawn out games that boiled down to me and the other healer seeing which babysitter could carry their kids first.

I lost 59,m rating, dishing out 35 mil heals and securing a killing blow as the healer, the other healer gained rating, and that was the end of me dabbling in this social experiment.

It really boils down to “you can’t fix stupid”. In the grand scheme of things, this game is not that hard. When we are talking about just having fun and winning here, losing there, not caring about titles and stuff, all you need is a pulse to do that. Consider how much of the player base still can’t do the minimums and you are left with the reality that the developers can’t force the players to learn, grow, and press more than 2 buttons. That’s their choice, and it’s also mine to not want to deal with the toxic player base this game has. If there is a fix for this game mode, they need to determine how to truly rate a player not incentivize people rerolling.

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Yes. Brother I’m on your side. BUT why do all 3 of the other dps get to gain raiting for the 0-6 dps who not only punishes themselves but BOTH healers…

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you’re lookin at a growing leak in the bottom of the boat and shopping online for a bigger bailing bucket instead of flex seal

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Bare minimum there has to be a way to not punish both healers into not wanting to play the game any more because one dps through no fault of their own found a miraculous way to lose all six rounds

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Same reason one healer I went against gained 359 rating in one match, and I lost 9, and I also got 2 kills as the healer (dps couldn’t take anyone down I had to get aggressive and help push). I also get the same dps most of the 6 rounds, so when they are bad, I’m screwed.

All he had to do was hide behind a pillar and dump cyclones and hots, so from his perspective it was “that healer sucks I just gained a ton of rating now I’m at 1500 after one match!”. From my perspective I had to overplay and literally cc and dps people and heal ; at once, to secure the only two wins we got.

The entire system is ridiculous, it needs a ground up redesign.

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Don’t give up man. You sound like an amazing healer. I’d be honored to play with you. DK, DH, BM hunter if you like 2s :slight_smile:

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Hey! I’m not that healer but I’d be happy to take you up on that offer if you’re open to it? I’m a Feral/DK/Lock player and think we could have some fun with those combos! I’m more stuck around Rival though…

Down to swap btags?

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Perma-bad rated arena healer here. I stall out at about 1400 or so. I mostly enjoy the non-rated random BG and the blitzes are crazy fun. The arena rating for me is meaningless.

Healing SS would have more meaning if I can get some % towards the mount by winning a game in the SS and not winning the whole match. But if I need to win the match to get 2% towards the mount then it loses it’s luster pretty quick. If I can get 0.5% to the mount for each game within the match then there’s a reason to play.

Or, if they gave a way to grind cosmetics through honor / SS that’d give a reason to play as well.

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Just a heads up, you need 3/6 games won in the match to get the 2%. So “technically” you don’t have to win the match since healers mostly get “rating unchanged” for a 3/6 performance.

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agree that bliz did a poor job of anticipating these issues in their shuffle healer treatment

at this point they should just give healers some rating for any wins

as soon as a healer stop caring about shuffle rating, and the system makes a lot of healers stop caring as a coping mechanism, the healers lose desire to stay in a losing match or even try very hard if it seems like a complete waste of their time

as soon as they stop caring about rating, they don’t care about the leaver penalty either

yeah you can extrapolate some of this stuff to dps as well but it’s much much more frustrating for healers, especially a non-fotm healer

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It doesn’t make little since it makes no sense.

My mmr is always so much higher than my cr I can literally drop my cr to 0 and get it all back in a handful of games.

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I hate RSS, but if I could do 30-50 matches for an 1800 mog like I do in 2’s I’d play 30-50 matches x however many toons I want the mog on.

The gameplay would still suck, but I’m mostly salty that I’ve got to play 2-3x more rounds than most DPS for similar rating.

Also, BG Blitz will bury RSS. I predicted the healer problems, watch me be right again. Hope you boys are ready to learn to rotate bases.