Replace the Arena Team system with the retail Personal Rating system in every bracket. Participation is in part low across the board because of how punished we are for team hopping with the Arena Team system. Personal Rating allows players to play with more players and try more comps and never fear being “out of range” of getting points or end of season rewards.
Add cross-realm Arena Queuing. Similarly to the Personal Rating change, cross-realm arena queues will boost participation even more. Once we do away with the Arena Team system, there will be no reason not to allow cross-realm arena queuing. This change is especially good for those who are arbitrarily stuck on PvE realms and can’t transfer to a PvP realm if they decide they wanted to be able to find more arena partners.
Add a 3v3 Soloqueue bracket. The arena-tournament WoTLK private server has had soloqueue success for over 10 years with a comparatively MUCH smaller player pool to what WoTLK Classic will have. It’s good to be able to log in and queue the game for those who don’t want to tryhard or use voice communication in the premade bracket.
Add a Dampening (an increasing Healing% reduction after X amount of time) mechanic to arena. Most people don’t like playing 15+ minute games, and adding Dampening will ensure that gamespace doesn’t feel slow in certain matchups. Compared to TBC healers, WoTLK healers have much higher throughput while having much higher mana sustain. This can lead to games that are almost stalemated without a dampening mechanic. Arena just isn’t fun for either team when it feels like no team can possibly score a kill to end a match.
5.a. Remove Racials from arena or make them something similar to a talent where any race can choose any racial power. Racially tied power is very bad design for competitive PvP in an MMO. It forces players to play a race or faction that they don’t enjoy to acquire greater player power from the most meta race. In WoTLK, the PvE trinkets are very overpowered in arena so every class that can choose Human will go Human so they can run 2x PvE trinket while still having a CC-break mechanic from their built-in PvP trinket racial. Either remove the Racials from arena entirely, or make them a separate talent tree where every race has access to any racial ability in arena.
5.b. If removing Racial abilities from arena isn’t an option, the very least you could do is allow us to PAY YOU for a service that costs you nothing, a race change, so that our characters can play with the Racial abilities that are best for arena. Racials are game-breaking and not having the best racials simply loses you games. It’s not fun to lose because your race has X% less power and % to win the match than another race. Let us PAY YOU to change our race.
Remove Legendary effects from Arena. Since we will most likely not see a flat-out ban of Legendary items in arena, we should at the very least disable the Legendary effects that make these items game-breaking while in Arena. Shadowmourne will still be the best 2handed weapon choice by far even without the chance on hit proc effect, it will just make the item ruin less games if it can’t proc and just win games for free.
You realize that once it’s out, it will be too late to do any major adjustments right? This is blizzard… They barely even support their flagship product in retail mid expansion… and we have multiple years of data pointing to the fact that:
Classic doesn’t get anywhere near the resources devoted to it
That they don’t make big changes to classic, post release.
Any systems changes like the OP suggested, basically need to be getting worked on now, and implemented before beta to make it into the client.
Quoting a snippet so you know I’m talking to you… but @ each point
Personal rating: Absolutely. Failure to do this was one of the larger mistakes in TBCC.
Xrealm arena queuing: I’ll be honest this doesn’t impact me in any way whatsoever I don’t think. But I’m ok with it.
I’m actually a bit sad I didn’t put this in my wrath issues/suggestions post. Love the idea, if only to boost participation rates. I’m also in favor of just importing RBGs as well
I couldn’t remember if dampening was in WotLK or not. Absolutely in favor of this as well.
I’m not opposed to just deleting racials entirely… but I think we should be fine if we just tone down the outliers (EMFH, Arcane Torrent) and maybe give a small boost to the weaker ones (Gnome escape artist could always work, for example) Simply replacing emfh with the future retail stunbreaker version still would net them a top tier pvp talent, without it being overbbearing enough to be problematic, as the double pve trinkets version is.
Legendary effects: I’m actually opposed to this one… For three reasons: First, Smourne isn’t all that much stronger than H.Bryntroll, at least for a DK. Perhaps it’s different on war or ret… I also don’t ever remember once caring that a healer had the ulduar mace leggo, back in the day. Secondly, I’m not sure blizzard is capable of disabling just those specific legendary procs, and it’s far more likely nuke all weapon procs in the process… Bryntroll is one of the best, easiest weapons for melee to get, but it is a heavily proc reliant weapon. Third, I don’t like the idea of gutting the top end pve items for pvp. They are admittedly very strong, but they are legendary weapons for a reason, and even so I never felt they where all that superior to my wrath dk’s bryntroll and h.bryntroll.
There already is dampening in wotlk, it’s called a healing debuff and Rogues, Warriors, and Hunters have them. It reduces healing by 50%. They added dampening when blizzard brilliantly re balanced pvp and heavily nerfed healing debuffs from 50% to 20% in Cata. A dampening in wrath is completely ridiculous.
Excellent idea, but I have a better way to do it, use the actual ATR servers, now blizzard can’t screw up the class mechanics anymore with their garbage retail engine.
Better idea, make resilience also nerf healing in exactly the same way it does damage. Reason being, blanket fixes like dampening are horrible.
Just remove racials entirely.
nah, just deactivate those weapons in arena in full in the same way other items are not allowed.
Okay but real talk, why is it always the 1500 players giving arena changes? Are people still looking for excuses why they can’t climb rating? “I’m 1500 but if I had WoTF I’d be 2500”.
There is top teams of both factions and all races. Hell I’m 2200 playing with a troll rogue. Like cmon best racial by far.
they could improve the arena experience by removing it all together. Wotlk arena is going to be even more cringe than TBC. washed up players trying to make their streams/youtube pop. no one cares about arenas
Of course I want to play Wrath, and will play Wrath. Why would I suggest changes for a game I am not invested in?
Retail has gotten many quality of life arena improvements over the years, and it seems foolish to not add those changes to WoTLK Classic. Even if only 1-3 on my list got added to WoTLK Classic I’d be happy, because those changes quite literally just allow people to queue more arena without being punished.
I was looking for a post like this before making a new one. 1 & 2 are so important there are not words to describe how important this is.
Imagine you are a new player or just new to pvp. You decide you want to get into arena. You are not on one of the few pvp mega hub servers. You cannot find teammates and just like that another potential new arena player is dead on arrival.
We need to be able to que with anyone. I would even go so far as to say we need to be able to que with the opposite faction. If remember correctly they are doing this on retail soon.
The arena scene needs as much help as it can get. Instead, it gets overlooked and is an afterthought as per usual.
Yes - or remover Rating all together and Adjust how points are given (X for a win, Z for a loss)
100% yes - Cross realm should be added to every aspect, Shard all the dead servers together and the unbalanced servers.
sure
Already a thing. Almost all classes have a mortal strike.
No - Racials mean little to nothing until 2000+ arenas (when you are playing people that know the ins and outs of each comp and the littlest advantage means a W). And doesn’t effect Wrath until ICC.
No - Weapons mean little to nothing until 2000+ arenas (see above). And doesn’t effect Wrath until ICC
I’m one of those that don’t like changes in the classic releases, but regarding arenas this suggestions would have an incredible positive effect, with exception of those two: