Well, not entirely. Dragonflight is the best PvP has been in a long while. It’s a lot of fun when it was tuned properly, and some of the best WoW PvP seasons ever.
The main issue balance wise is the outlier specs that don’t see tuning. I picked this game back up during covid, and I can tell you the first time I actively stopped playing was the s1 ret paladin fiasco because there just was no point to queueing. Aug was bad but I stuck through. DH is bad but I stuck through. I want to play the game, I want to improve. I love playing WoW PvP when it’s good.
I’m very close to taking another extended break. And it’s nothing to do with the lack of tuning, although that is a secondary concern. The real reason I would consider to cancel my sub is because there is 0% chance Blizzard is not aware of botting. You can tell yourself whatever you want in your head, but they definitely know it’s happening and it’s clearly the talk of the town at this point. While they may address it at some point, it will likely be too little too late. Until they address it in a permanent way (i.e. a ban on the payment option associated with account, or I.P. address, etc.) this is only going to get worse and the bots are only going to get better. And to be honest, if there was any interest in keeping integrity in PvP, this would’ve been done swiftly and thoroughly.
Couple this with MAJOR balance ignorance, and the integrity of the game feels completely compromised. While this likely effects RSS more so than other game formats, I basically have to schedule play time for 3v3. The entire reason I choose PvP is to avoid that. I don’t want to schedule a raid at 8pm. I want to log on when I can, play, and log off.
This following bit is not exaggerated in the slightest. I will walk you through what happened to me today, when I had roughly 3 hours to kill and friends aren’t online:
-Queue RSS (40 min queue times on average today for dps)
-Queue pop, leaver immediately before the gates even open.
-Queue pop, bot, we all know it. It goes 0-6 because we are aware.
-Queue pop, 3 games with a raging healer who is being toxic and giving up, next 3 games the healer DCs (unfortunate, happens, not Blizzards fault, but just want to be clear this was the only real game I got to play today)
-Queue doesn’t pop in time, I have to log.
This player experience is not far from typical. At all. It’s fairly standard.
During this, my RL friend (former PvP healer) is watching me play in Discord. He hasn’t played since Cata s1, and he is not really understanding the new abilities or the pacing of the game. Then he sees this (largely typical) player experience. Now mix in the often discussed time it takes to start, level, gear, craft, etc. just to get your character ready for PvP. Then you get to be a bad player for a long time while you’re relearning. Spoiler alert: He didn’t want to reactivate.
Pretty much since launch, Blizzard has actively said PvP is a “mini-game” they aren’t focused on heavily. And I sort of got that, because it wasn’t the bread and butter of what draws player base. The majority of paying players were not taking PvP too seriously. However, 1 year ago there was a poll that showed PvP was performing higher than given credit for:
To be clear, that is VERY close to being the preferred content of the player base. So imagine the issues were fixed, and what it potentially could be.
TL;DR - The game is actually very good when it’s good, but nobody cares to fix it, and there’s no way they aren’t aware.