I started from “how can they make frost mage a pvp spec on par with fire?” And I quickly realized that this topic can be expanded to viability for various specs: MM hunter to name one.
I also realized that every specialization has its own answer.
Frost mage, for example, could get deep freeze again. I don’t think that’s the best answer. Personally, I want frost to be able to pull off big shatters. Given the pve damage profile… it seems that this would require something specific for pvp. Maybe a return of frost bomb in a form that is single target focused and pretty lethal.
Which led me to the conclusion that frost doesn’t need to suddenly become “viable” in the sense that it can slot into AWC comps. Frost needs the fun element. I’m posting this from my lock and yeah, I’m degenerate and pvp as demo. And it’s not “viable” in the way I just outlined. But it’s fun.
And that’s the angle that should be pursued in my opinion. For example, even if WW was actually not good right now - let’s imagine-craft a state of the game where WW doesn’t have the defensives it needs, but it can still one-shot with dummy thicc SCK. People would still play it a lot due to the fun aspect of pulling that off.
I’m just some hardstuck 2k 2v2 demolock. So I thought I would throw this topic out there on these forums because, at least in the past, I remember really good players like absterge and dilly etc… would actually post stuff here.
I know that viable and fun are both relative terms: anything is viable up to at least 2400 and fun is what you make of it.
But I think we can agree that fun for a damage dealer is being able to 100-0 someone that doesn’t have defensives available. If we make that a metric, like defining time to kill as the time it takes to 100-0 someone without defensives, I think we can coarsely identify which specializations are lagging behind in the fun department. It’s only a coarse approximation, because TTK defined in this way doesn’t account for classes that are more focused on sustained output - assa rogue, aff lock, bm hunter, etc…
I don’t know. Maybe it’s a fool’s errand to try and discuss arena pvp in this fashion. Regardless, still throwing this out there for discussion.