Lets take a look at race statistics in Arenas

PVP Arenas
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First off, I want to save great work Blizzard on bringing back dedicated PVP CC breaker trinkets. I think this is a great move towards fixing some critical failures in the current PVP system.

Now onto the race dilemma, if you can call it that.

BLUF/TLDR: I believe that racials play too high of a role in rated PVP, to the point where the player feels like they are shooting themselves in the foot by not playing some specific classes. Below I will detail data pulled from arenamate which draws all information directly from the wow armory ratings page.

When you look that Duelist and above brackets (2100+), you will notice a very common denominator between Alliance and Horde. That is 1 race of each faction dominating for the bulk of classes.

When you sort by race in this bracket, you see Orc and Human on top. Combined they make up 52% of all races in the bracket. Over half.

Now if you look into this deeper, and sort by just the classes that the ORC can play, they now bump up to 74.2% of characters on the horde.

Humans with this same metric are at 69.6%. I high anticipate this number to rise in shadowlands as well based off their racial ability and the return of pvp cc breaker trinkets.

Below I will link the base line statistics by faction, without looking at the classes they cannot play.
ALLIANCE:
Human: 57.8%
Night Elf: 26.2%
Dwarf: 4%
Void Elf: 3.7%
Dark Iron Dwarf: 3.3%
Gnome: 2.2%
Draenei: 1.1%
Kul Tiran: .4%
Mechagnome: .4%
Panda: .4%
Worgen: .3%
Lightforged Dranei: .2%

HORDE
Orc: 48.5%
Blood Elf: 21.7%
Undead: 10.5%
Tauren: 6.3%
Troll: 5.8%
Goblin: 2.5%
Zandalari Troll: 1.7%
Panda: 1.3%
Vupera: .6%
Highmountain Tauren: .5%
Nightborne: .3%
Mag’Har Orc: .3%

With this information above, I believe that we can make some real positive changes by fine tuning, or even removing combat specific racials for classes. That should allow us the realign these numbers to match up with what people actually want to play for lore and cosmetic reasons, and not for their PVP racials.

Please let me know what you as the community thinks.

Thanks.

1 Like
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Disabling racials in arena would be the only way to balance them, otherwise they would have to rework just about every racial to be PvP oriented and that just isn’t realistic.

I do agree though it’s very lame to see human/night elf/orc every single match.

3 Likes
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I’m ok with this. I don’t think we should change anything.

7 Likes
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would be nice if nightborne had a racial at all

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It seems a bit unfair to compare the original races with the new ones.

Do many people race change or reroll for PvP?

Should Lightforged Dranei keep getting buffs until they have the same representation as Humans?

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Orcs get relentless for free… Humans get a 3min get out of stun for free.

Lot of competitive players change to get that advantage… (imagine every stun you take being 20% reduced simply by being a different race)

1 Like
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Dwarf is insanely strong atm (probably the best for casters) as it removes claw which is a huge part of the meta. Yet it’s fairly low on the rep chart 4%.

Horde locks are starting to realize goblin is insane due to smoke bomb and Spite.

Meld is obviously god tier busted for rogues and Druids.

Stats like this while meaningful don’t tell the full story. A lot of the people in the 21-26 range just go what the pack does so the numbers are swayed by a lot of group think.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are more impactful racials out there than you may realize. That said I think they can continue buffing the under represented races.

2 Likes
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Actually yet. Race changes are huge among many pvp players. If you monitor these stats and look at seasons with different racial metas, the numbers change by a very large noticeable amount.

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Honestly belf is also misleading there. Its pretty high for as bad as the racial ability is now post-legion.

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It is the only class that can play Demon Hunter on horde, and has the best racials for paladin. That is why BELF is so high.

2 Likes
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Gnome is about 97.8% lower than it should be :exploding_head::triumph::triumph:

1 Like
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Ehh not really, tauren/zandalari can be considered just as good as belf for horde paladins but they are both not aesthetically pleasing

The horde paladin racials are nothing major so whatever looks the best is going to be chosen

3 Likes
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Woah woah woah…

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Yikes what a bad take :grimacing:

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Its a popular warrior class! Was just the worst class aesthetically until mechagnomes came out.

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You spelled best* wrong

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im fighting the good fight playing undead

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That doesn’t look like a prot pally :thinking:

1 Like
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I feel like this is like 5% of the 15% of of people who actually play pvp. I Don’t actually know the % of people who play arena, so I looked at wow head and 2% of accounts have “3’s and Company: 2000” and 11% have “3’s and Company: 1550”. But the number still feels really small.

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If you actually take out the rating requirement, it doesn’t change much. The participation numbers for 0 rating and above are still the same for Human and Orc at 52%. In fact nothing else really changes, I shouldn’t have put the 2100+ in there, but what just trying to emphasize higher end pvp.