I agree with you OP. I had the same situation - I got my main, Disc priest, to 1800. I did not have trouble finding groups, but man, the meta-gaming that took place was absolutely dumb and insane. I had group leaders in the 1600 bracket pass up 220+ mages and spriests because “We need another boomie”. When, in reality:
Only two things really matter for pre-2k RBGs: A good TC and gear. I’ll leave a group after one game if no one is calling anything, even if we end up winning. Additionally, you’ll almost always lose that obligatory game where MMR matches you with a whole team decked out in the next bracket’s gear.
Otherwise, comp doesn’t matter. I can listen to a few arguments where a rogue (and they being good) is the only required class pre-2k. But that’s it. In the few groups I joined that didn’t meta-slave, I played with a BrM tank one night, and went 4-1. I had another group with two havocs, and we ended positive on the evening.
I want to be clear - this is purely a player problem. Not a Blizz problem. The majority will always meta slave nowadays, as long as streamers, videos, and guides tell them that there’s an optimal path.
Now, I want to gear up my WW, but I spend 45 minutes applying in the LFG tool to no avail.
Nah, I just like calling people out on their BS. You were too concerned with pushing to play with your own friends, and now you’re here to complain about a situation that was entirely at your will to control (as well as theirs). Either that or you’re lying about having friends who you ‘couldn’t play with.’ Literally nothing in the game is stopping you from taking your survival hunter, enhance shaman, arc mage, mw monk, etc. pals and starting your own group.
Actually you are completely wrong and by your achievement points I can clearly see that you are new to WoW and used to other types of game, that have more of a esports approach. That’s something new to wow and devs are struggling to deal with.
Likely, over 20 specs not being used in the metagame is a critical sign of poor balancement.
I’ve played this game since BC, but alright. Lol Go ahead and explain to me how Blizzard devised a queue system that rejected your ability to invite your friends to a group, fill the remaining roles, then start a game.
You are missing the point. My complaint is about the entire atmosphere that ends up on the meta comps. You are taking the consequences and not the cause behind it.
Yeah, absolutely, you don’t have the experience to understand how much the game has changed for the worse in regards to stuff like this.
Season 5, Wrath’s first season, the most notorious season in the game’s history up until Corruption, was healthier than the environment the combination of gearing, ilevel discrepancies, class imbalances, the dominance of the meta mentality through overexposure to influencer culture (muh twitch) has created.
Players on average now know less, not more than they did 10 years ago. The mechanical skill has gone up, that’s muscle memory, but the intellectual skill has plummeted because people have become so conditioned to following what are essentially trends.
The first time I got duelist was as a combat rogue stacking armor pen in 5s, I was one of the 2 forum theorycrafters behind the ridiculously tanky and annoying hemo swords build that some people played in Cataclysm. It’s a shame the old forums are hard to find archives of, because it’s pretty stark to compare how far we’ve fallen in terms of peoples willingness to entertain the unorthodox.
When you’re new to a hobby, the middle path seems the most logical, but realize your naivety in thinking that this is where people will necessarily have the most fun. Some people drive stick on purpose.
I haven’t queued in nearly 2 months, but surv’s a great example of what I mean about this knowledge gap. Surv is literally the superior hunter spec in rbgs, except for on Temple of Kotmogu and on Eye of the Storm if you are for some reason not sitting a base (MM more effective in mid than surv, double knockback potential + aoe root), but the majority of middling “high” CR teams are reluctant to take survival hunters because they know marks does more burst.
Surv does a better job of slowing flagcarriers than rogues do, especially against demon hunters (harpoon leap pepega)
Surv is tankier when focused (or sitting a base), particularly since many surv hunters are necrolord and either have CC immunity through fleshcraft cast, or auto-fear when dropped below 35%
And Necrolord surv hunters do in fact have enough haste now to provide fairly solid team fight damage, including particularly high AOE from bomb burst + poison/bleed spreading
Survival is a fantastic example of a spec that is, in Rated Battlegrounds, purely limited by player perceptions and overconfidence in what they’ve “seen the most.” Surv struggles in arena right now because of pet res timers, but it’s extremely viable in rbgs. We’re rare because the majority of hunters don’t want to play melee anyway, and the community notices we’re rare and so begins a feedback loop of increasing rarity within a bracket dominated by class popularity.
Nah, it was a good change. Niches are healthy for the game.
You materializing in the battleground forums because I said “survival” enough times to trigger your Google Alerts is a great example of some points I’ve touched on in the previous posts that you didn’t read, however.
To those of you that don’t know, Bepples here is one of the prime instigators on the hunter forums for actively antagonizing people for playing a spec because he, personally, does not like that spec. He’s 5 years into a crusade against melee hunters at this point.
I think survival’s quite healthy outside of pets dying easily in arena, largely a pet HP scaling/damage issue.
You obviously didn’t read correctly. I’m talking about community perception bias ruining the game and creating stale metas that are created by the consensus culture that modern technology has created. I’m using the spec as an example of one that succeeds in this bracket despite widespread community ignorance towards it. Some of the highest rated hunters in RBGs are in fact survival hunters. We’re simply less common than MM at the population level. RBGs and random BGs are where survival hunters are most often found in end-game right now.
I shouldn’t have to teach a class on statistics here :^)
Very, very Interesting to read a theorycraft perspective.
I definitely agree perception is a pretty big driving force of the meta. I saw a couple 2-5 player groups with an enh make some pretty crazy plays on objectives in randoms at first half of the season. Yet people here say enh sucks.
Kind of a double-edged sword, though. Because the more niche a spec, the less familiar its counters are to the majority. So it creates kind of a happy accident of boosting the value in the spec, just because people think it’s not valuable.
The difference is he took what his classes could do and made strategies based on them. That is where rogue fast-capping came from was his strategy of leaving the death knight himself and Hunter in the flag room. Then he would have the three healers out mid with two duster locks and a warrior I believe. That’s when second wind was strong.
The strategy they came up with was stalling mid because the destroy locks used the embers to heal themselves and they would not try to kill anyone. They just stayed in combat everyone in the base killed the flag carrier rogue fast cap.
So then you would have people try to copy the strategy but they didn’t have the comp to do it.
So that’s what you see now is a lot of people will copy a comp but they don’t know the strategies to go along with us.
That is why I don’t understand 1600 teams trying to do the meta when they don’t even know how to use them 🤷