Back again with more interesting data, but this time on Enhance! I previously pushed 2400 on my main hunter and alt hunter as Survival.
Enhance was a completely different experience with a completely different set of win conditions. Now that might be obvious to everyone, but it’s really interesting seeing it in practice AND how it affects your wins and losses overall.
For my hunter, who I matched up against was a massive factor in wether I was going to lose or win a match. The first was having a healer that could be CC’ed. CC for Survival is crucial for setting up kills. Any matches where I was facing an Evoker or Monk for heals, I was already dealing with an uphill battle. Pair them with a Shadow Priest, Shaman, or DH and that compounded quickly. Conversely, if I was facing priests, palis, or shamans and no one to dispel, the game would be heavily in my favor. Second would be a proper kill target. All the CC in the world is great, but if I don’t have a good target to hit… well, I can be out of luck.
For the enhance shaman, this was completely different. Healer largely didn’t matter as my main pressure was generated through kicks, purges, damage, and occasional CC. Likewise, Enhance can kill just about everything. Keeping my healer out of CC allowed me to keep up pressure.
So what was important for enhance? No all melee or all caster lobbies… This is probably true for most classes. While I tended to fair better against all casters, all melee were easily the most difficult. Key to surviving as enhance is having something to hit. Well, Blizzard in all their wisdom has given many melee ways to continue to put out pressure while entirely negating incoming melee hits. Blur, Evasions, DBTS, Bubble, as well as Fists of Fury. All of these prevent me from actually generating Maelstrom. Pair that with stuns and disarms… I do no damage and therefore no healing. I have ended many of these matches with 1/2 as much damage as everyone else, if not more.
Outside of that, pressure… Again, may seem obvious, but anytime someone on my team tries to pull back too much, it actually makes the game more difficult overall. This pushes our healer back which makes it harder for me to peel or prevent CC and it makes it hard for me to peel for the dps or heal them. If I’m playing with a caster, having them push up actually gives them more breathing room. A great example would be a match I had on Lordaeron. The healer and lock on my team never pushed up to the tomb. The lock kept porting back and the healer kept pushing back to stay with the lock. This left me getting kited a lot of matches and falling back to keep the healer out of CC. I had no good target to hit and my pressure was awful. Guess who the blame? Welp, had they pushed in, I could have easily kept the healer out of CC and peeled for the lock while putting our pressure.
So what do I need? Something I can hit. Often doesn’t matter what it is… even pets. In many matches people ask me the target and its completely situational. Sure, we can say lets hit the mage, but If I have a rogue on me, I might need to hit them while pushing for the mage.
So what’s interesting!!?
I had ZERO games where I went either 0-6 OR 6-0. I had lots of stretches going 3:3, 4:2, or 2:4. This was COMPLETELY different than my hunter. On my hunter I had LOTS of games where I would go 6-0 and then the very next match go 0-6. This made for huge spikes in my MMR. My shaman by contrast just kept steadily pushing up.
More then anything, diversity in matches was crucial. Anytime I had to face double warrior, double lock, double hunter, game felt pretty bad. One of my worst match ups was double lock with a BM hunter. I was almost completely unable to connect with anyone and I had to deal with an MS. Double Arms was equally brutal. Maybe this is already in Blizzard’s algorithm, but 2 ranged and 2 melee matches give everyone the best chance to win.
Outside of that, like my hunter, 2/3 of my matches my MMR was higher then the average MMR. Seems to be pretty consistent while you’re pushing up. While the degree of variance between my MMR and the average MMR was lower then my hunter, during pushes, it was clear my MMR was almost always higher, unless you can pull off lots of consecutive wins.
TLDR: Who you face can be a huge factor in winning. If you find you’re always losing against X spec, don’t beat yourself up. As I said with my previous threads, queuing during peak hours is going to give you the best chance of fighting a diverse group of dps and healers. Don’t be afraid to speak up with what you need from your team. I was constantly saying “Push up” or “Push in” if my teams was to passive. Be clear with what you’re going to do or what you might need or what you’ll do. “Please stun fists” or “I’ll purge Shroud.”
Now… what to push next. Shadow? DH? Fury?
Previous threads:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/290-rounds-of-rss-looking-at-the-data-mmr/1515270
