as someone that has always wanted to learn pvp and improve at it, but never actually put forth the effort until this season, i can say this season is beyond brutal for new comers. First i feel like i need to heal to even be considered for a group or anyone to join my group. and as a healer if i dont pay complete attention to a hundred things at once we lose. Everyone says “just play more games, it slows down and you can see more if you play more games”, WHAT TF IS THIS game slowing amount??? i have over a thousand games as a healer and still struggle like crazy to watch every single thing going on (even with every recommended addon) like wtf!!! no wonder the player base is dwindling, its not new player friendly and neither is the pvp community…
Learning curve too steep
Gearing too hard and time-consuming
Nobody willing to be patient or learn together
Genre as a whole has fallen off, BRs and MOBAs exist
Same, it’s a lot to keep track of, but if you’re consciously and actively figuring out what stuff is scary, what setups generally look like, the game plan of various comps, etc, it all sort of starts coming together.
Like, I know that the Windwalker is looking to fish for a crane kick proc, then sweep somebody into bonedust/keefer’s with off the GCD clones and then crane kick into rsk, or something along those lines, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that I die, or my teammate dies if we sit on our hands.
Inability is not the communities fault. People have been pvping in mmorpgs for 20+ years now. If you’re just starting of course it doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t “slow down” litterally but when you know what to do and what’s going on it doesn’t feel as chaotic as when you’re brand new.
People are going to be rude while you’re learning because they’re blaming you for their - points even though it’s a team game.
Everyone’s mean to the person that’s accidentally feeding in league that’s just how it is. If that actually gets to you then pvp in any game really isn’t for you as it’s naturally competitive and therefore “toxic”
It took thousands of arenas for me to get comfortable enough to not get the pvpanic before the gates open. Once I stopped panicking, the matches didn’t feel as fast paced. This season is definitely not friendly to brand new healers, but there’s addons at your disposal that will give you warnings when a truly scary CD gets popped. Get your towel, don’t panic, and queue up my dude.
Don’t be afraid to blame your dps partners for not doing enough to help your team live. It’s definitely not always on the healer for someones hp hitting 0
Once your partners help with living, healing is a lot easier
If you are struggling as a healer download the add on Weak Auras and then download Mes’s PvP Weak Auras. Retail is insanely difficult right now with pretty much every class having a swifty burst one shot macro. Mes’s weak aura will show when the enemies pop these cooldowns and you’ll know that you are going to need to use a major cooldown or the player will need to use a major defensive.
To be clear, I think this is horrible game design, and I wish this wasn’t my advice because I think WAs and one shots and everything have gotten out of control, but as a new player I think it will immensely help you understand why people are dying and when the are going to die.
Best of luck mate
Having omnibar, gladiator losa, Gladius and weak auras help, watch streamers that play your class, slow those videos down, see what they are doing in each situation and try and mimic their strategies
Also look at the wow reddit pvp community, it’s a great place to ask questions as a new comer
It’s a hard game friend
Last but not least, don’t let people get to you and just keep working on your skill, youl run into chill players eventually that can flow with your playstyle
This is 100% right.
There are definitely toxic players who are going to flame you and leave after the first loss even when they are a DH who used something like Blur and Trinket before combustion and smoke bomb because they were in Meta and wanted to do BIG DAM.
But there are also a lot of players who are genuinely interested in getting better and working together and understand a loss rarely falls on a single player and arena is a team game.
Thats not unique to wow, and you just gotta sort through and make sure to add people you vibe with
You’re putting too much pressure on yourself. The best thing that ever happened to me in WoW arena this season was when I decided I don’t care. And quite literally, after playing X games over the season it’s starting to get a lot more telegraphed and easy for me.
I still get tilted here or there and have a bad day or two, but largely it’s whatever–I’ll run completely stupid comps, queue with 35k alts and tank my CR, it’s whatever. lol At the end of the day, the game is for fun–if you don’t hit Gladiator this season, or whatever, is it going to affect your worth as a human being? Not at all. You’ll get to where you want to be, when you’re ready to be there–just try to enjoy the ride.
any new players who asked me questions about pvp, i just tell them to ignore all the toxicity if they wanna get good. cause this game takes a lot of patience and repetition, and you can’t get caught up on what someone whos already burnt out said.
Learning curve too steep - AKA 1 shot meta is not fun. Many hardcores just play classic.
Gearing too hard and time-consuming - AGREED.
Nobody willing to be patient or learn together - lotta other team based games that are more rewarding.
Genre as a whole has fallen off, BRs and MOBAs exist - fire the devs
More accessible, too. WoW has the premade-only aspect which is difficult and often time consuming because in LFG people are angsty and drop after a loss or two which leads you to being back in the finder, whereas most big popular games let you sit there and binge regardless of teammate availability.
I totally agree. WoW no longer has a fun entry level PvP activity. Unrated BGs used to fill that role, but the ilvl difference behind rating gates make them an abysmal experience now, especially for a new player/character.
Arena players are being forced to grind a ridiculous amount of honor in BGs. It is understandable that they might be toxic towards underperforming or undergeared players, because losing makes the grind even worse.
Rating gates force people into rated just to have the gear for unrated BGs. They don’t necessarily want to do rated and losing makes that grind take longer.
Not to mention how lopsided games/fights are, purely because of gear.
The gearing system is a Petri dish for toxicity.
Let players play the game they want to play and get the hell out of their way.
This is a problem on 3 fronts, gear/rbgs/healing
When pvp gear becomes good in pve the ladders inflate at the lower levels with players at around equal skill but when pvp gear is not good in pve at lower levels there’s a deflation where people whom usually rise to 2k+ sit 1600-1800 and terrorize new comers whose rating rises quickly out of a lack of participation in general. Rbgs exacerbate this issue as when pvp gear is alright and pve players want it they usually go the rbg route (see S1 shadowlands). Thus not causing the lower ladder inflation that would normally take place.
The last thing is probably the most controversial and it’s healing in general has changed. In an effort to make arena games fast pace and encourage healer damage in M+,blizzard opted to make healers into secondary damage characters whose healing capabilities are effectively cut short. What I mean by this is if a ret/war pops all cds and your free casting without a proper CD trade there your going to just lose to their damage. It was unheard of outside of very random chance for say a healer in MoP free casting to get out damaged. Typically if you could free cast you could avoid CD trading, thus cds were more for preemptively preventing set up window kills where you could not free cast. This is no longer the case in a 0.9sec kill time meta where the other team doesn’t even bother throwing an interrupt your way. Your job as the rsham is to prewall cds/link/earthen or ascendance, every time the enemy pops a significant CD that you can coordinate against while doing dmg and keeping a decent amount of purges. This healing design blizzard choose in order to try and make healing more appealing to those who would otherwise just dps has been at the detriment of everyone who mained healer to heal and new healers who try to step into the role expecting to do just that. But with this design, healing is your secondary job. Cool down rotation/adding dmg/purges (rsham) are your main task.
Even if there weren’t insane interactions that cause globals/one shots, the ladder has some extreme flaws. Trying to jump into 2’s on a recently dinged 60 is awful. It can be your first game of the season and you will be at 1500+ mmr and face 55k health teams when you have 40k health. I got rival on this pally and my very undergeared Rsham. The entire time on both characters I was 1850+ mmr. At around 1750 cr we started being put against 2k rated teams and were LOSING POINTS from losses. Against a team 250 points higher than us we were losing points. Then there are the 59k health glad titled players on glad mounts playing ret or warrior boosting for $$ that are all over the 1400+ range.
This is exactly what my first point states, there aren’t enough casuals jumping in at the low end of arena to balance things so you end up immediately at such high mmr for a new player that you get crushed and the insensitive directly from arena isn’t there with the gear not being great in pve and the grind of it being dumb, and when it is accessible Rbgs offer better access to it for casuals while having 9 other players that can cover for them. Arena ladders are a joke right now for anyone under 2100.
yeah people are gonna be toxic in any game
biggest issues are def getting started
gear is a big part of that, you q up a bg in the honor gear you spent x hours grinding just to get eradicated by someone with arena/rbg gear
another part is the game is ancient, cliques have been made and cliques are hard to break
I only have like 5 people I’d q up with to get cr and qing with anyone else is sketchy
game anxiety is a part of it too, with all the time it takes to get gear/meet people etc etc you don’t want a bad q session because then they may not play with you anymore over it if you aren’t friends outside of arena
There are tons of reasons why wow PVP has been dying over the last decade.
This xpac is pretty good though. So gearing is way better this xpac since you dont need to do mythic plus and gear is upgradable and scales in pvp.
Problems with this season is again, lack of balancing in a competitive pvp game (should have small balance changes every month at least not every 6 months). Takes way to long to catch up to conquest gear late in the season so towards the end of the season the season just dies out because nobody wants to grind hundreds and hundreds of conquest just so they can be competitive in a quick span of time.