The new arena map isn’t fun at all for a few different reasons.
Knock abuse. Unlike Blades Edge you can’t LoS effectively here when you get knocked back/off the platform. If that’s where the fight is and the fight doesn’t shift it’s nearly instant game over for the person knocked due to line issues with heals.
Closeness of start point- this feels worse than Dalaran Sewers, really hard to get saps/gates/hots up before combat starts. Also hard to punish a rush if there isn’t a knock back on team.
The design favors casters heavily. There are no real safe places to play for heals outside of nearly on or on pillar. Because of this and the layout of the map melee are going to be at a heavy disadvantage in this map, far worse than the analog which is Ruins of Lorderon. IDC bout the spelling on that last.
Suggestion-Place a pillar in the middle or raise the platform further and create a similar layout to Blades Edge.
To be very clear I wouldn’t want to play this on my Dk even though I’m pretty good at abusing Death’s advance to avoid knocks in pvp or pve. It isn’t just the knckbacks, though those are really bad. It’s that combined with the map being a shooting gallery in any of the axis angles or lanes of the map.
It both favours and doesn’t favour wizards. Monks & dhs have a field day on this map, but wizards don’t really have anywhere to line if they can’t repeat knock melee down so you’re kinda stuck in this awkward back and forth.
Odds are most games at the top end are just going to end up playing on one side of the map and never interact in the middle of it beyond the first 10 seconds, because it’s just too awkward.
Melee do get more opportunities to line when not in CC here though.
It’s realistically just a rsham cleave map, mw cleave/wizard map & throw in a few dhs + wws because why not. Everything else is about a net neutral
From the couple of skirm queues I got in it as Boomy, I like Cage of Carnage quite a bit. Perhaps I was vsing players with not too much awareness, but there seem to be good LoS, plenty of knockback opportunities, roots can be highly punishing there as well, and just turreting as a caster can be a lesson to melee that spend too long out in the sun
It’s all about positioning.
I wish that was true, but when I was trying to out position thunder from shaman by standing with my back close to opening pillar with the shaman facing me and in front I was thrown back and diagonally. To be clear I saw that knock coming a mile away, out positiond it and it straight up didn’t matter.
Idk if that’s a bug or if thunder just auto paths at random but position matters far less for knock on that map.
The lobby I’m talking about had an ele sham, enhance sham, fire mage and a disc/holy priest. Someone was going flying every 10s or so. It drastically increased the pacing of the game in a way that didn’t seem to be particularly easy to counter.
Worst was when heals gets sent to one side, dps to the other while the other team sits in mid rooting,snaring and taking a free kill off nothing.
The only melee that’s actually going to be able to deal with this is ww, if you put dh in no man’s land w/o nether they’ll splat just as easy as any other. Ww can port, so the play for them is kite then out a bit, knock out of range of the port for the cheek clap.
The thing is with the new map positioning hardly exist because of all the chaos caused by knocks and all of the weird x and y axis LOS issues. It’s literally a brawl map and it’ll take a minute for people to figure out how it works because it’s still pretty new.
I think Blizzard knew the frustration they would cause with this map and I’m not sure why they made it like that. Hopefully in one of their future interviews they can explain their reasoning.
These are great points… It sounds like you had a tough lobby with a lot of big knockbacks. Esp. if it split your team, it makes sense that this was a death sentence. I wish we had less of these knocks, micro-CC’s overlapping… Should be maybe one per kit, sharing DR’s properly and never bugging. But you’re talking about a game designed for M+… And where PvP is the side game that eats the leftover patch notes. All we can do is try to have fun with these tools and shenanigans
This might actually be the worst map they ever added. This is exactly why I can’t fathom the thought process of the people who cry about no new maps. When they add them, they are always terrible. Just delete everything but Nagrand.
Yes, I was trying to look on the bright side which is not every lobby would be like that, and gave myself a night to sleep on it before I decided to add my 2 copper to the forum on this. I remembered this morning something you’re brining up:
This, what you mentioned right here. Lots of knock now in the game so 1/2 the classes in the game or slightly less will be pure aids to play into on this map.
Yeah they expanded on old Ring of Blood in terms of a map being awful, which was quite a feat. I’m pretty much OK with the other maps to be honest they all have their little nuances that you can leverage but it’s a lot more ‘fair’ across the board unless you’re talking about Lorderan or Sewers or Mugambala, and that last is only really annoying when someone is good with ports.
