Me and my son have been doing Arenas casually for a little while now. No hardcore grinding or anything like that. Seem to have hit a hard wall around 1100 rating and the reasons are completely nonsensical. I have never seen more blatant cheating in my 8 years of playing this game. It starts with the interrupt and cc scripts. There is no need arguing, some people are doing this to give them an unfair advantage and it pays off for them, obviously Sentinel doesn’t catch this nonsense because it is more common than not but it doesn’t stop there. Some of these scripts are extremely advanced. Met a priest the other day that couldn’t be killed because they couldn’t be interrupted, the split second an interrupt was cast they would stop casting then immediately cast the same spell. Kind of hard to stop a class that requires school locks and CC to kill outside of them completely AFK.
The biggest problem isn’t the botting, it’s far worse. Once you get around the 1100 mark you start meeting up with people in the 213 to 226 gear range. How are they allowed to play in this bracket? Because CR and MMR are two totally different numbers completely independent of one another. Some will say “get good then” blah, blah, etc… This is completely and utterly ridiculous because said players have already reached a much higher rating to get their gear (sure some of them got the gear from 3s or BGs) and are now farming lower brackets to upgrade that gear OR carry someone else in 200 gear to a higher bracket. When you go into an arena as a 205 monk and 199 Paladin and meet up with a 226 priest and 199 insert class here, really any class will work you already lost, period. That small 10% Ilvl difference equates to over 25% raw power (I estimate somewhere close to 40%). It’s the equivalent of pitting a heavyweight against a welterweight. There are weight classes in professional fighting sports for a reason however in real life the lower weight class may have some slight advantage in WoW the lower players are hopeless. Combine this with so many broken abilities (Boomkin convoke, Brambles, Fleshcraft, etc…) The entire system has hit the garbage point. The current meta is kill the other team in 20 seconds. PVE players can play this or Classic / BC, PvP get a similar experience from any of them because the output vs health pool and broken tuning abounds.
There are certain things that could be argued about my post like I choose to play BrM monk (I went 1700 BrM in WoD after they needed tanks to the ground, I accepted it as a challenge) pick a better comp, whatever. This has nothing to do with skill and is all about “competitive edge” overpowering competitive edge that should not be possible. I’m not going to quit or threaten to, I do feel like this needs to be discussed even though no Devs read this or pay attention to anyone not on their VIP list anymore which is exactly how we got here.
I didn’t realize scripting was actually allowed to do things like that, but if that’s the case that’s insanely dumb because as you said not being able to be interrupted for healer classes especially is just too good. I don’t really have any evidence of or experience with scripters though so I can’t give much else feedback on this.
I do however 100% agree the gear differences we see in arena at the moment are honestly horrendous, and the fact nothing was done to help ease these issues in 9.0.5 is just sad really. Trying to win any arena match with more than a 10-15ilvl difference is just insane currently because of how much extra life/dmg it gives them which is a lot more useful in this burst meta. It honestly just sucks and it makes trying to progress through arenas (and even RBGs) just insanely hard.
I haven’t seen much cheating, but casual rated PVP is brutal at this point in the season. If you don’t have at least 213 gear you’re just a target dummy for the real PVP’ers. Hopefully the gear scaling in 9.1 will help give non-elite players a place to have fun.
Interrupts just like trinket should be saved for the very end when it looks like you have no choice but to use it. Healers fake cast a lot but if you don’t get baited they will eventually try to cc you and get a heal off. That’s the window where you toss a cc. They get desperate to heal and stop fake casting.
Best use is to interrupt at the very very end of the cast.
I know how to not waste interrupts on fake casts, case in point as said before “if you don’t have at least 213 gear you get smashed by those that do” funny thing we win a lot of matches against people with 213 gear but you need 1600 rating to get that gear so why on earth are they at 1100? I helped my son get hot streak a couple weeks ago, we went from 1100 to 1250 in 10 games, next match fought a team at 1500 (In glad gear nonetheless) rating and lost 20 points. We win against 1400s and gain 11 points and lose 20 for a match a full bracket above? This isn’t a “get gud” situation, this is a community issue. How are people supposed to progress without carries? Its about gaming the MMR system or using other cheats (it’s more common than Ive ever seen and I’ve played off and on since MoP, skipped legion and BFA for the most part because Legion ran like trash and made everything too simple and BFA looked blah, I hear I didn’t miss much.
This isn’t keeping me from enjoying PVP by any means. Last fight last night was me, my son on his 1400 Rdruid and a 210 Spriest vs. 38k health R Shaman, D Lock, WW monk and we won the Skirmish so its really not about skill. (I did as much damage as the priest) it’s a balance issue, a cheating issue and a rating issue. Making CR and MMR two separate ratings is the weirdest decision I’ve seen from Blizz in a long time. Go read the arena reddit forums, they have people giving explicit instructions on how to game the system using an alt to lower MMR while keeping CR so that you can climb a bracket or two higher while fighting people in shard gear.
If someone uses scripts they use it at every rating. Your comment does have a good point, people use scripts because they are “God awful”. I think the biggest problem is the MMR vs. CR game. It’s an exploit plain and simple and allows people to be in a bracket they shouldn’t be in. The arenas are saturated with it right now. This isn’t the game I started playing in 2013 or the community I played it with for sure. My son actually recorded several matches last night to make a point and the point was well made, fair fights aren’t really fair for us because we obliterate evenly matched teams then get stomped on by people 10 to 15 Ilvls above us. Ilvls aren’t in the 700s, they’re in the 200s and 10 Ilvls is a massive difference. I haven’t even mentioned the insane balance issues and how certain specs can literally kill someone in 1 to 2 seconds, some can kill 2 or 3 people with a single ability 100-0. I do get your point though, I need to “get gud”. I wonder if that involves making an alt and purposefully losing for a few hours?..
My guild does RPvP for laughs once a week, and our “yolo-thing” has gotten me to ~1300 over the last 5 weeks or so.
Which means, I would STILL be stuck with i200 gear.
Meanwhile, we have Heroic Sire on farm, and we’re 3/10 Mythic. I can FAIL a M+12-13 and get i213 gear in my vault that has a very good chance of having +Versa on it.
So when it comes to getting curb-stomped in lower brackets, it’s not JUST people that were boosted to higher levels and are now trolling the lower brackets. It’s PvP casuals like me that still sorta like to play, but through no fault of my own as a mainly PvE-player, I have a i210-212 suit of PvP gear… that I earned entirely through PvE. For all the BGs I’ve played and rBGs… NOT A SINGLE PIECE OF GEAR I have could have been earned from it. It’s all from PvE. lol
It’s PvP just showing off how LAUGHABLY BAD it is in this game.
That’s actually why they are implementing the gearing updates so you get higher PvP gear iLvl from doing PvP for PvP, and PvE gear won’t be as good. There are too many bad players at the lower levels just holding on because of gear.
As for scripting, I know of no scripting that can do that. Good players will simply keep baiting you until you cast your interrupt spell, then free cast.
There are definitely still issues, but most I hear are around paid carries. Something I kinda would like are minimum breakpoints. Once you are so far, you can’t purposefully drop down so low to get easy wins.
I’m sorry man, but if you were the timing god like you explain you are in this thread, you would be much higher than 1100. The only real wall that is here right now is around the 1500-1800 range because of glad boosts for the 1800 transmog set.
I don’t think anyone is kick-botting in 1100 CR ELO games.
It’s why I gave up on it. “casual” arenas and arena rating are essentially meaningless now. Even at very low rating I was constantly paired against high rated and very well geared players. At the end of the day it’s just wasn’t fun and didn’t feel like I could progress in any meaningful way regardless of what I tried.
