This may be unpopular, but I’d like to see WSG/AB buffed for honor to match up with AV as it currently is so that more people will pug them.
I’d like to also see AV get giga-buffed for honor, with the caveat that we make some major changes in AV and how it is played. PvP should not be a rush to get in and out.
Buff the Warmasters in AV to make them extremely hard to kill without taking out the towers. End bosses cannot be accessed until Warmasters from both factions are dead. This is how they designed Ashenvale’s PvP event in SoD and it was brilliant. This makes people play objectives, and ACTUALLY PvP in AV. Buff the honor gained by killing the NPC bosses, AND other players because objectives will draw more combat, which would be a solid set on incentives to actually play the game the way it was designed instead of meta-chasing.
For the people who want a faster game for their honor rush they should go play WSG. Buff that game mode.
AV is supposed to be large-scale, tactics based combat. Right now it just feels kinda boring. We’ve had this issue in this game since 2019 Classic, and we’ve been asking for changes since then which seem to have fallen on deaf ears. AV is not supposed to be a zerg-fest.
It would be pretty cool to add a Rated Battleground ladder along with an Arena ladder.
Queueing Skirmish Arena matches has always been a great way to find partners and find people you naturally play well with. Being able to duel in front of your major city with like minded people and queing Skirmish matches used to be a wonderful way for that kind of player to spend their time logged in, always practicing and trying new strats.
Don’t need rewards at all, just a ranked ladder for those who wish to participate.
As far as maps for Vanilla Arenas, it would make sense to start with the natural ones already in the game.
Gurubashi Arena
Dire Maul Arena
Orgrimmar Arena
Ruins of Lordaeron
Perhaps expanding or instead using natural World PvP hot spots for Arena maps. Places like the Eastern Plaguelands of Lordaeron Towers or The Silithyst Must Flow locations in Silithus.
Go to and natural PvP hot spots found in the open world could also be fun. Such as the Blackrock Mountain Chain.
For some players, raiding is their favorite way of playing the game. Or perhaps a player loves collecting and completionism on their characters. But for others, playing the game is playing the game.
Honor isnt why nobody plays them. Premades are why nobody plays them. And with premades comes win trading. Rewarding win trading is bad.
I would love to be able to play some AB/WSG. But ill never set foot in either of those BGs again until any group of 4 or more players is forced into a separate premade v premade queue. Premaders have proven repeatedly that they will game and exploit any system to get put against uncoordinated PUGs at any cost while being deathly afraid of fighting eachother.
Until theyre completely denied the ability to rig queueing in any fashion to be able to go against uncoordinated random PUGs with a stacked comp and voice comms game after game, nobody is going to even THINK about queueing AB/WSG.
arena
No. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Arena was the single biggest mistake Blizzard ever made for WoW PvP. Multiple specs - sometimes entire classes - were completely ruined and oftentimes purposefully left that way for one or more full expansions purely because they posed a consistent threat to Rogues, Mages or Priests in Arena. Balancing with the philosophy of “RMP must always be the best, forever. It cant even be close” is precisely how Retail PvP DIED ten years ago. Its a twitching corpse at this point. RSS was like giving an OD narcan an hour after their heart stopped. A good try, but the damage is already done.
AV
The problem with making changes to AV is that AV is the only BG people play and the majority of people are such complete slaves to the meta that if you made changes to AV that didnt still boil down to RIDE NORTH/SOUTH AND WIN OR LOSE INSIDE 6 MINUTES DO NOT EVEN LOOK AT THE OPPOSING FACTION THIS IS A BRD SPEEDRUN the number of people queueing it would collapse overnight.
I would 100% add a dismounting shot to archers and whatever that 1 minute physical shout snare is the Fallen Heroes in EPL have to all melee units in AV. Just to force people to stop the brainless RUN BY EVERYTHING DONT STOP KEEP GOING NO MUST RIDE IN 1 DIRECTION TO STARR AT BOSS shenanigans.
But people would have a complete melty if AV changed at all.
Why? It is granted it doesn’t entail balance changes, and if people don’t want to play it they don’t have to. If it sucks the only change is a lonely arena NPC somewhere.
I would also argue it would be a good change to add Arenas and/or RBGs, whether vanilla pvp sucks or whether they should, people are competitive about vanilla WoW PVP so there is literally no reason to not add some kind of pvp with ratings to let them know how they actually score up. For example I enjoy WSG and doing precise jumps but I do not buy gold for endless consumes so it’s literally unplayable for me, and not only I feel so, the population is down to like 100 people last I checked.
This just isn’t true lol. You’re making it out to sound like there’s some cabal of premades. Every premade I’ve ever been in for 10 years will attempt to beat another premade on their first game, and whoever wins the pissing contest will likely see the losing team go-next to benefit their HPH. It’s still competition.
Yall gamed the system to premade AV in 2019 after PUGs quit queueing AB/WSG due to premaders. Yes, yes it is true. Gaslighting doesnt work in 2025 lil homie.
I literally quit the game because of AV ranking and didn’t return until you could competitively play WSG/AB.
It’s not gaslighting, you just don’t know what you’re talking about. The only reason I still play this game is for WSG, and premades lust for the opportunity to play against another premades. The only “wintrading” happening is when bad premades go next against a team they know will beat them. That happened all the time in AB, which is where we get the term “townhalling”.
So enforcing premade vs premade is a non-issue then. I don’t even say that as someone against premading, if anything i want more incentive for doing it without having it ruin the game for everyone else. Some of the most fun i had in this game was running RBGs in Cata 1.0 which is essentially premade vs premade.
I’m kinda conflicted on that topic, because I also do a lot of solo queueing so I can terrorize less than experienced premades.
Based upon my experience playing with good players, there’s nothing enjoyable about pubstomping your way to R14. Most would prefer good games.
With this new system stuff is a lot different now. I would be okay with a seperate queue if premade games got a ludicrous amount of honor which will incentivize people to play together, something the old system did well and the new system severely lacks.
Would just need to scale the honor reward based on the duration of the match, and probably put a time limit on WSG (lets say an hour). If you just slap 20k honor per win just for premading you’re begging people to wintrade at 5AM.
But a 30 mins match should give more honor than a 5 minutes stomp.
But yeah its the frustrating part with this version of PvP. There is something to do with this system, Blizzard just need to put a tiny amount of efforts into it.
Time limits are awful because that incentivizes the team that caps first to just turtle. The lure to vanilla WSG is the indefinite length of a match, and good teams will keep trying even when they’re down 0-2.
Honor should just be from caps and whether you win/lose. Maybe a small bit from flag returns.
Win trading is not as big as a problem as people make it out to be, same with bracket mafias. It’s these niche case scenarios that blow up on reddit or the forums and people act like it’s the norm when it’s not. Most good players prefer to play against other good players, and won’t throw that away for short term gain. At the moment devout WSG players are willing to take the hit in honor not spamming AV just to play the game. The people that would be win trading are those who aren’t interested in WSG, and are just trying to get their R14 so they can parse like the majority of people queueing AV right now.
(edit) On the old system premades would often tryhard against other premades on their first sighting together, especially if they drag it into deepwaters and tank their HPH. It’s a pissing contest to see who will go next on their next sighting. Sometimes the winning team goes next, because they don’t want to deal with a long game impacting their HPH. Depending how this social game played out, you could see longterm benefits to your HPH when you end up inevitable facing each other in the future.
Blizzard shouldn’t have done anything. I don’t trust Blizzard to make good changes to vanilla because they are A.) extremely corporate and B.) more experienced developing a version of WoW that is more often than not incombatable with vanilla. That is why SoD is clowned on so hard. “Runes” is just another whacky system that comes and goes with every expansion, like Garrisons and Artifact Power.
The new PvP system is bad for PvP. Less people are playing WSG/AB now than before, even when they have to deal with premades pubstomping. Which based upon my experience soloqueueing, it’s not really as big of a problem as people make it out.
100%, and the people who dont know this just dont RBG / dont care about PvP.
The time limits are a disgusting abomination in retail that truly hurts the game.
First cap turtle / last cap on tie turtle… GG well played, also hate AB maps in retail for much the same reason. Soon as we got rated PVP its almost always play it safe 3 cap and turtle rotate.
The changes people claim are good in retail make the game super stale and boring just like pure meta play is super stale and boring.,
What gets me the most is a lot these people demand changes to the game so that THEY can enjoy it, not caring that aspects they deem need to be changed are the reason the cult fanbase still playing continue to play it. Like American tourists going to Italy and demanding people speak English for them, and they have zero self awareness.
I guess i don’t? (i linked my retail account above).
Time limit is fine when coupled with the FC debuff, if you think an FC with 10+ stacks can stall forever you actually never RBG’d lol, at that point a rogue can just step cloak dance and 2tap it.
Without a time limit a good team with a really good FC that knows all the map exploits can unironically stall a game forever if he wants, i’m talking Glad/Hero level teams. Its precisely why they added the time limit/debuff lol.
Plus the timer was just an idea specifically because if we enforce Premade vs Premade there will be situations where 2 good teams facing each other will literally get punished for being good HPH wise.
The goal is to incentivize fun, competitive gameplay while also encouraging casual gameplay for people who can’t or don’t want to find a team and just want to have fun in BGs, like it used to be possible to do.
That depends tons on the expansion you’re playing… Everything Cata+ IMO is retail, its basically all the same… but at the same time, different versions play vastly different in respect to how survivable you are or aren’t VS rogue trying to return.
whiles true a skilled FC can be incredibly difficult to catch, but that’s half the fun.
Problem is the rules they have in WSG maps = last cap wins on tie time out or first cap turtle wins on time out. That is a huge problem and incredibly boring.
last cap wins on tie and turtle blocking to run the timer is dumb, its also not terribly difficult to block a rogue from getting near your FC.