PvP feedback from someone trying to get back into it

PVP Battlegrounds
1

I suppose it’s telling that I’m on here giving feedback instead of in-game playing, but oh well. Anyway, I’ve done PvP in other games, from MMOs such as GW2, ESO, and BDO to platform fighters and niche stuff like Mount and Blade: Warband. I’ve done PvP in WoW a great many years ago, but at this point I’m effectively new again. I started hopping into BGs and my experience so far has been…a struggle.

  1. Queue times. This game has millions of players and you’re telling me it takes 10-20 minutes to find 10, 20, 40 people? I tried to get into some epic BGs this weekend and while perhaps it wasn’t quite evening prime time, 20 minutes estimated wait is…Well I’ll just go take a walk at that point. There isn’t really anything directly fixable about this, but it seems very telling about the state of things. I’ve had much faster queue times in other MMOs with far smaller playerbases. I haven’t even been able to get into an epic BG because it just takes so long!
  2. The first more tangible roadblock I’ve run into is gear. I can go buy some stuff off the AH, sure, and to be fair I already have a couple honor gear pieces from just a few BGs, but it’s still bad. My health is 1/3-1/5 the health pool of most other people I run into. If a DPS engages on me, I’m pretty much dead because of the sheer stat difference. I also have to buy a CC break trinket (that’s partially on me, fair 'nuff, but why isn’t this skill baseline in a PvP zone?), and it’s even more of a slog without one. My options are either suffer in BGs, arena, etc or apparently do zero PvP and do this crate farming thing I’ve heard about. It’s nice that there seems to be a quick way for alts to gear up, but I’m not keen on spending several hours basically playing scavenger hunt simulator. This is deeply unpleasant and I don’t like the idea of having to spend a few days worth of game time before being allowed to have fun. It’s worth noting that I’m queuing as a resto druid at the moment, too, so my experience is likely better than a tank (who would lack gear to even do their job) or a DPS (what’re they supposed to do, tickle the enemy with a feather for several seconds and die?). At least if I’m left alone I can make some half decent green numbers.
    2b) Honorable mention, but gear is also boring. It’s a stat block I’m required to care about being at a certain threshold because without it I die, and for Reasons™ this resets every so often so I gotta do it all over again. There’s no real variation in gear that has any impact on playstyle beyond ‘ah, I’ve reached the threshold now, I can stop hiding behind teammates as much’. Gear grinds are much more forgivable when they have some influence on character customization, but this is far from the case here.
  3. Addons. If I need an addon to give me important information, something has gone terribly wrong. Did I juke a kick successfully? Only the transcendent pig knows, and it’s not telling. Is my opponent using some strong cooldowns? Maybe! Hard to tell from the blobby mixture of visual effects, some of which look like they were made yesterday and others that look like an intern made them 10 years ago. Other than certain specific cooldowns and visual effects, like paladin wings (love em) and slow moving chaos bolts (very pretty, gives me a few seconds to come to terms with my imminent death), an ability to discern what’s actually happening from moment to moment seems almost non-existent without help. After a certain point, I’m not so much playing a game as I’m just playing a UI. If I wanted to play against a UI I would open excel and at least get paid for my trouble.
  4. Class design. Things that work in PvE struggle more in PvP. The sheer amount of button and talent tree bloat is staggering. And somehow, for all the bloat here, actual options that make a difference in gameplay are slim to none. There are hero talents, and generally one of the two - insofar as I’ve been able to tell from guides and my own fiddling - is considered the best while the other languishes far behind, still functional but so much less effective that it’s a nerf to use it. Talent trees are full of must-picks and other obvious things, such as ‘would you rather do 1% more damage or 3% more damage’ existing as different ‘options’. And then oodles more buttons are needed for macros. CC is plentiful and it feels like I spend more time doing nothing than playing the game sometimes, but on the flip side healers (or DPS with a healer looking their way) never die without said oodles of CC.
  5. I’m sure there are a lot of things wrong with balance, most of which are out of my scope because I don’t see how I’ll be playing long enough to git gud enough for them to matter. But still. Worth a mention. WoW in particular seems like it rotates through fotm while screwing over whoever isn’t the favored class/spec that patch more than other games do.
  6. Rewards. WoW has a weird economical thing going with how it resets progress every so often so that certain resources can be valuable. Nothing really against that, exactly, but it’s very wonky especially in PvP, I feel. It’s terribly unrewarding in general and I’m not very interested in doing other grinds just so that I’m allowed to enjoy a particular game mode. If I recall correctly there are gems or…shards? Whatever they’re called. Thingies I can buy for honor that sell for gold. That’s fine and cool, but also not very useful when gearing up or later in the season when people are mostly ‘done’ with the treadmill process.

I like to PvP in MMOs. They have - or are supposed to have - an advantage over other types of PvP games where players can enjoy the complexity of MMO combat, different builds, and ways to engage or ally with other players in a way that you don’t really get in other PvP games. Unfortunately, WoW doesn’t really offer much of anything in its PvP modes that would justify time investment over other options, imo.

In short, WoW PVP has barriers to entry that commit the cardinal sin of being boring while also not really offering much of anything in the way of a unique MMO PvP experience. I started getting back into it because I was really enthusiastic about trying out some RPvP. I’m gonna keep trying for a little while longer to see if I can grit my teeth and trudge my way through things to get to where I want, but I’m not sure if I’ll make it at this rate.

There seem to be some low hanging fruit that Blizzard could adjust to make this process much more bearable and I really hope they put some resources into polishing up PvP. If you see a resto druid running away for dear life, please be nice to them.

4 Likes
2
  1. It’s your honor level. Once you are above honor level 30, queues average 5 mins or less on Horde.
  2. You need honor, join a premade community (Davey Jones Locker is one of a few). A few matches and you can have a full green honor set. If you need conquest the fastest way is through a crate farming group. I recommend Nacho Party for that. I can get you in both. Find the community that is a fit for you and your play times.
  3. Addons are very helpful. To queue with my community, Battleground Commander is required. To get a waiver from me, you can’t be afk when we q. I have two ppl who do not use BGC. Healers Have to Die (H.H.T.D.) and capping are both also very useful add ons. Everything else isn’t as vital.
  4. Items 4-6 all I can say is we pvp because we love it. I’d do it for no reward.
1 Like
3

Join a pvp premade crate farming group and you can have a full epic set in 3-4 hours.

3 Likes
4

Look in the community finder and join Davey Jones Locker for Horde or Ruthless Renegades for alliance.

They might also be cross-faction. Until you reach honor level 30 you will be in the entry bracket.

It will improve your experience and teach you some tactics, then you can move on your own.

Once you are full honor gear minimum, you can queue for rated Battleground Blitz, which is not split by brackets but will try to pair you with other players around your rank. Play multiple games to see how high you can reach. You get a nice armor set by reaching 1800 rating.

5

Oh thank heck. This was very vexing and I’m glad it goes away later. Had no idea this was a thing.

I know this is possible, but it’s very unfortunate that the gearing process here is to watch netflix while crate farming or join a premade and roll over people.

I’d do it for no reward, but unfortunately gold is required. If it was like PvP focused games or GW2 sPvP where currency was either irrelevant or entirely provided through PvP matches, I’d be fine, but that’s not really the case.

I appreciate the response.

6

Decent advice in here, and I guess it works as a returning player. But this raises a glaring issue of what a huge barrier this is for new players getting into pvp:

They’re unlikely to come to the forums for a resource (and frankly they shouldn’t have to). They shouldn’t have to rely on trade chat to get detailed responses, maybe a bit of communication needed there is fine as it’s in game.

I remember trying to explain the pvp crafting system to a newbie so that they could get their rings crafted first. Going through the missives, embellishments, etc. it’s quite overwhelming for someone new.

At least in pvp there should be an entry level set you can just buy with gold or the scaling needs to be better so that the gear gap isn’t as wide.

2 Likes
7

While crates, joining premades, etc are all decent advice to help alleviate gearing up pains, they’re still band-aid fixes that I hope Blizzard works to make unnecessary in the future. Relatively speaking, I’m highly motivated to get into PvP and still am unsure if I’ll stick around long time (we RPers like our blorbos). I may never get around to crafting anything, either.

2 Likes
8

Crate raids are so efficient that it’s annoying. I geared up many alts that way, but I would prefer to be doing pvp. The answer is to buff all pvp currency earnings but Blizzard is the kind of company that would just nerf crates instead.

9

Yeah, a lot of that is good for people who played in the past and come back. It’s arguably the best gearing system we’ve had. But, like, I can’t imagine anyone outside of WoW actually giving it a try, when there are other PvP games. Certainly not until they add renown track or battle pass.

It’s not even gear, it’s the whole fabric of combat, which is very knowledge heavy and you can’t just “action-logic” through it. Base HP and damage doesn’t matter. It all depends on cooldown versus cooldown versus defensives configuration.

It’s all very high end friendly, but floor is very high unfortunately. You have to be somewhat experienced in WoW combat to see the light in the end of the tunnel, and I don’t believe anyone new is actually able to get any dopamine hit from WoW PvP.

1 Like
10
  1. It’s the end of the season so it is usually slower, but they have a lot of things messing this up. Premade groups have really screwed with EBG queue times. They need cross faction opened up. General shrinking of the whole pvp pool because of lack of interest and care taking from Blizzard…it’s in a bad state.
  2. Don’t go for honor gear. I would go for the bloodstone gear. Just do the pvp bgs for conquest and honor for sockets for later. Bloodstone gear is far better and you can get it crazy fast. You can do box farming in open world pvp without fighting almost anyone. Then you can gear a lot faster and fill in a few pieces if need be with honor while you store up your conquest…but I would save the honor for sockets.

Other than that the rest is all pretty valid. Lots of issues. Almost no time or resources put towards pvp to fix them.

11

Outside of suffering in BGs, there’s no great way to gear up late in the season. I wouldn’t want to farm crates for hours (I did an hour recently on an alt… just awful). Nor would I want to run around and do a bunch of World Quests for Bloody Tokens. Let me put it this way, you’re going to suffer one way or another, and it probably won’t stop even after you’ve geared - to be fair.

12

I wonder what % (guessing below 10%) of DJL and RR members actually reach 1600 let alone 1800, :rofl:

13

Honestly, I’m not waiting 20 mins per match for rated. Meh. Try harder.

14

If it was more of a one time thing I could more easily stomach it, or if it was a 1-time thing for most stuff and then a much smaller grind for every gear refresh afterward, but it isn’t. I’m somehow punished for wanting to PvP, but also punished more and more the later I start in the season and for taking breaks if said break misses the start of a season. Blizzard really makes it so hard to give them time and money.

15

hrd agrëe epix or bust way more fun