I won’t try to speak to MMR; I defer to people with much more knowledge than me, but I do want to throw some thoughts in here since PVP is my favorite part of WoW. It’s sad to see it suffering so much right now when the rest of the game seems to be doing better than ever.
Even something like adding a few more rewards for healers who queue SS would help a great deal with queue times. I am sort of flummoxed that nothing has been done to address this issue, even though it’s been an issue for the entire iteration of SS.
WoW-rated PvP is hard to break into for newbies. SS was perfect in that regard; in theory, it introduced more people to the system. In practice, people who work do not want to wait in a 30-minute queue for one game; it’s not worth it. Everyone knows healers are the bottleneck, we all know why healers are the bottleneck, and people who play healers have been very forthcoming about what it would take to get them to participate more. But so far, the only additional incentive is a bit more conquest. Bluntly, no one needs more conq later in the season. Give healers a different mount to work towards, or healer-specific transmog, or at minimum, don’t punish healers for going 3 for 3 in matches. It doesn’t feel good and discourages them from queueing. It almost feels like the current system punishes the specs we need to queue the most and rewards them for switching to DPS.
We need more people to want to dabble in rated PvP, SS is the perfect introduction, and I still think it could be great, but it isn’t right now.