As a dedicated PvP player, I have to say the current state of PvP is frustrating across the board. Here’s a breakdown of the issues:
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1v1 Duels Are Dead
Once vibrant duel hubs like Stormwind’s gates and Orgrimmar’s front steps are now eerily quiet. Sometimes, there’s not a single person around. The community and culture of dueling have nearly vanished.
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Random Battlegrounds and Epic Battlegrounds Are a Mess
This is arguably the worst part of the current PvP experience.
- Premades ruin the balance of random queues.
- Epic BGs are often decided in the first 3 minutes, with one side completely steamrolling the other.
- If a player leaves, a replacement is brought in mid-game, but that person is almost always thrown into a hopeless match. They’re forced to either take the 15 mins deserter debuff or endure a painful loss they had no part in. As a result, losing teams often have double the number of players due to churn, and the win rate imbalance (often around 30% instead of 50%) reflects that.
Personally, I’ve stopped queueing for Epic BGs altogether. It’s just not worth wasting my time on such consistently negative experiences.
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World PvP Is Practically Dead
Flying mounts have essentially killed spontaneous World PvP, and World PVP quests attract very few players. The new zone Undermine(11.1) saw some revival due to flying restrictions, similar to the good old Stranglethorn Vale. But it’s temporary—only relevant in this patch.
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Rated PvP Queue Times Are Brutal
If you queue as a DPS, expect to wait 15+ minutes. If you’re not interested in PvE content or world events, that often leaves you with nothing to do but AFK while waiting.
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War Supply Crates
These are now largely monopolized by organized premade raids. While the original design seems to encourage faction competition and engagement, the reality has strayed far from that intent. It no longer feels rewarding or fun for the average player.
Suggestion: A Dedicated PvP Zone (Revamped Ashran)
I strongly believe PvP players deserve a dedicated, open-world space that serves as both a social and competitive hub. A reimagined Ashran could be the answer, with features like:
- Always-Active Open Ashran (World Map)
Let players freely engage in PvP while waiting for rated queues. Give us something meaningful to do in between.
- Dynamic PvP Events
Bring back Ashran events that trigger around the map, with minor honor rewards and faction-based objectives that encourage fighting.
- PvP Vendors in This Zone Only
Relocate all PvP-related vendors to this zone. When a place is populated, it feels alive—and that energy builds community
- Faction-Neutral Safe Zone for Duels and Teamfinding
Let players duel here, or find partners for 2v2, 3v3, or RBG. It should feel like a proper PvP gathering hub
One last thing I want to point out:
Even though Epic Battlegrounds require 80 players, queue times are often just 5 to 7 minutes. This is despite the fact that the gameplay experience in Epic BGs has become absolutely miserable. And yet, people still queue. Because there’s still a massive population of PvP players who don’t do rated content.
I hope developers can understand Rated PvP is not the same as PvP.
Many of us play PvP for fun, for excitement, and for the joy of jumping into combat and unleashing flashy skills the moment we log in. We’re not here to chase high ratings or grind through stressful competitive ladders.
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I have sympathy for those that still PvP in this game but wouldn’t a PvP zone just get over taken by a pre-made like the crates? If they force team balance, that’s just BGs. If it’s free-for-all PvP then pre-mades still wreck it.
Doesn’t seem like there’s many good options. When there were a lot of people playing PvP, it diluted the pre-made tryhards more but with dwindling participation, that leaves mostly the try-hards and they will optimize every aspect of the game to get their reward.
As far as Blitz queue times (or solo shuffle), they could just drop the hammer and make it pure DPS queues only that way you don’t have to wait for healers to queue and possibly removes the wait as all you need is 20 people of any race, any faction, any class as long as its dps. As a healer myself, I enjoy healing more than DPS but PvP is kind of an after thought mode anymore. I don’t even know if that would improve queue times.
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I’m curious. Is there a reason why you don’t join a premade group? I was never really interested myself, but it seems like a shortcut through the misery. One alternative is to hop from alt. to alt. but you’ll often end up getting put back into the same game you left (assuming you have alts. to do this with). Hard to know what they can do with this mess.
Manarein
13 posts
80 Blood Elf Mage13100
1m
The Ashran I envision is essentially a 24/7 Brawl Ashran, always open, always active.
It would reward only a small amount of resources, just enough to encourage PvP activity but not worth farming through premade domination. This setup discourages organized exploitation while still promoting spontaneous and organic combat.
Even if one faction gains a numbers advantage, it won’t completely ruin the experience—the weaker side can still fall back and defend their base, creating natural choke points and moments of counterplay.
All it really needs is a neutral sanctuary area where players can duel, socialize, and access seasonal PvP vendors—and it becomes the perfect PvP hub.
But above all, what I truly want is this: The right to engage in PvP freely, whenever I want, without waiting in a queue
I did and it was a strange experience. We spent more time in discord trying to make sure the queues were synced (dropping and then restarting, until 7 or 8 of the groups got the queue pop at the same time) than the actual 5 minutes of stomping the under geared, uncoordinated enemies. It wasn’t particularly fun, I just felt bad for the enemies. There was also some item level requirement and 8 healers, one placed in each group, vs their 3 healers. The goal was making it as unfair of a fight as possible, apparently. Honestly this experience, and Blizzard doing nothing about it, completely turned me off the game mode.
2 Likes
You are very correct, they would be overtaken by a premade. Back in BfA there was a guild (won’t name them) on Alliance that would form these massive premades of several raids all in one shard for the PvP event in Nazjatar and would completely stomp any Horde teams that showed up. Occasionally a few Horde raids would show up and the ensuing battle would lag the server so bad instant cast spells took 45 seconds to go off. The server even crashed a few that I can remember.
While a PvP zone would be pretty cool, this problem will still exist of premades dominating anyone not in an equally large group.
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Q times being high and the lack of Wpvp proves that the vast majority of WoW players play PvE.
I get what you want, I really do as I loved spontaneous world pvp way back when where I would defend meaningless hills or tents or whatever I could find in whatever zone I was in. Just going at it with others in the zone was incredibly fun. It felt like Warcraft to me and even if I got nothing out of it, the fun I had was the reward.
Problem is if there are no rewards or weak rewards, the content is DOA nowadays. Everyone seems to just want the reward at the end and don’t care if the journey is fun. That’s what happened with the PvP towers in vanilla. It was supposed to be a beacon to attract PvPers to a location but failed because there wasn’t a juicy carrot.
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The ones doing it in discord are the ones just stomping pugs. There’s zero need to be in disc for epic BGs but yeah, I guess some of them ‘need’ that for some reason. lol
Guess what? You can already do this in all zones. It’s called War Mode.
Then YOU do this. Get networking. Blizzard already knows the cesspool that most PvPers have generated. They want no part in it.
This won’t bring back PvP players. Players care about balance. Not rewards. This has been said many times.
You can easily go to Moonguard Goldshire and duel from there. Bring a friend to go cross realm. Oh… and start networking.
Some things I agree with here. Some things not so much.
- 1v1 Duels Are Dead
Once vibrant duel hubs like Stormwind’s gates and Orgrimmar’s front steps are now eerily quiet. Sometimes, there’s not a single person around. The community and culture of dueling have nearly vanished.
Try Undermine. I see duels going on there often.
Random Battlegrounds and Epic Battlegrounds Are a Mess
This is arguably the worst part of the current PvP experience.
I agree to an extent, but if your on the winning side they can be quite fun.
- Premades ruin the balance of random queues.
No disagreement here. They need to do something about que syncing. I remember I was watching a game where a 14 healer premade got into an RGB.
- If a player leaves, a replacement is brought in mid-game, but that person is almost always thrown into a hopeless match. They’re forced to either take the 15 mins deserter debuff or endure a painful loss they had no part in. As a result, losing teams often have double the number of players due to churn, and the win rate imbalance (often around 30% instead of 50%) reflects that.
Yes. Thats never fun.
- War Supply Crates
These are now largely monopolized by organized premade raids. While the original design seems to encourage faction competition and engagement, the reality has strayed far from that intent. It no longer feels rewarding or fun for the average player.
I don’t like this either in terms of gameplay. Also sometimes you have opposing crate farming groups come into a server and it caused the whole area to lag.
However… It does make getting full conquest gear much smoother and quicker then it otherwise would be and with pvp. PvP is the sort of content where getting the top gear shouldn’t take forever because its competitive by nature. Crate groups prove a smooth and streamlined and reliable way to get that gear. And one of the number one deterrents to people looking to get into pvp is getting dominated by people in better gear.
- Dynamic PvP Events
Bring back Ashran events that trigger around the map, with minor honor rewards and faction-based objectives that encourage fighting.
Crate drops are supposed to be that. However you can get something like this by doing pvp in siren isles. Whenever one of those expeditions upons youll often have enemies trying to get it there to fight the boss and will have to fight other people for it.
Relocate all PvP-related vendors to this zone. When a place is populated, it feels alive—and that energy builds community
This is a bad idea though. The PvP vendors should be somewhere safe. Otherwise people will just camp them.
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I knew a lot of guys there, most of them are chill or AFK there , but im Horde anyway
didn’t they block the enemy’s team players from showing up in the scoreboard before the bg starts? this is in epic bgs only, i understand.
that should help with the epic bg premade issue
I’m always down for more PVP content, gotta get back into it.
If they remove stun locks and roots, I would probably have another go at it. Every other PvP game I play in my Steam arsenal does not involve those two mechanics, and I enjoy the PvP more.
Another thing I want to add is that world pvp is far from dead even in areas with flying. So let me give you some advice on where to find people.
- Undermine
This is an easy one. No flying here. There is unusually a lot of people out here.
- Siren Isle
Has lots of people trying to complete the quests and farm blessed irons. The nice thing about this area is that it has a lot of objectives for people to fight over. Most people don’t have flying unlocked out there.
- Hallowfall
Look near the light beacon areas. There is often lots of people doing dailys out there and Sureki areas. As well as near flames radiance. There is also 2 pvp areas there.
- Ringing Deeps
This one has 2 pvp areas and when quests are up for those areas I usually see lots of people fighting out there. There is also often alot of people walking around questing areas or farming mats out there. You can also find people near the entrances or dungeons or delves. And there is often a lot of people outside the entrance to Undermine. The black blood area is also the source of some weeklies.
- Isle of Dorn
There is often lots of people hanging out just outside the city, people are active when there are quests for the pvp areas, you can check near cinderbrew and I often see lots of people doing world quests and farming mats out there.
- Azj-Kahet
This one you can get lots of world pvp out there during Sureki events. There are also 2 pvp areas out there. However I would say this is the worse area to find pvp just be flying around when the events aren’t up.
That just sounds like PVE against players if you take away stuns and roots… plus you’re a mage, it’s what you guys do, you ARE CC machines.
In every other actual PVP game that I play, they don’t use roots and stuns. Fortnite, CoD, Rivals, Apex, and the list goes on and on. I love PVP in every game except this one. Because all it takes is one stun lock for three people to come in and just absolutely mow you down. I played duos trios and quads so I know what it’s like to go against more than one person at a time and this game is just not it for me. but that’s me personally.
Nothing wrong with not liking PVP in WOW, I love it. It seems like you’re a fan of FPS games which makes sense to why you don’t like WOW’s PVP, I used to love FPS games too… I would love to play ranked in rivals, but the EOMM system they have blows my mind at how bad it truly is.