Since BFA every expansions has changed minor things, modifying the PvP experience. From the war chest, vault, set bonuses, and overall gameplay changes things have moved in a positive direction in the last five+ years.
I wanted to make a short list of four good changes and four areas we still have room for improvement.
What’s working:
- Debuff clarity, allowing players to see at a glance what debuffs are on you and a heuristic surrounding their effects. Given that there are no independent PvP talent trees, debuff clutter that would go unnoticed in PvE is very noticeable in PvP. Yet, with this UI change it helps remedy the problem until future changes can be made.
- Gearing is now entirely independent from PvE from vault to set bonuses with the catalyst changes. That said, many of the tooltips are a little difficult to understand for new players because many of these solutions have just been added to a vendor.
- Stun reduction has made the game far more playable, even though not perfect it’s helped a major issue.
- Promising new battlegrounds and PvP updates keeps me optimistic. There was a long time there where there were no new updates and it’s refreshing to hear that PvP is a supported community in the game.
What needs Improvement:
- Separation of talents. PvE combat is a little too obnoxious, all the cooldowns and defensives make it very hard to kill people. Beyond this, any/every PvE class update indirectly effects PvP and often for the worse. To fix the present and future, there should be an incredibly lean talent tree beyond the main talent tree for each class. This would enable PvP to be much more controllable, be easier to understand, and make it much more watchable for Arena World Championship.
- Simplify tooltips. Many talents, buffs/debuffs, and gear upgrades & things are a little difficult to understand or just straight up don’t apply in PvP. For example:
https://imgur.com/a/Ux4X8D2 - World PvP is rarely ever fun. It’s always extremely dominated by one faction. If there’s anyway to balance layers it would be appreciated. Also I’m not sure if it’s still this way but I remember back in BFA the alliance got some percentage higher more rewards than horde to encourage more world PvP from that faction and that’s bogus if it’s still around.
- More interesting rewards like decor or something small to sprinkle into PvP to reward people who primarily play PvP game modes. The progression in PvP is fairly flat compared to the depth of PvE.