It’s hard to list out all of the ways this expansion has been a tremendous letdown for those who were excited for PvP, but some come to mind immediately:
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extremely inconsistent experience with honor gains resulting in longer many-times-over grinds for those who didn’t do what I did and rush 70 and farm honor immediately… greatly discouraging participation from the casual end and deflating ratings in ranked.
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bugs with warrior intercept, mages being stun-immune after blinking, the way spell resistances were calculated, to name just a few…
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starting teams at 0 rating rather than 1500, for no discernable reason really, which also disincentivized participation from the casual end and makes it a punishing grind to swap teams at all.
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adding anachronistic rating requirements to S1 and S2 PvP gear, discouraging participation even more, while average player skill has increased tremendously since the original TBC which pushes many of those items totally out of reach for anybody who doesn’t have years of experience, which depresses participation even further still than it already was.
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The way certain items (MQG, Shield Belt, Net-O-Matic, Skull, …) were originally allowed to run rampant and then surprised banned unexpectedly. While that was a good change, the communication is extremely lacking. My friend that I earned Gladiator with in original TBC, quit TBCC for good when that was announced one day after he dropped his Enchanting with very lucrative recipes like Mongoose, and dropped thousands of gold to level Engineering. Advance warning doesn’t prevent people from being harmed by unlucky timing but at least it would have allowed him to get something out of it first when you didn’t get this one right on launch and then waited so long to take action.
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I keep coming back to edit in additional ones I forgot: oh my god the Nagrand Tornados. What better way to tell us what you really think about TBCC PvP, Blizzard. Why, if #somechanges (see the terrible ones above) is the modus operandi, would this be the one thing to keep? Don’t you think #somechanges might have been better applied to Tornados and oh, I don’t know, Heartbeat Resists?
As bad as all of this has been, as a player who loved raiding in Classic and was eagerly anticipating returning to PvP in TBCC as it was the era of WoW where I made many of my most cherished memories, the worst thing by far has been the way that the PvP seasons have been so badly rushed.
On a discussion about the drastic shortening of PvP S3, I saw a recent question from a curious outsider:
Yes, I complained when premature endings were announced for both S1 and S2. And what they are doing to S3 is somehow significantly worse.
Not only do I have fond memories because S3 was the first season I reached 2k+ rating in the original, as well as the longest season where more players had time to gear up alts and experiment in PvP. S3 also has a meta and pace of play that many players consider to be the most enjoyable; it is a special time where specs like Shadow Priest and Dreamstate Druid finally reached the level of gear where they come online and you start to see different and interesting compositions emerge on the ladder.
Now in TBCC, S3 is the shortest season and I’m very unhappy about it. I farmed to 2k rating in the first week of the season, which only a couple hundred people did at most, and I still need Helm, Thrown, 2nd MH for Weapon Chain vs. Warrior teams, and OH Dagger for Shiv. I planned in particular to have the Helm as a Resilience option before my end of season push, but it will by obsoleted by Engineering Goggles in the next phase; OTOH, if I do buy it this week (and invest significant gold in the expensive red gem, meta gem, and glyph enchant) for my push then I won’t have enough points left over to buy the other pieces even at the 50% discount between seasons. If I don’t buy the Helm this week, then I’ll have enough points to buy everything including the Helm between the seasons… but the Helm will be no longer useful to me. So I have to choose between maximizing my character now or in the start of S4, and while hard trade offs can be compelling this does not feel that way.
I’m also GM of a semi-hc raiding guild and it’s an extreme burden to be raid leading, prepping our people for Sunwell, and doing my end of season title push at the same time, all on a very shortened timeline. A few more weeks would have been extremely welcome to be able to just enjoy PvP, practice, and have fun rather than needing to get all this done in such a shortened fashion. Say “Thank You” to your GMs everybody, because it’s a tireless job already which leaves little time to stop and smell the flowers and appreciate the things you enjoy as an individual player – and the rushed pace of content releases makes the problem so much worse.
The arena meta still feels like it shifts every single week because people are still gearing, character power is increasing, we don’t get any time at all to settle in and build intuition for what incoming burst feels like for each class, or to enjoy and fully explore the capabilities of what our class can do with the gear that we accrue.
I’m a patient player and while some are constantly craving something new, I personally enjoy a high degree of optimization and refinement (I’m here playing a re-release of a 17 year old game after all!). I feel like that is being totally stolen from us, and had I known the content would be this rushed going into TBCC I would have made very different decisions about how to play or whether to play it at all.
TBC is one of my all time favorite expansions, maybe my single all time favorite expansion, and I’m extremely disappointed that Blizzard does not care to allow us to savor it and make many lasting memories, to enjoy those hard earned accomplishments, or make any kind of compromise at all that brings us closer to the original timeline.
With the announcement that there will be no option to remain in TBC and everybody’s character will be pushed into WotLK, even sticking around to enjoy PvP with a small group of people who really love it won’t be an option. Copying character to remain on TBC and continue queuing up for Arenas is something that many of us PvPers were very hopeful about going into this expansion, with lots of hushed speculation about what the future of Classic PvP might be like following the unprecedented way the Vanilla → TBC transition was handled in Classic. There would have been potentially a very different audience for even one single TBC era server, and this could have been a saving grace for the way Blizzard has totally blown it with regards to pacing of the Arena seasons.
I must say that I am truly, bitterly disappointed in the way PvP has been handled in TBCC. I hope that Blizzard learns from these lessons in WotLK; I don’t share the same degree of fondness for that expansion and I don’t expect to be very engaged with it, but the people who love WotLK PvP deserve so much better treatment than the TBC PvPers received.