A check in for PvP for season 2. While everything is not on fire like it was with the ret rework, it’s still not in a great situation. There’s been no tuning done since the initial destro lock nerfs, which I personally think is unacceptable. You can argue that you don’t want to do tuning till you have enough data on where PvP is where most people have the 4-set bonus from tier, but even that is a terrible argument as a lot of people won’t have 4-set from pvp for another 2-3 weeks, which would be a whole 4-5 or more weeks of no tuning. On top of that just playing the game feels terrible with the hard mmr deflation, resulting in an unsatisfying grind where you either
- Wait forever in lfg hoping to get a group
- Wait 30+ minutes in a solo shuffle queue as DPS and spend 10 minutes stressing out cause you’re dying non stop every match from high damp
- Queue as a healer (assuming you have a heal spec) and then have multiple heart attacks while your entire team is dying, get no rewards, wonder why you queued to begin with, and then uninstall the game
The only thing that made shuffle bearable in season 1 was the fact that you could get higher rating and have rewards to look forward to, even if you had to wait in queue forever. The 3s ladder is just spell cleaves, enh/x, sub/x, and the occasional jungle every game. Destro never needs to cast, enhance globals, sub globals, boomkin has insane damage on top of 0.5s cyclones that reduce your damage done and healing taken, precog is insane while the new determination buff from the figurine of gathering storms might as well not even exist. It’s all awful.
Then there’s battlegrounds, I’m sure the devs have looked at the forums and seen all the complaints for the past few months (and probably years). People hate queueing into premades, especially when you’re trying to gear and then you face a full group of conquest players with tier doing a weekly, which just leads to unfun gameplay.
- Make premades queue against each other
- Make battlegrounds and epic battlegrounds mixed factions, which helps queues and should fix faction imbalance (which historically was horde dominated and now leans towards alliance)
- As a temporary solution, if mixed faction queues take a while, maybe make it so alliance can queue into each other, and that horde can queue with alliance with mercenary buff in an alliance filled group, or vice-versa.
While this is not entirely pvp related, I do want to speak on the topic of catalyst. While I feel like the requisition speed of tier is not that bad, I think catalyst should be moved up a week or two. I know raiders that got 4p two days into the patch (which most of is the same or better in terms of ilvl than pvp gear), and a lot of pvp/m+ players want easier access to tier. I think that it would make balancing the patch earlier easier for devs, and would also be nice for players to get their hands on the new toys of the patch faster. It’s also just more alt friendly as you can make a new alt and not worry that you missed out on 3-4 weeks of vault rewards and possible tier drops.
Overall I would say 10.1 has been pretty low in terms of satisfaction as far as pvp goes, and hope to see more work put into balancing and general content.
Cheers, Sha