I came back after not playing the game at all after slands launch. I haven’t taken pvp seriously since cata, and figured that since some friends of mine were coming back to pvp, might as well start focusing on that again.
I got all my honor gear, checked out numerous builds, spent a few hours in some bg’s just getting back into the grove of things, and then queued up solo shuffle. I was excited for a casual 3’s system and that’s what I was expecting it to be at low rank, like most 3’s would be up to 1800, but holy tap dancing velociraptor: Was I ever wrong.
first off, my mmr was set at 1500 automatically after not playing any arena for basically a decade, ok, that’s fine, 1500 is generally where you would find the casuals that haven’t figured out focus macros, or arena/party targeting binds. So shouldn’t be a problem.
I was very wrong. Melee has everything and then some these days, you don’t kite any one, 3 melee dps and me on spriest was the standard it seemed, about 90+% of my games had DH’s that just tunneled one target the entire game along with their melee partner or hunter partner, and that target was almost exclusively me.
I was pretty sad to only get to about 1300 as spriest after queues would go from 11m ‘estimated’ to 30-50m actual or even worse if it was an off time. My win/loss ended up around 40%~.
As I dig more and more into what’s happened since slands, I’ve seen that shadow has been ‘reworked’ a few times, and at one point in mythic+ it was meta. But now it’s just a mess of class design, lack of defensive options, lack of cc (in comparison to the majority of classes now), dot damage is quite poor, and it seems you’re pigeonholed into slight variations of a direct damage build. Your dots are just there because other skills do more damage when they are on the target.
With all these reworks, and changes, the class has ended up worse for wear.
By the way, I had ONE match of solo shuffle where there were no hunters, no rets, no warriors, no dh, no dk. Just Spriest, Mage, aff lock, and resto druids on both teams. The game was quite a bit longer than your typical shuffle game, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had since playing 3s ins Cata. The players were decent, it wasn’t just 'mongo train X all game and win", people set up cc chains, people played intelligently, there were dispells, offensive dispells, deaths on sheeps, proper positioning and everything. It really felt like how arena felt at previous times before legion.
Sure, I love the whole void theme that they adopted for spriest, but when they completely changed the class to a builder/spender system (Shadow orbs were different, you didn’t need to stack 20+ of them before you could do something meaningful) and then tried for multiple expansions to make S2M the thing, they really just made it a different class with some similar abilities. The hybrid aspect of the class is severely lacking now, and keeps getting nerfed, the dot damage is hardly anything to gloat about, and we seem to be mostly pigeonholed into spike builds and direct damage builds.
I tried a lot of different talent set ups, things that would allow me to spend less time hard casting things, like dots applied via crash, running leech rather than speed (let’s be honest, when was the last arena game you were not slowed 70%?), avoidance enchants to help with the abundance of aoe damage, but there was only one time I ever topped damage in 3’s/shuffle, and that was when a dk/dh didn’t train me and instead trained the druid healer.
And now looking at the set bonuses that we have as a class, not just shadow, and seeing how trash they are compared to the bulk of other class sets just makes playing the class so stressful and sweaty to play vs players that would be hard stuck at 1500 prior to legion but they’re now at 2k or even higher but still clicking abilities and keyboard turning.
Man, what has this game come to for pvp, we went from having stadiums full of people watching 3v3 tourneys, to barely getting a slot at blizzcon for the biggest tourney in wow right now.
I healed one game in shuffle at 2.2mmr and went 3-3 at 0 cr im too scared to heal again.