Washed-up boomer thread alert
tl:dr game fun but also not
It’s hard to quantify what I enjoy and don’t enjoy about Shadowlands arena so far, and without getting into the problems with gearing and boosting, I think the best way of putting it is that doing a lot of damage and getting kills feels way better than the last two expansions, but MAN does it feel way harder to counter misplays.
I feel like warriors are the perfect example of this. I genuinely can’t tell the difference between a 1600 Arms warrior and a Gladiator warrior, because despite all the tools they have their damage is very on-rails and it’s nearly impossible to get anything to stick on them if they mess up. Not that I’m advocating for nerfs, I just think that everyone is frustrated with this one class despite them not being the only class/spec that has this luxury.
Look at fire mages. They don’t need damage so they run Triune Ward, and their actual gameplay is very basic - land easy sheeps/RoF with DB, pop combust and go. If you mess up, you have cauterize as a cheat death (other mage specs have to iceblock), you’re probably NF so you have a pod, you have iceblock, and if all else fails you have 3 schools of magic to work with to peel for yourself/your team. The only real counter is another mage or a well timed grounding totem.
Boomkins are the same. Yeah convoke is a meme but they’re near impossible to actually punish for playing poorly. Also you can just get hit for 20k despite kicking convoke instantly since the first spell cast is instant. When they run out of damage they can sit in bear form if getting trained or peel/off heal.
Sub rogues aren’t that great outside of their kill window, but they’re infuriating to play against because blizzard gifted them free restealths. Like, no one wants to play against rogues because it’s so scripted what they’re gonna do: open, do big burst with (insert new crazy combo sub to my channel click the bell), if kill then collect points if not then run away despite bleeding and dots. Don’t need to vanish, don’t need to commit cloak, don’t need to really do anything, just walk away.
The list goes on but you get the picture.
The trend with the “problem” specs boils down to them having way too easy of a time (note: not just because of their damage) because you can’t punish them as easily.
The flipside of this is that I’m having loads of fun playing off meta specs and classes by finding the odd kill window and actually killing people in cc chains. That felt genuinely impossible last expansion so it’s definitely nice. I’d like to see blizzard tone down the ability to blanket mistakes for the problem specs so that you can actually counter misplays without having to be a god-tier gamer.