The state of premades vs solo players

I just did one wsg brawl on my hunter last night…this character. I was going to play my rogue, a character im actively gearing but just was in the mood to play this.

The very first brawl I’ve done in a week since I’ve been largely offline and the team we fight was an obvious premade of people in nearly all duelist gear. I saw an spriest with 75k hp. A hunter sitting on nearly 63.

I have some gear on this and it was still a miserable experience. I dont even want to imagine the absolute fun it would have been on my low ilvl rogue trying to gear.

My entire team gave up and half of them said something to the effect of being over the game and quitting.

Why is nothing being done to regulate this? Cap out the people who can queue randoms or brawls together. I dont care if it isnt FUN for them boohoo we cant queue with all 8 of our friends.

This behavior is literally killing pvp and anyone who denies it is just part of the problem and the person ruining the other players experience. This isnt the first time this has happened and its basically been every brawl I’ve done over the last few months too.

What is wrong with this company? Show SOME caring of your game. Do you know how rage inducing it is to see people just trying to gear up an alt and mess around and we are being spawn camped by players whom in some cases had 3x the healty of some of my team. Absolutely ridiculous state of the game right now.

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You can only queue 5 together. The exact same could be said about those who solo queue: who cares if it isn’t fun for you boohoo, get some friends to queue with it’s a group based mmo.

There is a debate if premades get priority to get another pre-made in games. I’ve solo, duo and group queued into BGs and as soon as you have 1 more person in your in group I find I get more premades. So even though you got wrecked by a geared premade, maybe you also had a premade on your team. Premades don’t always win, and they also aren’t always good or geared.

Someone brought up in another thread that was a really good point is that if you solo queue you have a higher chance of getting into in-progress games, which is true, and definitely sucks for solo queues. Best solution? Queue with some friends or community members.

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Premades vs Solo players is not an issue at all. What is an issue. Is the massive gear discrepancy in PvP at the moment. Atleast in my opinion.

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no more premade groups. not 5. not 2.

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Wrong again just just qued in with a team of 40 into an av

You are right got my hunter to level 60 she has 133 gear score this toon has a 233 gear score so acorrding to ION each level is 1% power ECT I’m 100% more powerful than my hunter. And I’m 20 levels lower than the top dogs

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I mean lets be honest. Anyone how plays epic bgs are not real pvp players.

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To really be honest anyone that goes into a regular bg with 214 gear is expecting to be carried

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As someone who clearly has control over this, I’m going to have to decline your request.

I mean you can’t queue with 40, you queue with separate groups and get in the same game. 99% of premades aren’t doing this anyway and also:

Yeah dude game is doing great. Lets keep doing the same behavior forever while hitting historic lows. Alliance is dead. Game is bleeding constantly. You are objectively wrong that this is a good system.

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Wrong. They are just playing what they want to play most likely.

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You can for Korrak’s Revenge; not for any other epic

Grouping with friends has always been in the game. The current state of the game doesn’t have anything to do with premades, if it did then it would have been the same since vanilla. People like doing content together like dungeons, keys, raids etc but because you don’t like it people can’t bg with friends?

Huh, I didn’t know that fair enough.

Yeah it’s stupid. Last time WSG brawl was around, every time I q’d we got curbstomped by premades with such high gear that I wondered why they were even there.

Not sure it’s a premade issue necessarily. It is part of it but what this is is a side effect of the dumb gearing system.

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I noticed really early on in the expansion that the stat level squish seemed to only have been done so that they could very, very quickly ramp in ilvl in the expansion to give this artificial sense of progression.

During the beta, people had like 16k hp and were hitting for a few thousand damage at most. Blizzard pulled a literal bait and switch on the entire playerbase. It’s been a wholly awful experience, and one that I quit several months ago after seeing the writing on the wall.

It’s really a shame, too. They had this great opportunity with SL to take the game in more of a direction that classic WOW was encouraging at the time - slow, meaningful progression that consisted of small, incremental improvements, meaning every piece felt like a huge relief, but no one piece felt like an absolute necessity.

SL took all of that and just crapped all over it. The gearing system for PvP has been an utter disaster, the ilvl discrepancy is not only significant, but so much so that people have literally just said, “nah, I’d rather not even play instead.” My shaman is around ilvl 215ish (I think?) and has 1/3rd of the hp of everyone else at this point. The total gap in TBC from s1 to s4 gear was a difference in 2-3k hp for most classes, or about 20-25% of their total health pools.

The power creep has infested every progressive style of game that Blizzard has put out (really just being d3 and WoW), and it just feels extremely lazily done in both. “Screw it, just give everyone an extra 20% damage each patch, that’ll keep players engaged!” seems to be the normal train of thought for developmental design, now. Instead of depth in gearing and giving meaningful options, players are just given massive sweeping ilvl increases. Instead of having to choose between another 1% hit versus 1% crit, players are just given an arbitrary 5% damage increase per item.

I genuinely would love to see WoW go back to classic/TBC style itemization (minus haste, since it was so game-breakingly overpowered compared to almost every other stat), where a warrior could look at a piece of gear like the Crown of Destruction, or classes would have to personally value extra stam or spell power over int or spirit depending on what they were doing. Those choices are gone, now. Spirit is a dead stat, stam, int, agi and str are all arbitrarily determined by ilvl and don’t change outside of rare occasions, and stuff like crit, haste and mastery has become so watered down that meta builds basically just have you chasing a specific combination with a higher ilvl than what you already have. It’s very, very shallow.

I’d love to see WoW PvP return to a gearing system like TBC, where the offset pieces are the exact same for people doing Arena or BG’s, and having a tier higher from doing Arena, but a tier that isn’t such a huge upgrade so that the BG gear is just flat out non-competitive. I knew people who got Glad with s2 gear in s4, after s4 gear became significantly buffed with the armor pen and marginally more inflated stats. It’s nice to feel like you’re being rewarded for your Arena prowess by having stronger gear, sure, but it’s basically the modern equivalent of a 60 going ganking in Redridge at this point.

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Premades in randoms has always been a hot topic, with debate going back as early as the moment you could. Blizzard has recognized this and gave us rated bgs and a premade filter that is supposed to lock premades against each other but to your point it has limited success and applies only basic logic (eg. 2 random 1400s grouped = premade. 5 duelists grouped also equals premade. Now they must fight.). It’s a strange situation because in pretty much any other pickup environment (soccer, basketball, paintball, etc) if one side secretly knew each other and deliberately stacked their team they would be shunned and disqualified immediately. Yet in wow it’s seen as totally normal to many.

Now, why premades feel worse than usual is two-fold. First, the gear and power disparity is at an all-time high so five duelists (who by achievement alone are already in the top 5% of skill) will not only be inherently better, but also have 3-4x the HP and damage of team pickup-scrub on top of picking their team makeup, having communication etc.

Secondly, the game is at a critical loss situation for subs. This aforementioned power gap and unbalanced specs is very much to blame. That means many of the average players ran into the gap players, got wrecked and left. This continues over and over until you end up with today - with a disproportionate amount of diehards still tooling around the queues (as they have the most invested and are holding the most power), a complete absence of 1400-1800 players, and an ocean of casuals on the other end. What it equates to is not only are you more likely to face premades, but you’re also more likely to face duelists above anything else (or if you’re lucky, have more on your side).

This means games are increasingly blow outs - and no one being happy.

Plus, people are monsters. The people that fought for itemization in PvP almost exclusively wanted it for this reason - to stack the deck as much as possible and effectively grief as their stress relief. A lot of the people they griefed then quit and again, we end up in this dystopian future scenario.

People should be allowed to have fun with friends - it’s a social game. But when their fun is centred around ruining it for everyone else, then I have a problem.

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It’s VERY RARE to face a 5 stack in bgs right now. There’s only like one or two good ones that q for each faction. Franq the mistweaver is prob the best horde premade, and the premade I usually run wins 90%+ of our matches.

Gear is a much bigger issue than premades. I wouldn’t mind the idea of an MMR for random bgs, and skirms. However, that isn’t the spirit of WoW.

It’s strange to me that blizzard thinks pvpers want this huge ilvl gap. It’s extremely annoying from a decent players point of view when someone uses 3 ilvls as an excuse as to why they’re missing 1 million damage on the scoreboard.

Another massive issue is merc mode. There’s literally forum threads that have people encouraging players to merc q on new alts to farm honor fast on alliance. If you want to play the better faction, you should have to sit in a q.

Maybe we should do premades in WSG brawl.
Could be EZ wins.

Do it, that’s what the game needs rn lol