While it should come as a surprise to no one, spec/class diversity in arena is awful right now. I understand a new season is here soon, but it still is worth highlighting. Arms, Ret, BM, and Demo make up the majority of matches. There is such a massive divide between the top specs and everything else that it makes every other match just a copy of the one before it.
This is the last 34 matches I have had on my enhance sham. Since I’m a visual guy, I marked the dominant four specs with green. The second column is the same, but uncovered. I have been bouncing from 2.1 to 2.4 for the past week. While the very small nerf to ret has helped, the total lack of diversity in the queues makes it tough to push. Games that have 1 or less I tend to todo better in.
The majority of matches have 2 or even 3 of the top specs. Any match with just one or none is multitudes more fun.
Same goes for heals. Lots of shamans and discs still, but I am starting to see more Holy Paladins and plain old MW monks.
What’s funny is I’m still getting double ret games. Hilarious how strong they still are. Unbelievably broken spec.
I’m positive at this point if Blizzard doesn’t intervene in some way, RSS is just going to be a FOTM bracket. Not that players can’t do well with other specs, but there is a very clear advantage currently to just playing what’s popular. The main reason being healers actually understand how to work with these specs. I have to beg healers to push in on my enhance.
None were WW that I can recall, though I did just fight one. Most were not fist weaving.
We need people who actually play the game a bit. That said, just looking at the data should warrant a response…
I mean, I’m glad they aren’t nerfing ret into the ground, but at the same time, I wish the nerfs were actually meaningful. Yes, they aren’t as strong, but they are still substantially better then the majority of specs, and by a large degree. It’s like a match I had earlier. We get the ret to 20% 3 times in a row and every time the ret had something. Lay on Hands topping is just nuts. I just can’t wrap my head around it. They are just so damn good. They have something for nearly everything.
Yep. Beyond the difficulty of pushing, the main issue is really just how unfun it is. Every game getting trained by arms/ret or arms/bm, or bm/ret, or bm/demo, etc. etc. Arms/Ret just destroys my shamans. They completely shutdown my goes. Every single time. Nothing like going on the warrior and then getting stunned into a disarm into die by the sword. Legit takes me out of the game for 12+ seconds. Then healers call me bad for doing so little damage, but I have no good targets to hit.
It sucks. It really sucks. If the healer isn’t decent, I just flop over.
I saw a holy priest rated 2200 only and they were so good. They were playing SO good. They could predict everything that was going on in the match, and I didn’t have to think about my health every round I played with them. The other healer was a fistweaver who literally didn’t even use life cocoon once in the whole match. Same rating, they went 3-3. I think if I play RSS, I’m going in with meta specs (and nothing else) because it is clearly powerful, at least for healers.
I have seen rets at 2.4-2.5 that don’t give their team bop, freedoms, or even a single heal. I had one ret complain about my damage while I sat in roots. I have had rets watch me die in the opener without giving me bop to warrior/feral. I have seen TONS of rets hoj the kill target with no CC on the healer and with dispel of CD. Of course it gets instantly dispelled. It’s like, how do you get to 2.4 hoj’ing the kill target if you know it’s going to get dispelled???
Seen tons of BM hunters that ONLY use scatter on the healer and don’t even try to go for trap. Never using masters call on anyone but themselves. Never using tranq. Never kicking. ONLY using stuns on the kill target. BM hunters trying to kill healers which are impossible for me to stay on sometimes. I could keep going.
Rets are still broken beyond belief. If you want todo well in RSS, just play the best specs.
Yea, it’s pretty consistent no matter how far I go back. Well, was worse with rets pre-nerf. I had a lot more double ret matches then, though I wasn’t playing nearly as much.
why though
it’s 1 spec. triage says throw it out the airlock if it makes the game better for everybody else. if this game company were worth beans this patch’s 2nd day would have come out with “ret is 50% worse at everything until we figure out how to build it back up. our bad”
Because I have been on the receiving end of that a few times. Arms needed a nerf at the start of Cata, but got completely gutted. Spec was trash for the entire expansion. Same thing happened to hunter’s going from MoP to WoD. They destroyed MM, BM initially lost trap, and SV was useless for half the expansion.
I hate where ret is now, but I don’t want to see the spec as being useless. It’s just annoying that after all these nerfs its still the best dps spec.
End result was the same. Removing trap from BM made it useless. It made no sense. Making Chimera cleave with two shots made setting up as both thug and php harder. It instantly killed MM damage and pressure. SV was useless in melee. It was such a haphazardly built spec. Every melee at the time had some type of melee mitigation. SV had nothing and just flopped.
Ret was ‘redesigned’ and it was clear to everyone it was going to be broken before it made it to the live servers. =/
guess your mileage is varying here. killing the spec that haunts every single match to improve the qol of the other 30 is the right move whether or not one holds some naive hope that blizzard will come back after the sharp nerf and fix everything properly. if any spec is in 100% of games, the play experience would improve by slashing it down to be in 0% of them.
Good to bare-in-mind that every match will have a shaman since I’m on my shaman.
Eh, I’m just in favor of a balanced game. When rets are viable, it also makes specs that pair well with them better and it creates opportunities for specs that are strong against them. They could have made more significant nerfs without gutting the spec. Had they continued to make changes at the pace they did in the first month, these could have been resolved. =/
