Participation is down…
Players are quitting…
The Arena realm only exists for pro players…
Why?
IMO people don’t have WOW friends. It’s as simple as that. Nobody has the time to que for hours to learn with a team and grind. Just like all other areas of the game, group content and community “building” is dead. OG players grew up and we simply don’t have time to que and grind and match the same schedule as our buddies in game.
How to fix it??? No idea really. But on thing needs to change.
Solo shuffle needs to be 1 round and 1 round only. People need to be able to practice without the toxicity and WAIT TIMES that are absolutely plaguing arena now.
Gladiator titles/mounts should be allowed in S/S.
WOW arenas barrier of entry is very low. Farming gear is easy, getting into BGs to learn basics is easy.
But the QUE TIMES ARE ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS.
Take away the MMR balancing. Who the heck has 45min to wait for a 6 round slugfest where the obvious new player gets trained 6 rounds straight? Thats not fun…
Again, make S/S 1 round only and watch the player base grow overnight… I’m telling you… It will grown…
1 round… Do it blizzard …
And if anyone says “what if your group is bad matchup?” Welcome to arena… Lose and go again…
They need to incentivize healing, add arena seasonal reward tracks, add percentage based achievements back in, add more cosmetics throughout the bracket, make there a benefit to play a specific toon for a certain portion of the season and add a alternative mount to blitz/shuffle.
I always think I’m a dopamine fiend and then I see how much people freak out over the game being in worse states than it normally (even almost always) is. I’ve played a ridiculous amount this season, not only healing but also on a pretty crappy healer, and I’m still enjoying it because I recognize that it’s a video game and thus don’t care that much if I have a great queue session or a terrible one
I understand that many people want carrots on a stick to chase, but maybe step back and think about taking a break if the game is causing you distress, whether that be frustration or depression
holy paladin is and you could argue that disc and arguably mw are
imo the other healers should either be brought in line with disc and mw or with hpriest/rsham/pres (ideally hpriest/rsham/pres with a slight nerf to meta speed) but realistically that won’t happen. blizz seems to want og mw2 gameplay where everything is broken at the same time
people will complain that they want those rewards but they don’t want to play healer
if they do play healer, they will likely not enjoy it or be good at it
if they are not good at it, they will get berated, then quit even faster
whoever wants to heal already does. they don’t need more incentives.
the issue is not that there are too few healers. it’s that there are too many dps with no where else to go