This is gonna sound rough and I know it is, but new players are going to just have to accept that to PvP, they’re going to have to find someone more experienced, and just go a couple rounds. I know we live in a day and an age right now where people don’t wanna be taught, and they also don’t wanna do the teaching, but if someone likes PvP enough, they should try to find a consistent partner to learn and grow with. Yes, the learning curve is massive, and there’s no question about that. But the easiest way to counter that learning curve is by playing with someone who will also help.
This is a major issue though and is entirely true. There’s no balance, and no forethought was given to how these talent trees were going to effect PvP. We have egregious combinations where people are CC’d by 4 different types of CC coming from one person, some of them the same CC but not DR’ing (looking at hunters with tar trap root + iron trap). We have all these situations where PvP just feels awful, which is wild considering the gearing process this time around is actually a good one.
i used to pvp casually but… it just sucks.
the one shot outta left feild. the feeling of i cant do anything. the reminder that i am bad at the game and should feel bad from my " team mates "
I can list my reasons why I barely play PvP. They’re not suggestions for Blizzard, but just my anecdotal experience.
Casual rewards. I thought that having WoD gear back in DF would finally restore my love for casual PvP, but the reality is that it’s just not very fun to do for the sake of it anymore. For example, Overwatch does battle pass stuff, you get rewards pretty consistently. But in WoW you just kind of play an evening, can lose everything, and get absolutely nothing out of it. Even item level wise, you need to do rated to even be able to upgrade your casual gear to some LFR levels.
At first, it was fun playing many alts, but it started to become hard to keep up gearing all of them as honor gear started to become outranked pretty hard late in the season. So now I am forcing myself to grind out one character to help gearing alts with conquest boxes.
Solo Shuffle, while a great addition, and one of the reasons I bought DF, is very hostile to get into. Partially because MMR calculation is super wonky for new players, and you get placed into really high lobbies that you have no business being in just because you lucked into a win in your first round. Then you get flamed for being the weakest link. Terrible newcomer experience all around. Needs some fixing.
State random BG queue has also been really wonky recently. Countless sync premades effectively made 40 mans unplayable. You hate your life if you want to try get a daily win in an epic BG. It used to be that you faced one of these premades every now and then, but now it seems the pool of players is much smaller, and you face them all the time if you’re not in them.
Lower BGs are also plagued by XP freeze exploit twinks. If you want to spend some time doodling on your low-level alts, if it so happens that an XP freezer wants to queue at the same time in your bracket, you will most likely always face them until they log off, because of a smaller pool of players at lower levels. Might as well not waste your time, and log off pre-emptively yourself.
I hate that as of now, harassing chat is squelched. I would have more faith in this if I could trust in the system to understand the true from the false in harassment.
Psychology is a big part of WPvP. The V in PvP is vendetta. In Classic, a certain FS mage tracked me in IC and revenge-ganked me the day after I revenge-ganked him and 9 others for a certain belf ret who ganked me below 50% HP twice. This is real WPvP and I made sure to tell him that while Hunters are the worst PvP class in Wrath, I can track him and gank him back(even in real time if I want to). I now have the best gear Honor can buy(which won’t outgear the whales), but as class is the most important weight, Hunter is below all. *It means I can expect to keep losing to all melee and all ranged, unless I outgear them and outskill them(if they’re like me, it’s an auto-L).
Thing is, you can still trash-talk if you’re smart about it in Classic, but in Retail it doesn’t matter. It’s sad because gearing is the best it’s been since the gates of Sescheron, but you can’t PvP without(shhhhoooocking revelation) players.