it’s getting boring to watch. pvp devs got their work cut out for them this expansion. just nerf their burst and cc duration (especially poly, no cc should ever last for 7 seconds) so other specs can replace them
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it was boring to watch all through SL, its always been boring to watch, but mage / rogue /priest always finds a way.
but if you want to play a class that always finds its way to the top, play a mage/rogue.
cant say that priest will always be the healer for that comp, but, its a good guess.
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Wrath and cata rmp mirrors were / still are fun to watch imo.
I think moves like premonition and emerald communion are the counter to RMP. Locking down opponents is how they win so when moves disrupt that it makes harder to do so.
Maybe, but not because of the irrelevant pro meta. It is of zero consequence what happens to the outlyingest of outliers who are watched by 10k people or whatever.
If the pro meta is two teams of 3 demon hunters running at one another every single game, but the class is otherwise fine in the other 99.999% of the game, then the class is holistically fine and the pros (and their viewers) can deal with it.
I think the reason why Blizzard funds the AWC prize pool and the AWC production is because it’s supposed to be an advertisement for WoW that gets people excited about the game.
If most of the teams in AWC are RMP, RMD, or RPP (i.e. very limited comps covering few classes, and same old same old), that’s not a good advertisement for their new expansion. People won’t be excited about playing WoW, especially when the new class is nowhere to be found on winning teams.
In my opinion, it’s better to have a new class slightly overpowered than underpowered. If the new class is weaker than previous classes, PvPers will drop it after a hot minute and return to their old classes that win more frequently.
This situation recently happened in Hearthstone when they introduced the DK class in the new expansion. DKs were underpowered, so players were disappointed and they returned to the previous classes or they stopped playing the game. The excitement around DKs quickly died when people discovered this new class wasn’t competitive.
I think assa rogues and disc priests are also doing very well in the sub-r1 brackets, so they’re probably not fine.
The problem is that unless the other classes are overwhelmingly good RPX or RMX will always be the go to comp. When its CC/tools in some way always lead to a kill and the only requirement is that one of the classes does relevant damage thats a problem, no other comp or class is like that.
Other classes also can never be too good since 1. They dont have the same CC/tools as a rouge, mage or priest. 2. If any other class is overwhelmingly good it will get nerfed since ladder balance is so far off from TR and people just tank damage on ladder since most dont know how to kite or peel.
Notice how everyone complained about DK and Feral on ladder, feral had the same representation as rogue and then DK had less represenation than rogue even last week pre-nerfs. Now you literally have every comp in top 8 for NA as a rogue team and all but 1 or 2 teams in EU have a rogue.
Certainly this is the practical, hypothetical reason behind any esport, but in the case of WoW it serves no purpose. Arena is a god awful viewing experience even if you know the game, and utterly worthless if you know nothing or know little. The only people who watch pro arena are diehard fanatics.
Other games have moments of intuitive hype, but WoW has zero. There is not and will never be a WoW equivalent of that one Street Fighter clip where the guy comes back from nothing with a perfect block sequence, or the League of Legends team fight turnaround where Doublelift absolutely pops off. And it’s not just because those clips have better crowd and/or caster hype, but because even to a lay person there is some ability to intuitively understand what’s going on. Maybe you don’t know the nuances but you can immediately draw a line between action and hype and join in.
Without that you will never gain many new or newbie viewers, which renders its advertising potential as virtually zero. I’m not saying that if it were non-zero it would justify balancing around it, but we don’t even have to go there because it does no advertising and the only practical thing it offers is another layer to the PvP ecosystem for the minority of PvP players that care about it.
it’s an ironic problem for a game that does as much for input accessibility as wow
3 Likes
Honestly I don’t really see it as a problem. Not every game has to be a spectator esport.
WoW absolutely dominates in its niche of death match combat with incredible depth and complexity. The gameplay experience is unique and even after all these years can draw people back to it by repackaging its gameplay in a more modern format like SoloQ. It’s not like there’s a video game this doesn’t apply to, but especially for WoW it should just focus on its strengths as a playing experience and not worry about the spectator experience.
What they need to improve drastically is the experience of going from being a new or returning player to being up to speed. It is such an enormous impediment to the modern game’s growth how much it is the absolute antithesis of plug-and-play.
They’ve made some headway, but the new, modular UI and it being an option in the menu to make mouseover your default casting functionality came a solid decade too late. They need to do something with the alert add-ons like weakauras and bigwigs like yesterday, with the bottom line being that if the game is balanced around it it needs to be included by default in a way that is user-friendly.
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WoW esports are so slow. Like there’s too long of a wait between matches. The solo shuffle format would almost be better because the audience gets to watch more than one game. Watching AWC is painfully slow. It’s better to watch it afterwards so you can skip through everything
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that’s true, but it begs the question of why fund the awc at all to take as given that wow is an unsalvageable spectator sport
Mage/Rogue/Ele/Spriest are so strong because they’re over loaded with CC, high burst, short term self sustain, and defensives. It’s funny because without Rogue all the casters would be unplayable.
Lock and Boomkin aren’t good at high level play because their burst is trash. Dev Evoker is straight cheese burst and overall a bad designed spec. It’s like the DH of caster.
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Pro players struggling to keep ele shamans alive at 10% dampening. Cute. Try keeping one up at 40% like in solo shuffle
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EU has no problem doing it, only NA struggles with that.
Honestly my bet is inertia and pigheadedness. Companies aren’t AIs that make perfect financial decisions at every turn. They generally want to make as much money as possible, but there’s also a metric ton of whim and ego warping the fabric of spacetime at any big company. Video game companies might even be the biggest offenders of this give their relative newness.
Blizzard very clearly wanted to make its mark on the eSports scene. They never exactly achieved that, but as the esport of the flagship product I imagine someone has a soft spot for pro arena and doesn’t want to let it go.
That would be my guess, at least.
who even cares about AWC. 3s is same thing
Its always gonna be the same comps/same metas forever and till game ends with little to no variation. Blizzard just has a dart board to decide whats meta for the current season. Don’t overthink it. Thats just how CC/Class synergy works.
You would have to broadly change how CC works to introduce new comps/metas or just allow any spec to work with any spec and not be extremely disadvantaged vs a meta comp.
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Almost makes me wonder if they’re going to try to shift to some spec based shuffle tournament. 
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i wish they’d find a way to tune shuffle so that it incentivizes the kind of team play that team 3s has and shuffle mostly lacks
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Yeah, making the most of your grabbag comps strengths rather than just frantically trying to brute force the most susceptible to your damage profile.
I had kind of hoped shuffle would make people a little more conscious of playing relative to each other but it’s that’s kind of tricky so everybody just defaults to figuring out how to best spam damage