I would like to discuss the primary reasons why people do not PVP in wow, covering all forms of PVP whether they are BGs, Arena, or world PVP and both rated and casual PVP content. To start, there are three primary reasons why people do not enjoy PVP in wow, listing them from least to most important:
- Wow base UI is bad and makes PVP difficult to understand.
- The new player experience for PVP is very unfair to new players.
- Healers simultaneously are unenjoyable to play for most players and make games less enjoyable by prolonging games.
Lets cover each of these main points in detail.
Wow UI Problems
I hear people often say that wow PVP is complicated and difficult for new players to understand, but it really isn’t. Once you understand your basic DPS rotation, it is just a matter of learning what your other buttons do before you have a basic level of understanding on how to play your class. Don’t get me wrong, you well not perform will with this level of knowledge in ranked, but you can certainly play the game as long as you know what your buttons do. What makes wow PVP difficult to understand is that wows base UI does not give you nearly enough information in PVP, where addons are all but mandatory to play even casual games. If you were a new player, the game tells you nothing about things like diminishing returns or CC schools. And there is barely any indication for half of the major abilities and stuns.
Most players will not be able to see a dazed symbol above the players ahead to indicate they are being stunned. Wow PVP UI should be overhauled; simplify CC and other key abilities whenever possible; replace cheap shot with a generic “stun” and psychic scream with generic “fear” as examples, make these effects much more salient so you can look at a player and immediately understand what effects they are under. This will also have the second benefit of making wow PVP content much easier for viewers to understand.
The New Player Experience
Suppose a new player decides to PVP while leveling. They queue into a BG at level 23, only to get destroyed by someone smurfing at max level in the best gear, and that new player now has 0 interest in ever trying again. Alternatively, they play against a class like hunter that is broken in low level battlegrounds and get two shot over and over again. The biggest culprit for the lack of PVP engagement is how bad the new player experience is. There is no reason why max level players should be able to queue in levelings and there is no reason why some attempts aren’t made to balance low level battlegrounds. Blizzard obviously doesn’t need to spend as much time balancing lower level PVP compared to max level, but they should ensure there is nothing utterly broken in those brackets. Max level casual PVP is also in a bad state, with premade lobbies stomping people who are either gearing or in PVE gear, discouraging people from trying PVP again. To address this issue, Blizzard should make unrated BGB the baseline casual experience for all players, both max and low level brackets. This ensures premades cannot grief new players, while leveing regular random battlegrounds as an option for groups. Addressing these issues will encourage newer players to get into PVP.
Healers in PVP
I consider this to be the single largest problem for Wow PVP. We can talk about UI issues or casual BG balance, but what about the PVP content itself? The fundamental issue with wow PVP is that healers make the game antithetical to traditional PVP experiences while also being miserable to play for most players. Consider this, in most PVP games, people enjoy racking up a lot of kills; games like COD, LOL, etc., you are expected to get many kills throughout the entire game. In most wow arenas, you get a single meaningful kill and in wow BGB, you are lucky to get double digit kills in a 10+ minute game. You often spends minutes at a time trying to kill someone while their HP bar doesn’t or barely moves, waiting for dampening to take enough of an effect before someone finally folds. Or in BGB, you often choose just to run towards a different objective in hopes that there isn’t a healer stalling. This type of gameplay is boring for most people who enjoy PVP across different games; no one wants to spend 3+ minutes before they land a kill. There is an equivalent issue in BGB where teamfights tend to either stagnate, or there is a clear healer diff and one team never dies; neither of which are enjoyable experiences. Bad players will have little chance of killing a bad healer because they do not know how to chain CC a healer, making the experience unenjoyable for casual/bad players, while good players know how to coordinate a go, making the experience miserable for healers.
On the other side, playing healer is not considered enjoyable to most players for several reasons, such as being the primary target of CC, making it frustrating to watch your teammates die and then get blamed because they wouldn’t bother kicking the cyclone. Or the fact that healers in solo shuffles often go 3-3 because DPS have more carry power, causing their rating to be stuck for longer periods of times. This has led to healers having instant queues while DPS have to wait 15+ minutes to get a match for both solo shuffle and BGB. Bandaid fixes for this problem involved making healers stronger, which in turn means that blizzard had to buff DPS burst damage to be able to kill through a healer in a proper Go, which in turn makes it so non burst cycles do next to no damage while burst can global someone, making for an unenjoyable experience. Balancing around healers and 3v3 has made other casual PVP content worse. The solution to these problems is to move away from healers in PVP content; deprioritize them in content going forward.
For solo shuffle, prioritize a 2v2 solo shuffle mode with DPS only and begin balancing around this mode. Up base kit damage, lower burst damage for all DPS as they no longer need to play around healers. This will give DPS players a faster alternative to 3v3 solo shuffle with quick kills rather than long drawn out fights. For BGB, change which roles are needed. Make it so a BGB round can start with any of the following symmetrical role compositions: 6-8 DPS, 0-2 Healers, 0-1 tank. This will both speed up queues and make BGB less healer dependent and in turn make classes feel strong; because they will be able to earn kills more easily, this will increase the kill count in BGB modes, making the mode feel closer to a traditional PVP experience.
