Why PvP/Arena is dying

PVP Arenas
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PvP participation is plummeting because of the slow pace of the game. The amount of HP that players have make it that you can’t get punished for making mistakes to the same degree as before. If you face a terrible healer, it just means he will die in 2 minutes, instead of 5 minutes. This is soul-wrenching for anyone that plays arena.

This is a plead to the devs to do ONE or TWO of these things. (maybe a 5% change in each area)

  • increase damage flat 10% on all classes
  • reduce HP pools by 10-20%
  • reduce healing output of all healers by 10-20%

Why these changes? Right now pressing spells simply doesn’t feel good. For every class their main damaging spell (fireball, mutilate, shred, frostbolt, mortal strike etc) just don’t feel like they are doing anything. I can use a spell on a target and see their HP get reduced by 2%. Last patch I used a Shred on a resto shaman, and even with bleeds ticking, just proccing his earth shield caused him to heal more than my shred did damage. This is extremely unrewarding, and even though shamans did get nerfed. It took MONTHS, something that should have been hotfixed in a week or two MAX.

Wow is a game that is limited by the global cooldown, so this extremely slow gameplay just adds injury to the already limited pace of the game.

I understand that they are catering to the noobs, but that’s not a way to do it. I remember when if a healer got kicked 2-3 times in a row and did not play good, he would get punished for it. Now we have had two seasons where some healers don’t even need to cast… at all.

Sure, you got some people that gave up on Arena because they are too bad, to come back and play. But for everyone else it’s just mind-numbingly boring to have to play Hearthstone in WoW.

Every global cooldown feels like a turn in hearthstone. You have a lot of time to think what your next move will be, and if you make a big mistake, you can always recover from it, because hey you got 220k+ HP and the average spell does like 5-10K damage.

Now it’s all about “wearing your enemies down”. Slowly making them fall behind on HP, over many cooldown rotations, and a big bonus is if you can oom your enemy at the same time.

There was a time where if you faced someone bad, you would smash them and send them back to the rating where they belonged. This “everyone gets to play” design mentality is seriously ruining the enjoyment of Arena for everyone. And eventually those noobs that you were catering to, will have no one left to queue into when they press that “Join Battle” button.

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I don’t think the amount of stamina is the problem. If you increase damage by 10% for everyone why need HP?

The problem is defensive capabilities.

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What is then ? I would like to hear your thoughts. I’d prefer a game where damage feels strong, and healing feels strong, but HP pools are smaller. With lower HP, people would get punished for misplaying.

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It’s a big contributor. Health pools went up way more than damage did since last season.

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The damage feels bad because all the meta specs atm heal Thru the damage.

Look at what qualifies to the spring finals, what do they all have in common. Stupid amount of self healing or mobility.

Band aid fixes are short term and make things worse down the road imo. Those changes would make the game unplayable more than it already is because the meta comps would be even stronger.

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I see that you haven’t been over 2000 rating in the last 2 expansions so I think that you are not really familiar with how the game is on higher ratings. Right now you can only win by

A: CC chains
B: Ooming the healer.

Because any healer can outheal damage as long as they are not in CC, everyone is 100% HP until the moment they get CCD. And people survive CC chains on 10-20% now too easily. It simply takes 10 seconds for 2 people to kill someone from 100-0. If you reduce the HP pools, healing would still feel potent. I mean one of the 3 above suggestions WILL happen eventually, because that is the only solution to the current “dampening” meta.

I guess you were talking about RMP getting overpowered from damage buffs/HP nerfs, which is true, but the classes would just need to be readjusted within a week of the patch when we see how it affects that specific comp / those classes.

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You’re joking right? Has BFA made people ignorant lol

Claims I’ve never been over 2k in last 2 xpacs yet I’m wearing cruel gladiators tabard omegalul. What a joke you are for even saying stuff like that.

As to your points yes RMX would be stronger but so would comps like dk/DH/rdruid, imo if dmg was bumped up and traits un-nerfed and these self healing BS mechanics toned down a bit it would be solid.

3 Likes
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You got duelist in Cruel and WoD s1, every other season you’ve been rival (under 2k).

You said those changes would make the game unplayable, I understand the negative effects of a flat damage increase like that, and how it would change the dynamic of the game, but in the end you do agree with me that traits should be un-nerfed (damage increase) and self-healing nerfed (healing reduction)

So on 2/3 of the changes i suggested, you agree with me, I don’t understand why you wrote it would be “unplayable” then, as you suggested the same thing as i did, but you don’t give any specific numbers. If selfhealing got toned down, and traits un-nerfed, it would result in a 5-10% healing reduction to hybrid classes, and 5-10% dmg increase for everyone. So you are agreeing that those changes should be made, but you just phrase it differently, right ?

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Ok I’ll try to be nice but since your only XP is in BFA I suggest you stop talking about others(meaning you bought a character or just started playing).

I’m against the HP and healer output nerf you have listed. If DMG is increased and HP/Healers nerfed thats literally a massive healer nerf. The only healing nerf I want is for non-healers.

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I’m an EU player, hence the lack of history/achievements pre-BFA (new account). Also sorry for calling you out lol I think we literally misunderstanded eachother or the point you were trying to make is that everything is fine.

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I am also from EU xD

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too many specs aren’t punished for playing badly because their self sustain is through the roof

demon hunter is a huge pointer here
unholy and destro aswell
even fire mage

if dps specs couldnt just live through and entire setup without having to even trinket or even use a > 1 minute cd the game would feel so much more fluid, rewarding, and punishable

i dont think any button as strong as blur should be shorter than 2 minutes and it ABSOLUTELY should not have an auto proc talent available

the only setting that justifies cds as strong and short as temp/blur/ams is one where damage is high enough that you can easily lose outside of cds very quickly

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I made a post on EU too, both threads are getting decent amount of replies.

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This 1000 times over. Healers go oom from healing atm, it’s the DPS healing that makes everything go into dampening.

Defensive power creep is too strong

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Fists of Fury and Shimmer is why arena is dying. End of story.

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How is the game slow paced? I’ve never seen it so fast paced in the history of arena. I just think it’s time for World of Warcraft 2.

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Are you joking? You didn’t watch every game in the AWC go to 50-70% dampening the last year ?

Also I see Shadow Priests and warlocks passively doing 30-40% of the healing output of their healer

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Lolwut? You would curl up into a ball and cry in wotlk

And it’s sad that I’ve been waiting for 9 years for this game to be as fun as it were in wotlk

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19

i’m almost getting a brain hemorrhage from what i see some people write

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20

Healers are already OOMing faster than ever before, nerfing the healing output isn’t the answer here.

Increasing the sustained damage across the board with no changes on dmg cds will create other issues because some classes still hit super hard during burst windows. More has to be done to balance the dmg between sustained and burst.

Reducing HP pool is another band-aid fix and will force people to play even more defensively … may help some comps to perform better but it’s not a fix (nor an option IMO)

The changes on GCD doesn’t have much to do with the current pace as they were introduced in BfA and S1 was much faster paced than S2 (after the initial nerfs)

The AWC games you are talking about happened before Blizz nerfed all the tank trinkets and the absurd HPS from some healer specs, this was fixed fairly quickly (2-3 weeks after the first games went to 70-80% damp, if I’m not mistaken)

IMO, Blizzard must take a more holistic approach if they really want to balance the PVP and there’s no “silver bullet” in this case because of all the RNG madness they created with procs from Azerite, Trinkets, crits and other crap… one’s damage/healing output can be easily doubled when random things proc at the same time… on top of that, some classes depends on those procs to perform in PVP, so it’s complex, hard and takes time, which means … cost more money.

I don’t think they will achieve such level of balancing until really far into this xpac, which means that we will have to deal with this crap for much longer than we want.

I’m already slaying dragons instead of doing arenas and I had played only 1 arena game this week to get the chest loot (probably something I will scrap anyways) and got the cap from yolo RBGs and, tbh, having much more fun than doing Arenas…

4 Likes