I've primarily PvP'd since WotLK. Arena is where I love to spend my time. Raiding and M+ are ok... I need to do them to arena. I consider myself well rounded, but my love in WoW is arena.
The moment they allow us to soloqueue into rated 2s or 3s is the moment I'll touch arena.
I came looking for numbers and data and just found a blog post. Oh well.
No. I stopped pvp'ing after WOTLK was over. Ever since healing became so powerful in pvp I have hated it. Its not fun to me if you can negate the last 10 seconds of damage with 1 heal. I did a lot of arena in TBC because there it felt that the class and role I brought mattered. Now there are probably metas which is also why I would not want to pvp again. Also people are so tanky these days, I have to pop all my cd's in order to kill a single bloke? Come on... For me PvP is dead, the small amount of pvp I do is in world pvp with warmode and even that is limited.
Personally, I love open world pvp. I would like to enjoy random battlegrounds, but it's hard since there's no matchmaking of any kind there and too many people just don't know how to play to win a match. I don't usually do rated or premades because I like playing solo most of the time, or will group for spontaneous world pvp.If I had my way, I'd change how battlegrounds give rewards so that you're more incentivized to stay for an entire match and do role balancing so the matches are more even (equal healer/tank/dps on both sides).I'd remove honor from kills in battlegrounds and instead award it all at the end based on objectives completed, time, and victory.Ideally it shouldn't take too much longer to gear up in pvp as it does in pve. I used to buy a lot of pvp gear and feel excited and rewarded when I saved up enough for a new piece, but the battle for azeroth casual pvp gearing system was awful. I don't expect the best gear, but when i get better and more consistent rewards from doing 15 minutes of world quests than I can get in 2 hours of random pvp, something is broken.
Based on public blizzard API data an extremely small portion of the WoW community play arena. I like to play arena and glad it is there but they could just say screw it and remove it entirely from the game and pretty much only the streamers and influencers would complain, wouldn't effect sub numbers at all.Then there are RBGs. I'm more likely to see someone with a full OG naxx set and weapons then someone with a good RBG achievement.
For me PvP is the most iconic thing that WoW has. Any other game that i have played and it does not have PvP and all races are friendly with each other is completely dull. I personally still remember the endless ganking fests that i had during my early times in WoW in STV, in Winterspring and elsewhere in Azeroth.PvP needs fixing but it is by far the most complex thing to do imo. Because it requires so many things to work perfectly beforehand in order to have satisfactory experience in PvP. You need to have good classes and good systems that gravitate around those classes. It is essential to decide how your game will be balanced around. Will it be balanced around 1v1? or rock paper scissors? or will it be in 3v3 scenarios? or will it be around large epic battles? I think the correct way to go is around 1v1 cases and built on that foundations. Easier said than done, i know. When resilience and arenas were implemented in TBC i really disliked them both. I disliked them because coming from Vanilla wow where i ranked very high and having all that sweet pvp gear and the +20 stamina along with all the epix from PVE, perks from being in a very good guild, i could decimate everyone. But as years passed i realized that a stat that greatly fits the flavor of PvP is resilience and a place of true skilled playground can only happen in small numbers that arena is. Battlegrounds are great, i love playing Ab or wsg even now after so many years even they are nowhere near their former glories, despite the fact that most people don't know how ot play them, i find great fun and tbh now with classic i love the fact that there are tournaments around ab and wsg. Another thing that i believe led to the deterioration of the PvP scene, is the excessive use of macros. Back then you could play very well without many macros in Arena Scenarios, but now with how fast paced the game is you cannot play without macros, i will speak again from my personal view point coming in bfa after long hiatus it is very tiring that you need to search for so many addons and WA to be able to stay competitve, many things that are very good NEED to be integrated into the game. I strongly believe that blizzard has to step things up on that regards to automatically write macros and improve the overall UI and not just rely on the awesome community to better their game.Gameplay wise, the game is very dynamic, it always was but i strongly believe that it can be more. For example i remember one iteration of the Hunter's explosive shot was one of the most insane skills i have ever used in any game, firstly you had to press the skill and aim it and then press it again to detonate it wherever it reached. For me this is great design period. But sadly it has been removed from the game. Faction imbalance. I see a lot of people saying that factions should be eliminated and Azeroth needs to be one happy place where everyone is friendly with each other. I have news for you pals, a game with War inside its by definition not a peaceful game like Animal Crossing. I would gladly see the breaking of all alliances as it was in WC3 were Orcs & Undead were not allies and Night Elves & Humans were not allies as well. In terms of grouped content though, yeah i could see guilds being compromised of orcs and gnomes or arena teams with undeads and dwarves and so forth. But the open World NEEDS to be brutal in a PVP server! I still remember not believing in my eyes when my night elf druid friend was peacefully herbing or leveling and a low lvl hordie was passing by and me screaming at him to jump and kill him. When he told me that SiIvermoon EU is a PvE server and i cannot do that, i was seriously disgusted. Seriously i could write so much more on WoWs PvP that i LOVE and cherish but i am already offtopic so i will close by saying only the following, Please Blizzard take good care of the PvP! It only makes the game overall better and noone should forget that there is no other game out there that has anything close to good action rpg combat.
As one of those people who only care about pvp in wow and have 0 interest in raids or anything else, i feel like BFA is made for PvErs only, even Arenas feel made exclusively for them. As a casual player with 468 ilvl, going into an arena i can tell immediately if we are going to win or not just by looking at the HP of the enemies: if i see an unbuffed DH with 536k hp, i know i need a miracle to win. Corruptions are what killed my hopes of reaching gladiator this season: it's not even the fact that people can cast greater heal in 1,5 seconds or Gpy, it's that they are absolutely deincentivizing experimentation. I mean that if you bought the wrong corruptions from mother, good luck getting invited to a group and, because of them being pricy, you have no second chance unless you farm PvE like a madman. Everyone i have asked feels sad that skill is secondary to winning or losing arenas, why is Blizzard so reluctant to just make skill win?Alas, BFA has been by far the worst expansion for PvP imo. No other expansion has ever given me the impression that i simply can't win because gear is breaking the game, literally. Some stories to more articulate my point: As a 468 ilvl i died once to a destruction warlock who just threw his pets and trinkets on me. He never cast anything but conflag on me: i lined of sight every chaos and immolate and fear. This is a broken game.
same
Just came here to say that if you want to play PvP competitively, you want 0 PvP items equipped: go look at the gear from the top rated arena players, the only PvP items they still have are the ones they havent been able to get an upgrade for through PvE.
I haven't done arenas dedicatedly since WotLK. I loved the pace of matches back then, where I could kill someone in 5 seconds if I played my cards right, and get killed in 3 if I made a dumb mistake haha, but it was what it was, and I enjoyed it a lot. There was a lot of counterplay, hard counters for your class, and the tourneys where big and awesome to watch, it was amazing watching the pros do insane stuff! Wrath's fast pace stuck with me for the rest of the game and made me lose interest in rated PvP from Cata onwards when it changed, where I became full casual and just queued for a BG now and then because I was bored.
The game would greatly benefit from separation of pvp and pve. Either you can get the same gear playing solely one of them, or if it's not the same gear, best pvp gear comes from pvp and best pve gear comes from pve. The 2 modes require a different mindset and rarely a person enjoys both equally. Also, nuke RBGs from the orbit. I'm still sad some of the best color tints of Legion artifacts are basically unobtainable because they're locked behind 10 RBG wins. This is impossibility on top of impossibility. Blizz only created it to force people into dead content called RBGs and it didn't even work. It's an impossibility to find a group, especially if you're not a meta spec or don't have any ratings. If you find one, it's a rag tag bunch of pugs, you sit in the queue for ages, you get matched against that 1 existing team that's 2,2k+ rating and just sits there to farm noobs. You lose, pug disbands, back to square 1. If it was 10 RBGs played, you'd maybe slog through the torture of getting smeared on the ground every match and getting flamed by pug team mates. But 10 wins? There are no RBG guilds. Contrary to raiding guilds you can easily find one for either mythic or heroic raiding depending on your skill level and commitment. It's dead content nobody wants to touch with a barge pole. The tint locked behind heroic KJ is now soloable, or if you don't play a solo friendly class, doable in a group of 2-3 people. The usual unfairness of pve achievements getting trivial over time meanwhile the pvp ones only get harder and harder. I wish the tint was changed to be 10 normal BG wins. It would still be annoying because afaik you have to do it on the character that has the original artifact, i.e. did mage tower in Legion. But at least it wouldn't be impossible.