[Retail] PVP is at a breaking point already

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WoW Community Council
#1 - Dec. 8, 2023, 2:55 a.m.
Blizzard Post

We are barely 4 weeks through this season are already experiencing the same issues (and worse) that were present in season 2. I will do my best to be concise on the most pressing issues.

Wild class imbalance - Despite there being tunings over the first few weeks there are still MAJOR outliers that are yet to be addressed. At this stage, what spec you are playing matters more than your skill which is extremely worrying.

At a baseline, damage seems really high. People (myself included) are dying through cooldowns and sometimes even while getting spam healed. There could be a benefit here to simply raising health pools again because it seems like a tall order to find all of the specs (and tier sets) that are contributing to this.

Following the CC change from last season, there are still too many micro cc’s in the game that make playing arena not a fun experience. Often healers are complaining that they cant play the game. Instead of undergoing another massive CC change, a fix potentially could be to increase the cooldown on any CC abilities like roots/stuns/knocks that have a 30 second CD.

These things combined are actually just creating an uproar within the community which deters players from queueing up which brings me to my next point.

Solo shuffle que times(DPS) - 40 minutes seems to be the average wait time no matter what rating you are which for a game that offers rated PVP content seems outrageous. For the most popular game mode to be the least accessible feels terrible. I understand changes were made to prevent lower rated healers being put into lobbies with higher rated players and I agree with that but the issue is that healers are just not playing because of how much CC is still preventing them from being able to play the game and heal.

Shuffle point system (healer) - MMR has too much weight on the change of personal rating. Often times you can go 4-2 and win 0 because of the MMR differential. Not every lobby will be favorable and even if you play well you won’t get rewarded which seems flawed.

MMR Cap / Ceiling - With the current system, there seems to be no actual reason to play until later in the season. Being unable to push higher ratings and get rewards at the pace of our choosing feels bad. A solution could be to have the cap start way higher lets say around 2700 ish with a gradual increase towards the later third of the season for gamers who want to secure their rank 1 titles.

Side note - it may just be an oversight but you can’t currently queue a skirmish with a cross faction buddy, seems strange to be able to do rated cross faction but not skirmishes.

That’s all for now, appreciate your time. Looking forward to some more class tunings this coming week.

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Community Manager
#2 - Dec. 11, 2023, 11:29 p.m.
Blizzard Post

At the beginning of Dragonflight Season 3, we reduced the maximum rating gap healers could have going into a Solo Shuffle match, across all ratings, based on feedback we received. We’ve seen that this resulted in long queue times at higher ratings.

To help address this, about a week ago, we increased the rating gap moderately, but only at higher ratings, to best preserve matchmaking within the entirety of the ladder.

We’ve been watching the results of changes like that, and we’ll continue to watch all of these issues very carefully so that we can make surgical changes wherever necessary.

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Community Manager
#4 - Dec. 16, 2023, 1:05 a.m.
Blizzard Post

We’re implementing rating inflation.

There are significant PvP tuning adjustments coming with weekly maintenance.