First of all, i rarely read or post on the general forums, i know this place is infested with trolls and think they know it alls.
But its pretty much the only way i can express myself to a broad audience, voice my concerns to Blizzard and get some input from fellow players, so if you agree or not agree and have valid points please dont hesitate to respond.
I play this game since the first month the game is out, have seen alot of content and balacing the past few years through patches, not always as positive as the other but mainly good overall content wise, although the balancing could be alot better ( pointing towards content balancing, class balancing is difficult to be objective on ).
I would not call myself a hardcore raider or pvper, to keep the story short pre BC i was a raider and cleared naxx, after BC came out i did alot of arena, and now i do mainly heroics and pug the 10 mans + early 25 mans.
Along with every phase what i always did was join the battlegrounds, probably the best fun i (used) to have in this game, the everlasting battle between alliance and horde.
You will notice i will generalize alot, but it doesnt make it less true cause there will ALWAYS be exceptions to the rule, but that doesnt rule out the hard truth.
An hour ago i was playing warsong gulch, being the daily i figured ill do that before doing some more rounds of AB since i need those tokens. The game starts and i ride up to the alliance base to find myself alone, 8 other members of my team are walking circles around our graveyard with a mage sitting somewhere in the midfield getting killed. So i ask for help cause i couldnt do this alone...but no response. Getting frustrated i ask the question why they join BGs if they dont want to pvp or participate with the answer being "honor you nub".In reply i ask why they would need honor to buy epics(i assume thats where they spend their honor) if in return they would just sit with those welfare(yup i said it) epics in BGs not participating or probably not even bother to join a BG, and of course they had no answer to that. And thats the problem almost going back since the release of BC.
I do remember how pre BC the only way to gear up was hardcore raiding, i was one of them, and my guild was one those that would make groups after raids to pvp some, not to stomp bad geared noobs(cause thats what many raiders sadly enjoyed) but they simply also enjoyed to pvp, yet it was very rare to fight an equal geared group.So i made a shaman alt on a different server, joined a pvp guild and did battlegrounds.I went up to rank 10 i believe( the full blue set) and thats as far i could go with still maintaining a life since Rank14 was never an option, still even know i might not or never hit the following rank, i kept pvping with my friends, getting rolled by Tier3 and Rank14 groups, but we did win many games against them cause we never gave up, cause we were true pvpers and enjoyed it.
That to explain Blizzards view that there should be a more friendly way of gearing up next to raiding, this became the new honor system we have today, along with a third and fourth option being badge gear and craftables.
Fith option was Arena, which is a good idea on paper, yet very flawed. I could not get myself to enjoy it, but that doesnt mean i cant have others enjoy it.It was too much about class setup, class spec and how good you could mana drain the other group. Along also came resillience which also is seriously flawed in my opinion, its true that T3 mages pre BC could two shot or even one shot players of the same level depending on their gear, but understand that the gear gap from greens to Tier 3 was so huge, and that stamina levels barely increased along with the gear, rank 14 gear being the exception.
So the reasoning was that resillience will prevent those crits and make them smaller when occured, yet this broke many many specs which did little damage when not critting , think about dagger spec rogues or frost mages or ele shamans.
But the fix was already in place, with BC stamina was increased when gaining lvl70 by a huge margin , also the blue pvp gear and specificly arena gear added a ton of hp along with it, resillience really wasnt needed.How to fix it? make resillience take you less damage from all non npc damage by -15% in full S3 gear that with the increased hp will give you more then a good chance against a raider with more overall damage output. This to mention the resillience issue quickly.
I have to give Blizz a bit of credit here with the arena rating req on S3 items, but this had to be there from the very start on ALL items and weapons should have had the highest req, not the shoulders.
The actual issue today is, you can get all this gear, and make little to no effort for it, basicly getting rewarded for losing.
Nowhere in PVE will you get rewarded for not succeeding, not even van cleef will drop your sword if you wipe to him, even if you put effort into it and not down him , he still wont drop it , not even after wiping 20 times.
This is strong contrast to Battlegrounds and arena, i can go afk and lose everything i want, get full S1 gear from honor and get quite a few of S2/S3 pieces. Now i do not mind people getting loot or seeing content but again i have to compare it to PVE where a guild that only has enough people to do kara and clears it weekly without trouble, has the hardest time to down anything in Zul'Aman , Im sure you want to use your reply button right now and want to say how they are noobs and how you clear it without trouble, but ill ask you in return what sort of expierience do you have in 25 mans , what sort of gear do you have? if you only have kara epics , never saw any 25 man content and clear ZA every few days then i congratulate you, cause i dont know a single guild who can.
There is a huge imbalance in pve and pvp, in pve its made too hard to progress for players , i dont ask you to dumb it down like the molten core days, but give players a chance to get into raiding , to learn raiding and learning how to raid is not wiping to the first boss over and over, its by clearing an entry lvl instance to slowly gear up and once geared up go to the next instance and improve yourself again, not hit a brick wall.
In pvp its the other way around, it went from rank 14 system where you had to play 24/7 to just joining a BG and collect epics.This shows itself in battlegrounds, AFKing isnt that big of an issue and by that i mean right out afk botting like it was done in AV, but the alt tabbing out of wow when so called protecting a flag, sitting afk at a GY , walking circles , running away from the opposing faction , not focussing on objectives, rather riding mount in group then fight(av anyone?).
Ive seen it all, and too much, im tired of wanting to pvp and be own my own fighting for the win.
And Im not alone at it, sometimes i do get into games where everyone is communicating, working together, heal eachother, and its such a blast to play and so fun and every time everyone else tells me they are reliefed that they found fellow pvpers.I have no problem at all with losing when the other team is better, it means i have to perform better, but its very frustrating to lose when no one even tried, and they dont feel ashamed at all.
The current patch only made this worse in the sense that tokens can be turned in for honor, while its a welcome change to make some more honor, by winning i roughly make double to tripple the honor but same goes for losing , the ones that didnt put any effort into it also get double the honor for the same "work".
How can we fix this? very simple and there would be a huge outcry but its not rewarding any honor or tokens for losing games. Blizzard cant tell anyone to put some effort into winning but they can stop reward not doing anything for winning, this change should have came with this patch to start with, stop rewarding losing and reward winning with tripple the honor, this means even losing 2 times in a row will be made up by winning once, the idiots will stop joining battlegrounds , and the true pvpers can be proud of what they earned and not being looked down to by raiders.
Also the que timer "fix" for premades is again punishing for pvpers who through all this mess found themself in pvp guilds(you know guilds we used to have those alot pre BC when community was rewarded) where they could group with fellow pvpers and go out to win games, cause pugging got too frustrated.
Im sure for those who do pug its not pleasant to see a premade when entering a battleground, im one of them, but if blizzard cared they would have done this years ago when Tier 3 and rank 14 groups stomped all over pugs in greens who wanted some pvp blues.
I can only agree on the system they implemented a few patches back where premades usually face premades , it only makes sense , but what is the logic behind letting the "join group" option enabled , then having a premade wait 30 mins while 35 games are going on , with in the end only facing a pug anyway , its again catering to those who do not want to put any effort in it.
i beat alot of premades, its not like they are uber skilled somehow , its usually a pug grouped from same server often not even on vent, just wanting to play together to have a better chance at winning, but very far from beatable.
I hope we can see substantial changes to the pvp and arena system in the upcomming 2.4.2 patch, cause if not, the expansion pack wont bring it neither. This post became alot longer then it should have, but im interested in what you think about this.