Why Blizzard Will Never "Save" PvP In WoW | Xaryu Reacts 

No one who isn’t a veteran can even tell what’s happening on the screen . It’s so incredibly overwhelming . People check the streams , see the gameplay in arena , and immediately say “yeahhhh no” .

Part of the problem is that blizzard believes each class needs similar cooldowns to each other when in reality, the joy of PVP was different classes bringing different things and making those comps to prevent your weaknesses.

It struck me at the 20 minute mark that i'm a 28 year old watching 3 guys look at a graph

Solo shuffle was the worst experience I ever had. If you are the new kid on the playground the rest of the kids quickly take notice and you spend the whole time dead.

The monstrous mountain of addons (which, in a competitive sense, is 100% cheating) cause the barrier to entry and estrangement of veteran players (like me). Remove addons and you get more players. A LOT more players. Venruki has talked about this

This data shows number of games played AMONGST THE TOP 5000 PVP players. I don't think the top 5000 M+ players are doing anywhere near a million keys. This data isn't comparable...

I'm a 19 year old dude(born in 2004) that has been playing WoW since I was 4 years old, as a die hard arena player I can say that to no one out of my friend group does wow Arena Sound appealing. I've shown them VODs of my gameplay and they all instantly have no idea what's going and have a thousand questions that you can't even answer without at least spending 6 months of playing the game first/

They should try to have a simplified version of wow pvp as a separate game without gear, only cosmetics. About 10 spells per class, no addons

If you take everything I like about WoW and also everything I hate about WoW out of the game and then replace it with Fortnite mechanics, you get Plundetstorm. I've been playing for 16 years as a healer mostly and there is nothing for me in Plunderstorm.

As a raider I definitely remember a time before M+ existed when after we cleared raid for the week you either logged out levelled an alt, or you pvp’d. We were a hardcore raid guild that just kinda started channeling that into a couple high rated battleground groups & 3v3 teams, just cause we wanted to play the game & there was nothing left to do PvE wise for a week. I’m also not saying it’s a good thing to rely on people having nothing else to do but PvP of course, but I remember most of the guild shifted to M+ pretty quickly & never really looked back.

Best time i ever had was in WOD on my mm Hunter. All you had to do is grind honor and conquest points. you just go to the vendor, buy any piece of pvp gear you wanted and you’re good to go. No rng bs. it could be quite the grind getting that conquest but it felt satisfying to earn it and spend it however you liked. I know most people hated ashran, but if you could get a great group going you could earn so much points and buy a bunch of gear quick. I ended up learning all the mechanics for ashran and would spend 8+ hours leading the raid to victory the entire time. I genuinely enjoyed it and I’m sure everyone appreciated my hard work making sure we won every fight And got every bit of conquest. Eventually my Hunter was fully geared with mastery, which was at the time a straight up damage buff. I had the talent where if you stand still for 3 seconds you gain another damage buff + lone wolf talent. Let’s just say my Hunter was extremely broken and i could get most players down to 40% hp before they even saw me coming. Barrage would melt everyone and chimera shot crits were huge. Let’s not forget kill shot to finish them off..

the learning curve for the arena is difficult too. recently I tried to play arena and I'm a PvE player. you get into a game through solo shuffle and everyone just talks so much crap even at low rating where you're trying to learn.

I have played Dota 2 for 5k hours now, but I do not think WoW way to go is Plunderstorm as it takes away class identity (there are modes like that in dota that allows you to mix abillities), imagine having plunderstorm with classes (they can be simplified heavily), it would keep identity of classes, which is important in fantasy based PvP game. That's why I keep sitting queues for 30 minutes in retail instead of playing insta queue Plunderstorm.

If solo and plunder is the future of pvp count me out

I dont necessarily think it would be a solution that would attract the biggest player base, but for us old pvp addicts a tournament realm in the style of the private server Arena-tournament (AT) with no addons, where the gear and classes are balanced around pvp would be desirable for me personally.

I've said for years that competitive WoW PvP needs to be Its own game, similar to Plunderstorm. Basically "Warcraft Arena" with fewer, skill shot abilities, Its own balancing etc.

Im a pvx player. What i love about mmorpgs is that everything is connected. I wouldnt like seperated modes for pve and pvp. At the same time im stuck in a long queue. It just sucks on every end

Plunderstorm sucks. I want to be able to build a max level wow character and have access to everything available to me to use in regular wow pvp without playing the game. This would save WoW pvp. An awesome level playing field of real WoW pvp would be incredibly fun.

Plunderstorm is not wow bro, we need a World of Warcraft arenas only mode, with its own balance, its own spells, its own updates and everything separated from the main game

I think wow pvp scratches a very specific itch that some people love - And no other game can really capture. But I also think 90% of people don't really enjoy that same unique thing about it - They are looking for something else in a pvp game that other games provide better. If Blizzard separated the PVP modes entirely from the rest of the game and treated it almost as a separate game - I think they could deliver on both extremely well tbh. P.S. I really enjoy watching you react to things and to hear your input. I feel like on most topics you provide a very unique, refreshing, and grounded take that I can't really get from other people I watch - Thanks for the content!

Solo shuffle was an interesting experiment but some pretty large issues include: first person to die is likely to be the known easiest target to kill in the lobby... And because that player died in the first round may be focused and killed the rest of the rounds... And if they are focused and killed for a few early rounds they might leave early to waste everyone elses time. Then 3 dps that did ok in the shuffle and had a 30+ min queue get no rewards for their, effort it feels bad every time. 1.5hours of queue wait minimum shared for the lobby that didnt quit early is a huge problem. I stopped playing when 5 out of 8 consecutive shuffles ended early with no rewards. And I had already been telling people DO NOT ATTACK THE GUY THAT DIED THE MOST, because I didnt want them to rage quit, didnt work, they left early when their teammate died so no rewards. Such a waste of game time.

Solo shuffles and solo rbgs needs to give people glad mounts, i can play 3 games of league a week and ill get gold and still get my victorious skin, but for wow i need to play for 8 hours a day to maybe get a glad mount

The problem with WoW expansions is that people will play the first quarter when its new and exciting, then fall off towards the middle for a few months and take a break. Then once their interest has come back around you log in and are bombarbed with talking heads, new content like more areas, reputation grinds, factions, sub systems etc and a new expansion has been announced and is on the horizon. So you don't even bother. Not sure if you can even fix that issue

Now all we need is a Belluar react to this and the circle is complete.

I’ve always liked classic PvP more than retail. Always never liked the changes they made past Bc

Not only are the queues 30 minutes for DPS, The lobbies are trash. I have a video of a solo queue session I did where three out of five games I played, someone left the game early. I have another video where after the q popped, the match ended instantly because it bugged out as we were joining. Sometimes you get an absolute gorilla brain warrior who as soon as the gates open will run 200 yd from the healer, either dying instantly or forcing the healer to walk into CC. It's not just one thing, everything about pvp is f****** trash right now. Cc is a massive problem. Burst damage is a problem. Every class being able to heal insane amounts is a problem. Blizzard straight up. Refusing to listen to players when they ask for things like 2v2 DPS only solo shuffle is a massive problem. If you could cue for solo as DPS and get an instant q for some 2v2s I feel like it would triple the amount of people who try PVP in wow, but blizzard absolutely refuses for claims that it might be unbalanced, as if the rest of their game works well. They're just making money off a famous IP. No decisions they've made recently have been good.

If plunderstorm is wow pvp, then warcraft rumble is wow pve. It can be successful, but that does not translate into more players or a better players experience in WoW.

If they made a new solo q 2s mode for only dps, would there be less dps to healers in 3s? maybe it could help both.

The game was separate back in TBC, WOTLK and Cata all thanks to the Resilience... when Blizz removed it, the PvP went down hill... thats the facts and yet no one talks about that... Like for real ... PvE back then had theyr tier sets while the PvP players had resilience gear.... ( Players with PvE gear was getting easily killed if they aproach pvp with theyr raid gear and in raids the pve leaders was avoiding getting players with resilience gear) P.S. for those who dont know what Resilience is - "Resilience is a character attribute that reduces all damage taken from players and their pets or minions. The reduction has no effect on the damage taken from mobs." with decent pvp gear back then players reached like 50% damage reduction and it was stats only on PvP gear.

I completely agree about plunderstorm I love it, what I like about it is it’s easy to pick up, only a few games in & u get used to the powers, in wow you have to know so many moves in order to counter well.

It's not about pulling girls Xar. When "hot girls" play young guys like the Idea that there's a possibility they could play with them. It also makes them feel less like a basement dweller.

For me MoP was the peak. I'd rot my brains playing WSG/Gilneas random BGs. It was magical. If they bring MoP "Classic" might try it. But I'm not interested in anything else after MoP/WoD.

It's a shame everyone is giving up on PvP, I've never found the same feeling I got from Arenas in any other game

The arguement of splitting the playbase could be made the other way around too. Having an outdated and basicly dead format like 3v3 splits the playbase and draws healers away from solo shuffle and pushes up the queue-time. Half of 3v3 ladder is literally boosters and the other 12 people are the ones being boosted.

for some reason when i play classic or sod i tend to find people younger than me more often than on retail..

"I'm so sick of him" first thing lmfao

What you said at 10:50-11 is right. I'm afraid I saw those issues coming down the pipe before Solo Shuffle was launched. I really couldn't see how it wouldn't take away from regular arena. I used to do arena skirmishes, have some good runs with people, queue as a team with them, and then we would switch to rated and climb. Was easy that way to meet others, get rank, and the queues pops were instant. But ever since Solo Shuffle came about, which everyone was excited about, there's been less of that. Actually none of that, really.

Plunder storm isn't traditional World of Warcraft Player verse Player but is a Fortnite with WoW skins tacked on. It's a totally separate game that needed to use the WoW client to launch into the game because they didn't want to invest resources on an official launch and have it bomb. They invested $50,000 on a create tournament as a way to cheap out on advertisement for the game mode. I played Plunder storm, got my 40 renown and left it within four days. It was toxic in the lobby with the barrel rolls and PvP telling the Player verse Environment people to shut up or "get gud". I would take normally WoW PvP over Plunder storm any day because it is also more friendly to people with hand disabilities and offers support classes that don't have the ability to maneuver like you need in hand-to-hand battle with controllers.

Ill tell you why i dont heal, its because SS mmr is completely fucked for healers. It took me nearly 300 rounds to hit 1800 on my disc priest in SS. It took me less than 50 rounds to hit 1800 on my rogue and boomkin. And it was my first time ever playing boomy. I had about 1000 rounds played total healing between disc and MW monk. I enjoy healing, instant queues are great, but the fact that so many games are 3-3 because of an 0-6 dps the rating gain is incredibly slow. SS is great, but no one wants to heal because rating gain is so much harder and blizz wont adjust it.

The fact I look up streams and unless I have put 300 hours into a class I have no idea what's going on lul

I enjoy plunderstorm myself and agree that a new pvp mode has more potential for growing wow than arena, but i just dont know if plunder is the mode to do that lol

For arenas/solo shuffle, allow 2v2 dps to queue, keep the healer and 2 dps queues, significantly simplify the spells just like they did for plunderstorm. rogues class signature is stealth and go into stealth after 3 seconds of no damage taken or given. a subtlety rogue would have; 2 attack - backstab (a point generator) and sinister strike (a point spender). 2 utility - shadow step and shadow dance. 1 offensive - shadowblades. 1 defensive - vanish. 1 self heal - crimson vial. an assassination rogue would be a dot type architype have; 2 attack - mutilate and eviscerate. 2 utility - apply poisons and hemorrhage. 1 offensive. increase poison and bleeding damage. 1 defensive - vanish. 1 self heal - passive healing through bleeds and poisons. mage class signature is their casting ability every 3rd spell they cast it is a stronger version of the casted spell arcane mage 2 attack - arcane blast - arcane barrage. 2 utility. blink - apply slow to enemy. 1 offensive. no cooldowns or casting time for x amount of time. 1 defensive - mana bubble. 1 self heal - reverse time and with talents, the spells can be strengthened e.g backstab's damage can be increased by 10-15% or changed to gloomblade to deal shadow damage ignoring armor. or arcane barrage can slow them on hit, increased damage or is now a strong dot. i really do think they need to prune down the spells and have more options for queue to make pvp successful, if they can do plunderstorm, why not try something different for pvp. also, get rid of gear for pvp. it's just a dumb grind. look at plunderstorm, everyone just plays.

Any one who thinks WOW PVP isn't dead is just in denial it has gone down every expansion since Cata and has never gone back up and queue's became that long Blizz introduced Bots so people could get games faster when Bots are added in it is dead already.

love this content from xar!

Rated solo arenas were a mistake in my humble opinion. It should be soloQ rated battlegrounds. Bgs are easier to understand because it has clear obectives, either control a base, or run with a cart or something. There was a brawl with shorter timed BGs and it was a great experience. Less people in each team, smaller scores to finish a game and that's it. I had so much fun with that

What is a great site for seeing your ranks in PVP wow?

they should probably ban burst spell that will balance the game a little bit and not have player dying in 3 sec on stun against some burst

The chart is misleading due to the weekly Conquest Point cap on each character. A player can progress so much on their main character so, they work on an alt or 5 in the meantime until the aforementioned Conquest Point cap is lifted for the duration of the season.

We need to go deeper. Who is going to react to Xaryu's video?

I'm just saying, if they bring back a WoW game with just MoP pvp I would play that all as much as I can. The random or rated bgs were awesome for both sides and the arenas were fun for 2's, 3's and 5's. The Raiding and challenge modes were also pretty fun. The dailies were a bit of a grind at the start of MoP but cut that out and make it cosmetic and we got something perfect for many players in pvp, raids and solo content. MoP is perfect and I wouldn't mind paying a sub for a reskinned version of it with tweaks every few years instead of complete randomness and "new" features changing the game every few years. Talking about paying, I think its about time we stop charging for expansions or stop charging for the sub. The sub makes a lot more money and can make a lot more money without the needing to buy the expansion. I personally just purchased a sub since 2020 and I'm not going to be buying the expansion to try out retail because it doesn't look appealing, ok it kinda does, but I'm not paying to try it. Every other mode is free so there's no reason for me to try retail, even though I might enjoy it. I'm only playing for a month to try things out. My old guildies are spread out over all types of this game and I don't even know what WoW i'll enjoy the most and since I do not want to level or pay for a boost in classic's, then I'm just gonna quit and have even less faith in this game then I had before. I know I've said it before, but this feels like the last time for me. I purchased a sub and have played 3-5 hours the past 2 weeks, and most of that was just catching up with old friends while levelling and talking about the game. It doesn't appeal to me anymore and that's completely fine, but who is this game appealing to? It seems to be people who just want to spend money and be happy with items they just purchased, like kids in a candy store. Remember when games were about playing the game? Does anyone recommend a game like that to a mid 30's guy who wants casual fun in a multiplayer game that doesn't have 10-20 year olds yelling or doing stupid shit?

28 here and i recently just started playing wow i love arena but still trying to wrap my head around the game.

What i hate about this idea of splintering pvp off is that it wouldn't feel like this persistent world, like my same character is having these adventures, enjoying open world shenanigans etc.

Hopefully Plunderstorm will be some incentive for WoW to not give up on new modes to revitalize PvP. I've been hoping for a deep game mode that's 5v5 or 6v6 for a long time. They just don't have to seem have any willingness for innovation in PvP. There's been a serious void since GW1 died for a competitive team game mode that is both incentivized and engaging

Xar- 5% churn in a SaaS model is in fact quite bad. Most successful companies aim for 97%+ retention, anything lower is considered an issue lol

Plunder brought me back to wow in general after I reached 60 in HC and got bored. SoD is definitely heading in the direction most classic players feared. I haven't tried trios, but for duos and solos I have a very surprising insight: the team that works on plunderstorm is actually good and fixes issues. There were some huge problems with how much of a factor luck played, if you're not a lotto winner in terms of spawns you can kiss your first place chances goodbye. They for the most part from what I can see fixed levelling. I'm consistently getting to a competitive level even with bad spawns now.

IMO if you wanted to save pvp it wouldn't be too hard. Step1) make a few plunderstorm esc BGs but have the rewards affect your in game characters (Example, a tinker themed BG where your character hires a Goblin to build them a mount but the goblin or gnomes take it to battle, you can customize it and ride it outside of the BG) Step2) bring back old pvp sets with utility based bonuses and different more brutal appearances Step 3) fix the mmr issue I haven't pvp'd since mop but I hear it needs fixing Step 4) re-work battle grounds with new goals/objectives and tasks Step 5) blizzard needs to invest in the game, keeping the content fresh and the esports scene going.

For me its the CC atm. Just had a game against Warrior Rogue and Druid. SHuffle. I think i went from Cheap shot into a Gouge then a Stormbolt into fear into Blind and then a Cyclone and back to Kick then Cheap Shot. Glad i am a Shaman who has a lot of instants...... also yeah if you arer not a "Veteran" who played PvP in the past its just overwhelming what even goes on.... Just the things above with all the DRs they share or not share

I feel in pvp no one speaks about "casual pvp players".ofc you want to be in high elo in every game you play competitive but there is also a case like me that are ok in middle high elo in some games playing way less and being ok with that.

Doesnt plunderstorm have 6 buttons?

people were hooked to pvp when there was a lot of fun to socialize, duel, goo bg's arena together, and make or just watch open world pvp movies like unmercey, neilyo, akrios...

How new is it though, dropping into a large map from a plane?

PvP in WoW should be like different game..with bis gear you can have, no tier sets, no spells designed for pve, like massive aoe dmg or massive big deff cds..just pure player pvp skills.And if you noob, you cant complain and just improve.

healing solo shuffles is pure hell ill never do it agian but regular 3s sign me up

What would you think of a PvP revamp where we see each wow class represented, but pared down to their most basic elements? Make Pvp a fully separate and well supported form of content for WoW.

I'd love to see you and asmon hop in call and talk about stuff like this some time soon

i think its salvageable , you give every class a massive overhaul make them feel very unique and give them 10-15 buttons max you give UI a massive overhaul as well and ban addons , give incentives (major better ones than what is currently on retail) for raiding and pvping and that maybe gets you faster queues so players can come in and get that get in and get out type experience wich is much more doable for everyone

Xar talking about the drawbacks of solo shuffle while not mentioning the drawbacks of the previous system (which was inaccessible to the plebs), and ends up encountering the same parsing problem that SoD is currently facing.

I hate that when I am trying to search about a topic in my native language, almost zero related topics are up on the internet. When I switch to english the info I want is on the first three finds...

On point Xaryu, every product has a lifecycle and as they tap their customer base they must shift toward new markets to expand. You even see this in healthy companies, eg Xbox with game streaming or Apple with VR.

react of a react 2 brain move

WoW needs a FFXIV style PVP system. Different game mode inside of the game that has its own skills, no gear, just PVP fun

Wow pvp was built on the idea of “complicated”. Addons, 50 keybinds, and user interface customization…… As the years have gone by, we now realize that was NOT a smart vision for the game. 😅😅😅😂😂😂

If they would make a arena style standalone game , thats what i would love.

Now we need a reaction to Xaryu's reaction to Asmon's reaction.

Doing lvl 20s makgora its still alive 😂 best time roll playing and PvPing out there.

I've played arenas with friends since mop, I love it but not very good because I only really get 100-150 games in a season. I really only got to 1600 each season and pushing 1800 a few times and felt good because I felt I was learning and getting better from season to season, and that was good enough for me. But in DF season 1 I never got to 1400 and it felt awful, I tried again in season 2 when it started and never got to 1400 again, so why would I play a game that I cant ever get to the low mediocre rating I was getting before. I switched to keys and each season I push my rating and have got close to 3k on multiple alts each season and season 4 I am going to try to get 3k on all three roles. I know I will get the obligatory "get good scrub" responses but I have a career, a family, a home and a side business so 1600-1800 was good enough for me and I got the mount each season.

Solo ques could be fixed by giving an opt in thing to have full dps lobbies to handle the overflow .

I haven't even tried plunderstorm it looks useless to me.

Remove gear ilvl shouldn’t matter for pvp, less abilities, less cc, being able to kill shouldn’t depend on how good you can cc but rather your positioning and healer. Make healer have actual healing cd where you can’t just keep healing until you run out of mana or maybe have mana delete faster so mana management is more strategic. I feel wow pvp is gotten into which class is stronger now instead of which team is more strategic

I have to agree with you, Plunderstorm was a ton of fun. I am not a full time pvper, honestly I mostly stick to classic wow, but for a solid 2-3 weeks I couldn't stop queing up for Plunder. I think it's because of the homogeneity in gear and skills and the fact that if you just have a bad match it's over quick and nobody is bitching you out afterwards. Would I play wow only for that? No, but it reminded me of the good old days before arena where it was just battlegrounds and open world pvp. I tried to get my family to do arena with me several times and they just get smashed and depressed about it and quick before they can really even get into it. BG's are different, you can feel like you are making an impact without even really contributing that much. I don't know, i would like to see the meta shift back to that personally.

Definitely agree, plunderstorm is new but it is the way forward imo. Obviously they can't fix all the problems with old school arena... but pluderstorm is what the game needs to scale with the younger audience.

With Plunder everyone is basically the same. WOW retail PVP you have players with 30+ buffs, PVP gear and addons, new players can't keep up. One shot and dead.....

Nice vid, Xar...great review ! The thing I dont like about Plunderstorm is it being "Classless". One thing I feel is that WoW is hard to balance around x2/x3 (even worst for duels), but its kinda well balanced around larger fights, eg.: Battlegrounds. Hope PvP findnd its way with Rated Blitz (possibly) coming in next Expansion. Pce out, m8 ! Gratz on the gr8 content !!!

My relationship with wow is based on expansions. If I see something interesting I give it a try otherwise I stay out. I joined dragon flight, had fun with professions, raids, at certain point pvp with multiple classes and eventually the fun was no more and I quit. And it has been like that for a while now. If I ever had to complain about wow it would be: 1 - DH are way too op, fk them. 2 - Solo shuffle queue time is insanely high. I like the level of difficulty for PVE, and PvP you just need to be good.

I mean honestly if you are not already good at pvp then its unfun to learn it. You level a character with WM on you dont get any actual practice until you do the bgs and then when you naturally suck you get flamed, or, you turn WM off and get ganked by people way over leveled/geared to grief you because so many people think "lol its world pvp scrub get gud" and on either option the barrier for entry is way to high and the pvp community did it to itself. People are willing to put the time in but barrier for entry for new players is too important if you are trying to bring in new blood 26:26-"New generation is not enjoying it"

I played pvp today it was fun I have a pve character and pvp character but I'm also returning after 8 years so it seems fresh

I think we need to chill, Blizz takes time to do/realise these things, but they got Talby and some other smart people I'm sure they're listening and once they find a few solutions and the timing for timing for them, they'll make pvp better. Less abilities is something in some categories (probably most) is even something even the PvE people want.

only thing i ever really liked was warsong gulch. it was years ago. so much dang fun as a fire mage

TBH I think what made Plunderstorm popular is less buttons... I dont have to track 50 abilities of a Mage, Lock, Hunter, Priest, Paladin, Warrior, Rogue, Monk, Dragon, and more then track how these abilities react with one another PLUS track their CDs in my fuckin head while trying to remember my rotation and positioning before I die in one global.

the brain cells it takes to play healer vs a brand new player jumping on to a DH or war is a cataclysmic difference its actually disgusting to think about.

the bit around 26:00 relates to all blizzard games from the start. thats what i hope everyone will remember from blizz at the end of the day.. from legends playing warcraft pvp starcraft pvp diablo 2 pvp world of warcraft.. good stuff xar

Reaction-inception, lets gooo!

Hear me out here. A PVP acquired legendary weapon that’s BIS for all game modes.

Xaryu came out with the best comments out of WoW content creators so far. I've watch 4 or 5 opinions on this already.

Problem - lack of healers. Solution - make healers optional and not mandatory. Yeah it's hard to do and would change a lot but it addresses the root cause of the issue.

Why couldn’t they do a plunder but instead of new abilities you find abilities from your class and still have the wow combat but with less abilities

Ngl they really failed with arena PvP on Classic. They should have actively balanced the game. Playing on the final patch from day 1 and only making changes for PvE logs is wild.

The biggest issue with WoW PvP is simply that there are way better PvP focused games out there now. I can't think of any games back in the day that had PvP and character progression besides WoW. Now it's pretty common.

honestly if I want to play pvp, I don't play MMO games. I just play other PVP games. For me MMO is a PVE raiding game with friends. That's it.

Wish blizzard would make a game mode thats just what team gets the most kills and just lets us slaughter eachother