For the last couple of days I've been drowning on nostalgia and even being unsubbed I've been still taking some interest in what the community has to offer in terms of feedback here, and on the official PvP forums as well. And while some folks' opinions have been spot on, there are some people who still take some kind of enjoyment in PvP (apart from a minority that actually makes a living out of the game and is more or less forced to play it), keep paying the monthly fee, and even take their time to whine about small balance issue on the forums like "DH is OP plez nurf". And this has been absolutely mind-boggling for me.
The game, and most of all - its PvP aspect, is broken beyond repair. I've been enjoying the game for 10 years now. In Warlords of Draenor the spark was still kind-of there but now it's undoubtedly all lost. Game's not worth it's biannual expansion pack money anymore, let alone the monthly fee. Why are you still paying? Why are you still caring? What the hell do you still like in there? I honestly cannot understand, please enlighten me.
For me, literally everything I ever liked about PvP is gone:
1. World PvP. This is the thing that have probably given me more sweet memories through the years than most real-life activities have. I'd trade any night spent drinking in the pub, or rather doing mindless tiresome raids, for those precious moments when I was leveling my awesome DK back in WotLK Northrend when some max-level Horde douche came out of nowhere, killed me, and camped me for minutes. I would then log on my main feral druid and do the same to him as I not only outgeared him but greatly outskilled him as well. He would get tired and call a buddy or two to help him out. I would literally 1v3 them until they called their whole guild. Then I would call a friend or two of mine as well and we would fight like this for hours. When we finally prevail we would make a large group and raid some Horde city. And before I knew it it was time to get my quick bath and get ready for school. Guess what - this is gone, absolutely gone. People wouldn't even bother to touch you, let alone kill you as it's not rewarding in any way whatsoever, it's boring, and totally unbalanced. Even the most clueless person can literally oneshot you before you even spot him on your screen. Cause templates ain't active in PvP and their terrible deisgn make it so that there's no way for them to be unless you want to be farmed by mobs instead.
2. Dueling. For most people this isn't really a huge deal but the second most fun I've ever had in this game was dueling people. The skill required there, and the sheer room for improvement, have never been lacking behind arenas, in my humble opinion. Sure, there is no team synergy and coordination. Sure, you're dealing with just one guy instead of two/three of them. But knowing that you have no one to back neither you, or your enemy up makes things a lot different. While this has always been the most unbalanced aspect of PvP provided completely equal grounds for the two players, fortunately enough this can never be the case unless you somehow manage to duel noone but your very self. Through the different expansion packs there were often times when I would duel one particular person for hours on end. And while we eventually might have come to the point where his class beats mine 9 times out of 10, or the other way around, the whole process of getting there has always been nothing but extremely rewarding, both in terms of fun and expanding on your skill level, so to speak. The depth of class design allowed even for the most unbalanced of match-ups to have so many possible scenarios and therefore outcomes... And as I already said, the learning curve was enormously huge and rewarding. For me, the game started losing said depth back in MoP but at least this expansion offered something that I will forever cherish - balanced duels. Every class was so "bloated" that duels had never been so balanced. At one point I could beat anyone in 1v1 outside of Stormwind on my realm, with every single character/DPS spec out there. And that's when I knew all these years of duels had finally paid off. Like World PvP, due to both completely dumbed down class design and PvP templates - this is no longer possible. Even in WoD, duels weren't enjoyable anymore - it was a simple PvE DPS fest with most of the game-changing abilities and cooldowns being completely scrapped. Legion somehow managed to prune the fun even further. They could add a 1v1 wargame mode with little to no develpoment time required but even if they did so and managed to make 1v1s easily accessible with PvP templates on, it would still not be any fun whatsoever.
3. I mentioned the word "depth"... Well... it's gone. Somehow along the years it completely manage to vanish. Did I say vanish? Back in the day you could vanish spells with your rogue, remember? And that alone can't even scratch the surface. Every single spec had so much depth and that's what made WoW PvP shine. That's what made me play World of Warcraft PvP in the first place. Because if I wanted to play a game where you had literally 4 abilities with super simplistic design and very predictable outcome I'd rather play League of Legends. Duels, even arenas, were so much more enjoyable when people had options. Even the MoP CC and damage cds fest had a depth on its own. While I'd much rather have pre-MoP class depth where every single class had an enormously high skill cap (yes, even ret paladins) and something to strive to, MoP's plethora of cooldown buttons required some sort of skill as well, and while being a lot more mindless and mistake-prone it still felt fun and kept me playing on hours of end. Right now PvP is a PvE fest where large-scale AoE abilities are the pick of choice over single-target ones. And the only "option" you have is a single damage/healing cd for every single goddamn spec (there's no variety here even) that you can't even counter (like in WoD with another yet again boring defensive cd) because all the utility is gone. Playing PvP in this expansion honestly feels more PvE to me than PvE itself, cause at least mob AI has evolved over the years and provides some interesting mechanics while players have only 5 buttons at their disposal and as skilled as you are (or rather "have been", cause the game doesn't require skill any longer) you can literally do nothing about it.
4. Damage. Yes... even though the top threads everywhere (even here) are something along the lines of "DAMAGE TOO HIGH PLZ NURF", I personally think that there's not enough damage out there. Over the expansions since WotLK damage has been more and more sparse but that was compensated with how many abilities you could pump out over a given period of time. In WotLK you had 30k hp on average and a Ele Shaman's Lava Burst could hit for up to 12k or something. You could literally almost kill someone with a Lava Burst into instant Chain Lightning into Frost Shock or something. But it required a cooldown to be instant casted, had a slow cast, and mobility for eles was sparse. So you couldn't all that often get that off. In Cataclysm Lava Burst could hit for like 40k damage out of a 160k health pool which is obviously lower. But you could cast it a lot more often, you had the Earth Shock Maelstrom thing that hit for just as much, you had Lightning Bolts while moving, more mobility, etc.. In MoP Lava Burst hit for around 80k on a 560k health pool but it was spammable as f*ck and overall you could still have that great feeling of pumping out damage. In late-WoD it was kind of the same as in MoP though it felt clunky as hell as you literally had nothing else to do (cuz pruning <3) but that's a whole other topic. At least late-WoD gave us damage and that felt at least a little bit fun! In Legion... 3 mil health pools, Lava Burst does 150k - 200k damage at most. This is nothing short of laughable. Now you can say that "bruh, focus of eles is now shifted away from Lava Burst... they have Icefury now, Frost Shocks, Earth Shocks, instant Lightning Bolts, blah blah" but at the end of the day all the fucking abilities hit like wet noodles and slapping someone with a wet noodle over and over again isn't fun. SURE! The damage may feel OP as healers heal for even less, and as I already said - the game was so pruned that there's literally nothing left to counter said damage... But this isn't an excuse for every single class feeling completely underpowered. Until they buff the damage, buff healing accordingly and reintroduce some utility to cope with said damage (at this point I'm fine even with blatant % damage reduction cds) this game won't be ANY fun to me, I don't know about you. And crying about OP damage instead of missing utility and underpowered healing is beyond me.
5. Oneshots. Yes, you heard me right. I miss oneshots. The low amounts of damage (point 4), and the PvP stat templates have made it so making those sweet "crit montage" videos on youtube owning in battlegrounds impossible. I never wanted there to not be any gear gate! Owning people 1v5 in a BG, oneshotting every single one of them was the reward you got for investing so much time as to outskill and/or outgear said opponents. And sure, when you were behind on gear it was a bit frustrating but it lasted for only a couple of days until you got full honor gear. From there on it was easy as pie and you knew it was worth it. Now not only that PvP is more gated than ever due to honor talents and artifact power but once you join a BG, for example, even the biggest retard/newb can outdo you in everything and even 1v2 isn't remotely possible unless your enemies are literally (as bad as it may sound) retarded or braindead.
6. Soloqueue. Something that Blizzard has been refusing to do for years now. If the game is gonna be so much focused on arenas then make a solo-queue system. It will be more successful than LFR, at least, for sure. Most of us have grown up into working married men and when all of your friends quit the game for obvious reasons (life, and mostly because the game is plain arse) finding someone to queue with is the most frustrating thing ever. Not to mention that participation is as low as the ground. The game is dumbed down enough so that you don't require voice comm anyway, so please - for the sake of someone's nostalgic 1-hour PvP fix - at least add this feature to the game. It will be highly appreciated.