Ever found yourself out-healed by a warrior or a death knight in World of Warcraft PvP? You're not alone. This week's episode is a treasure trove of insights as we explore the surprising efficacy of non-traditional healers in the arena. We're diving head-first into the latest from Azeroth, highlighting not just world bosses and dungeon bonuses, but also the tactical shifts these healing anomalies bring to the battlefield. As a hybrid class warrior, I've been right where you are, and I've got a tale of an arena match that'll have you rethinking your entire strategy.
Are you ready to tackle the healing conundrums and Demon Hunter dilemmas plaguing WoW arenas? Hold onto your helmets, because we're examining the underpinnings of spells like Vampiric Embrace and the impact of dampening on match lengths. This episode isn't just about recounting my experiences – it's about dissecting the mechanics that could use a rejuvenating touch from Blizzard. Plus, we're zoning in on the contentious ubiquity of Demon Hunters, armed with statistics and a candid conversation about the current meta that will resonate with any PvP aficionado. If you've ever wondered why your Astral Guidance isn't quite up to par, this is the discussion you need to hear.
As we wrap up, I share my personal vexations with the Demon Hunter-dominated compositions that have taken center stage. This segment is an open forum for venting about the monotony of facing these ubiquitous setups and a rallying cry for Blizzard to bring balance back to the field. Tune in not just for commiseration but also for a look ahead at potential changes on the horizon. It's time for our community to unite and echo our calls for a more diverse and dynamic PvP experience. Grab your gear and join me on this legendary journey through the trials and triumphs of World of Warcraft PvP.
Hope you all enjoy and hope you relate to any of these stories. And I will speak to you all in the next episode!
Music. Hello and welcome to the Pig and Whistle Tales from Azeroth. As always here at the Pig and Whistle Inn in Stormwind, I go for a variety of subjects with regards to World of Warcraft. I grab a bottle or a pint, sit back and enjoy. This episode will be going over PvP and there's a lot of things I want to discuss Stuff to do with dampening, cc, hybrid classes, anything and everything to do with PvP. But, as always, we will get into the weekly news first. We have Strunrun, zakali, elders and Aerostar as your weekly world bosses. They're located in Onarun Plains, zeralak Caverns that's the one and Emerald Dream. The Dragonflight Dungeons are your bonus event for the week. What this means is you get an extra piece of gear from completing a Dragonflight Dungeon, so definitely make sure that you're doing this. If you're doing Mythic Pluses, you can definitely gear up some characters this way a lot more efficiently. Deep Six is your brawl for the week. Essentially, what this is is a 6v6 and yeah, this is Deepwing Gorge and essentially you're looking to dunk the orbs into the enemy's base. I believe. Wait, that's not Temple of Hot Moga, no, no. No, this is no wait. This is just normal sort of battlegrounds, but it is 6v6 format, so your actions matter a little bit more. I got them confused with something else there. Storming, raging and Terranical are your Mythic Affixes for the week. Storming you simply spawn little vortexes and you want to move away from these. It will not be good if you get hit by them. They just knock you up, do a little bit of damage, but it means that downtime on your DPS. You know that's always the downside. Raging when a mob gets below 30%, it will do increased damage. Please soothe this CC. It kill it quickly. And tanks kite this. Your healers will be getting healer. Rage if you do tank these adds without using a defensive cooldown anyway. And Terranical the bosses and the mobs that they summon have increased health and damage for this week. So bring a talent build that can accommodate to that. So first things first. I don't know where to start, but what I will start off with is a example. So I'm doing my battlegrounds no, not battlegrounds, I'm doing my arenas with the people that I play, with my little arena team, and essentially I'm against a warrior and a DK. We are Holy Paladin, arcane, major Boomkin, and we are against a Resto Shamann Warrior and a DK, a Death Knight. Now I'm the only hybrid class in this arena. Now what does that mean? That means that I am a hybrid DPS that can off heal if need be. Now this game goes on for about 10 minutes and this is on Tover, on Arena. This is a big map. Against the melee cleave, you're against double caster. You're thinking, okay, double caster wins, we do win. We do win this game. But the melees didn't give a shit about where they were playing. They were just playing out in the open in the very far corner of Tover on. So their healer was dragged out. This meant that we could get more CC on them and stuff like that, and our main target was the Death Knight, because warriors are quite tanky, as we know. They are passively quite tanky. So our idea was to kill the Death Knight as we finish up the arena. We finish the Death Knight, we win the arena and we go over details and have a look at everything. Now, as a hybrid class, you expect me to be third on healing in details. You have the two healers on each team and then you have probably me, right, and then you know you've got other bits and bobs. No, I'm not the third. The warrior is third A warrior, okay. Then the Death Knight, the other melee, and then the mage who has not had a single bit of healing in their entire World of Warcraft lifespan. Yeah, think about that. Well, they've had evocation glyph, but that's about it. And then I'm last. I'm sixth on Healing Done. Now, healing Done isn't everything. Obviously I'm passively tanky in boomkin form. I have a lot of mobility, stuff like that. But here's the kicker this warrior. The healer's healed about 15 mil, I think it was. Actually it was around 15 odd. Now the warrior healed for 7.11 million healing. Now, obviously this isn't pure healing. This is absorb shields, damage reductions, all of that stuff. But 7.1, nearly half of what his healer did, and he wasn't even our main target, by the way, this is passive cleave that we have done to him, okay, and he's healed, slash mitigated, 7.1 million damage worth of it. Now, these are in the forms of ignore pain, pain and gain impending victory, you know all the limb different things and just passive leech. Now, these things are all passive abilities. The ignore pain essentially should just be a passive ability, because you press it off, cooldown, because it doesn't matter to most people. Now the impending victory is the only thing that they have to consciously think about when it comes to their healing, or I should say healing slash, damage mitigation because it heals for a set percentage, they don't want to use it 90%. You want to use it when you're low and you want to use a battle masters trinket with it. This battle masters trinket for those that don't know increase your maximum health and gives you an extra 200, a essentially something like that, health wise. So you use that and then you know you're impending victory, just heals you up a little bit more than what it usually did before. You use that battle masters trinket. But this warrior came out of this arena with 7.1 million healing. The death knight five million healing, somewhere around that. My mage 2 million and I came out there with 1.6 million healing. So I have done nearly 6 million healing, less than their warrior. A warrior, a warrior that literally just hits things and passively heals himself. How does that make sense? Okay, so the way that they wanted to build hybrid classes is to make it so that you know it mattered their man up, all mattered, their heels mattered. Nothing matters about being a hybrid is if everything can heal. Every single arena, everything out heals me, and that's not even like while trying warlocks out heal me. They're not a hybrid, they're just tanky. You know they give themselves a 1 million shield on a 45 second cooldown. I know how tanky they are because I play a warlock Like that is my alt Um shadow priests again, they'll just passively out heal me. Plus, they have Talents that increase the healing gun by their next flash of light and by a certain amount, and that stacks up relatively quick. So it's actually a big, powerful heal, whereas my there's a similar talent for druids isn't the bottom of the talent tree, whereas there's near the top. And what mine is I have to do damage, put it, to accumulate healing in order for my Heal to heal extra. So, and even then it's got a cap limit. It's got a like 68k cap limit, something around that, and that's not a lot. That's like one execute, one mortal strike. You know one big hitting ability, so one global cooldown. So using a talent for that isn't necessarily worth it. That's the hilarious thing. And then you look at other hybrid classes who also heal. So rest up, or shamans, a shadow priests that you have, think that's it. No monks, can monks even out here me when walking monks can out here what my healing does If I was to stand there getting trained by two melee DPS and press regrowth, it would it. Honestly, I wouldn't even know that my health's going up. I feel like it would be going down. I feel like I would be killing myself by pressing regrowth, because I'm just naturally not going to be tanky because I come out of Boomkin form so my arm is gone. I'm just standing there casting so they have maximum uptime. You know there's a lot downsized depressing my regrowth and it's absolutely crazy to think that as a hybrid class, I get out healed by everything in the game. Every non hybrid class I get out healed by. I do the same healing as a rogue who presses crimson vial off cooldown. Probably that's the crazy thing. And this includes my talents, such as renewal, automatic frenzy regen, like the matted fur talent for my bark skin. This is incorporating all of this. But the problem with hybrids in wow is that they don't hybrid. Some do, some do. Don't get me wrong. I think shadow priests and rest or shaman are very good hybrid classes because they do have fat heels when you need to heal them. And the thing is when I need to heal my healer, that's getting trained because they're on clone dr's or whatever. My heels will not be anywhere near as impressive as that of a shadow priest or a resto shot or a Elemental shaman healing up the healer, because my heels just aren't as impactful, they don't do as much. I have to pop a five minute cooldown for my heels to do the same as what a elemental shaman and a shadow priest flashlight does. That's crazy. That is absolutely crazy. Even them Hybrids just do it all. Now, obviously, you can say, oh, but that's all on themselves and they're not helping out their team. Okay, so I will counteract that argument with okay, what can I do to help out my team? I can CC and I can heal. That's fine. I'll take a warrior, for example. What a warrior can do is intimidating shell, obviously not as often as a cyclone, but what he can do as often is Intervene. Now, intervene is a 30 second cooldown, something like that, and essentially for the next three seconds, you're taking the damage of that guy. Your, your mate. That you've intervened, that's pretty good. I would say that that's very, very good. You have a stun, you have multiple things. You have so much mobility and utility as well that my mobility that I meant to be utilizing to get away from melee doesn't matter, because if I get away from them Okay, he's got a charge, that's fine, I can run away even more. Oh, he's got a second charge, that's fine, I still managed to get away. Nope, he's got a heroic leap that you can leap 40 yards, like to me, oh, great, so. So in this time I'm having to switch out boonkin form as well, by the way in order to like run, which means that I'm not getting any damage out. So it's a trade-off. I'm doing no damage to run and gain distance, but he's just running me down, losing no uptime whatsoever, which is crazy. Now the death knight as well. If I try and run, he just grips me back. He just death grips me back, and he's got two of them. So I try and run, I get gripped. I try and run again, I get gripped. And then I try and run, the warrior runs on top of me and charges me. I'm run, warrior charges me again, try and run, and he heroic leaps me. I've got to get through five different things in order to actually get away from both of them, like immediately and quickly, and by that time the death knight's probably got a death grip back. So it's just an endless rotation. So it's absolutely crazy, but hybrids are not hybridding Best way to put that. This is also very you can also see this in certain abilities. So you have the same sort of abilities in Vampiric Embrace, astral Guidance and Nature's Vigil. These are all spells that convert damage into healing. Now, vampiric Embrace and Astral Guidance are 100 times better than Nature's Vigil, the reason being Nature's Vigil, the damage that you output as a boomkin isn't nearly as consistent as these other two classes, so it converts I don't know the exact number, but 10% of your damage into healing. If you hit for 100k, you'll heal yourself for 10k, if that makes sense. Now Shamans get automatic procs. They can not cast a single time in an entire arena if they really wanted to. They just get procs and this is instant cast lava bursts. Each lava burst does about 80 to 120k per lava burst and these can be thrown out on every single player. By the way, if you get an Ascendance proc so you can hit in one lava burst, press about 360k's worth on the high end of damage. Yeah, if you've got like Flame Shock on 3 targets, you know that kind of deal. That equates to what is it? 36k, something like that heals. Obviously it's a bit more, but in terms of like the actual numbers of the game. But this is just for demonstration purposes. Now I, as a boomkin, can throw out about 3 to 5 star surges back to back. At best this is with all cooldowns rolling and stuff like that. These star surges will hit for the same amount as a like Astral or a lava burst I should say so about 10k per, which isn't bad. But then it severely drops off. Nature's Vigil severely drops off because I don't have enough in the tank to keep pumping damage, whereas Shamans just sat there spamming their little lava burst keybind and doing a shit ton more healing through that one like ability alone, because they just have more consistent damage and therefore it generates into more and more like healing done. You know that kind of thing. Same with Priest. They have a shit ton of damage and it's it's absolutely insane just to think of the difference in terms of like the healing that it does. But again, even if I took every single healing ability that I have in my talentry as a boomkin, I would still not outheal melee classes, who are not hybrid classes. They shouldn't heal at all. Well, not at all. They shouldn't have that level of. I'm just going to stand out in the middle of the open against two casters, not give a shit and not die for 10 minutes. And the thing is you might say, oh, it's because you aren't CC'ing the healer. Where's CC'ing this fucking healer? Cc'ing dies because you've got to get through anti-magic zone, anti-magic shell, then intervene, then rally and cry and then the death knight, death strikes himself for about 200k per here. So you've got to make sure that he is disarmed during your go as well. But I'm the only one with a disarm and I'm running thorns instead to try and slow and kite my attackers, put out some more pressure while they're putting out pressure. You know all of that sort of thing. So it's absolutely crazy. But Blizzard really need to do something about hybrids actually being a hybrid class and every other class not being this tanky in the game. So see you now. I won't mind sacrificing some tankiness for these hybrid classes or an actual like. Their hills mean something. Obviously, you can still go oom and you only like you don't need to do much, but essentially like, give us something. Hybrid classes are worse at healing than non-hybrid classes and it is so shit it feels really, really bad. This leads into my second point dampening. Now dampening is becoming a massive, massive issue in arena because a lot of the games towards the end of expansions this always happens, though People gravitate to the classes that are a lot more tankier in the arena, because your best offense is being, or is having, a strong defense. Now what this means is essentially, the longer you last in an arena, the more like chance you have of winning, because the like enemy healer goes oom so he runs out of mana and then you just win for free, essentially. So the better the class is at being a defensive class and having more defensive abilities, the more you'll see them towards the end of the expansion. What they should do, in my honest opinion, to compensate for the later patches is roll out dampening faster. So season one, two, three, one two you can probably keep dampening about what it is, because their games are relatively fast, but when it gets to season three and four, inflation is like hit quite heavily and numbers are tough to balance. What I mean by inflation is health inflation, because your stats are just getting more and more. Your health is just going up and up and up. I think we started this expansion. How much health do I have like now I have, I think, one meal, something like that. I have one meal health. I think we started the expansion at like 400k. I want to say something around that. So, yeah, you can tell, and there's only been two seasons worth of arenas, so from season one I had about 400k and now it's season three and I have over one million. So what does that tell you? It's pretty heavy on the inflation, but what dampening is is essentially after five minutes in the arena, dampening starts to hit and this means that healing is reduced in the arena by a certain percent and every five seconds this will tick up more and more. You can get to 100% dampening, although that's never happened, but I think in the latest AWC game or in one of the latest AWC like tournaments, I think someone hit 82% dampening I think it was the liquid game and this means that healing is reduced by 82%. How crazy is that? That is a long game and yeah, it's absolutely crazy. So my idea for it is kind of just introduce solo shuffle dampening. So for solo shuffle, dampening starts really early. It literally out of the gates and essentially it just ramps up like a little bit quicker than the normal arena dampening and I think that this should be what is the go to when you get to seasons three and four of an expansion. It's that, or just keep the gear relatively the same. What I mean by this is keep the stats on the gear the same, but just change. I don't know, it's very tough because you want the idea of gearing your character and stuff like that, but at the same time, inflation is really bad because it makes numbers a bit tougher to tweak, essentially, and therefore you have a balancing issue and stuff like that. But yeah, my idea for it would be introduce dampening earlier on in 3v3s. You don't have to go crazy with it like the solo shuffle one, but maybe just a little bit earlier. That way you know it can. You don't want games to be lasting 15 minutes, like 10 to 15 minutes, because it can get very boring. You kind of just want to do some like five minute arenas. Ok, go next. Yeah, you know that kind of deal. You don't want to be hanging around in one arena and then 15 minutes later you lose it and you feel really shit, whereas if it's a five minute arena is just oh well, it happens, go next kind of deal. You can get two more games before that, one game would have finished, if that means Um, but yeah, that that's my idea for it. And there's one thing I need to talk about Demon hunters. Demon hunters right now are a fucking menace. I've got some stats here that I'm gonna read out for you, or at least one stat that like blows my mind, absolutely blows my mind. But what demon hunters are doing right now is Everything, and what I mean by this is people can have CC immunities. Sure, people can. You know. Classes can have mobility. You know that's their strong point. People can just, or classes can just, be naturally tanky. Classes can have very good defensive cooldowns. Classes can have, you know, very good damage output and constant uptime. Now, usually, when you've got some of these things, that you're gonna be negative in something else the rep panadins, for example, they have very good burst, but you've got to get to the player. They have decent CC with hammer of justice, one of the best stuns in the game, but you need to make sure that the healer is stunned, otherwise They'll just, you know, dispel the hammer of justice. You know there's multiple trade-offs and you know it's one of them. Things first, they're quite squishy, they're easily to keep. They're easy to kill and, to be honest with you, if you catch them with their pants down. But demon hunters have all of this. They have incredible Mobility. Their mobility is probably the best in the game. With two fell rushes, a vengeful retreat. This vengeful retreat also is a Guaranteed CC immunity, because everyone's taking this PvP talent that makes them CC immune when they use vengeful retreat and this talent also reduces the damage that they take by a significant amount. I think it's 70% or 90%. It's very significant. There's a good cooldown and this is on a 30 second old cooldown, something around that line. So they are CC immune while they are backflipping in the air and they can prolong this as well by jumping again. As long as they stay in the air for a duration, they are CC immune. They have incredibly good uptime and damage like they cannot be kited at all. It's absolutely crazy. They, they just have everything. They have great defenses. On a shorter cooldown, they have a complete immunity. In netherwalk they have blur, which is a 30% damage reduction, and you dodge everything that is in front of you. So if you are a melee trying to kill a demon hunter, you just won't because it's a minute cooldown and Minute in an arena comes up very, very quickly like you'll be very Lucky to kill a demon hunter like it in that minute spam, because you would have sent all of your damage. And then he pressed blur and it's like, oh shit, well, I don't have my damage for two minutes, so he'll just have blur back by that time. You know that kind of deal. And darkness, I think, is still one of the worst Defensives in the game, but For its cooldown and the fact that it's kind of a lottery Cooldown because you can die through it, it is a 50-50 chance if you're going to die, and they're not great odds. To be honest, on a three minute cooldown, I think darkness should get buffed in my honest opinion. But if you're gonna buff darkness, you've got enough something of demon hunters, because they're absolutely crazy. Right now I'm seeing demon hunters in pretty much every Form of World of Warcraft arena. I watch a wc. There's demon hunters. I watch it. While twitch streams there's demon hunters in the arenas. I watch my own game playback. Oh look, there's 20 demon hunters that I'm facing within a arena session out of 30 games. It's crazy, it's ridiculous and and that there's something that needs to be done about it. So here's, here's the stats. There's two that I want to say, so in solo shuffle. I've had a look at the leaderboards. This is as of yesterday, by the way. I took it as of yesterday this leaderboard. Now, demon hunters they well, okay, let's start with everything else above 2.4k rating. Yeah, you have a hundred death knights, a hundred death knights above 2.4k in solar shuffle. That's pretty good. You have 50 arcane mages, 50 boomkins, 81 warriors, 70 retribution paladins. So DK warrior, Retribution paladins. These are all melees, these are all decent melees performing at the moment. Same with boomkin and arcane mage. They are very well performing classes at the moment and you know they. This is what is above 2.4k, but the death knight is the only one to come close to or to be in three digits. And then you look at demon hunters. Okay, so let me read out these numbers again. Death night has a hundred. Arcane mage has 50. Boomkin has 50. Warrior has 81. Retribution paladin has 70. Can you guess how many demon hunters have above 2.4k? They have 217 players, Like individual demon hunters, above that rating. Now, I'm no expert, but that is a lot more than what Anyone else is showing there. That is over four times the amount of boomkin and arcane mage. That is just Under three times retribution paladin, just under three times warrior and double the amount of DK's. This is unholy death night by the way, this wasn't frost death night, this was unholy and all of these classes that are alongside demon hunters here have been performing very well in this current Season. Three meta all of them have a boomkin literally won A wc in na last week. Okay, excuse me, that was what was it last time? No, there was a Windwolker Monk that won last week, but rogues are primarily the other dominant spec up there. But yeah, this is absolutely crazy. I checked all the others but I didn't write them down. I primarily went with ones that are very similar and that I see quite a lot, but nothing comes close to demon hunters. The amount of demon hunters above 2,400 rating. It's ludicrous, I think. And the last stat I want to show with you is like you'd think that they're pretty easy to kill. Right, they've got loads of mobility, they've got CC immunity, they've got great damage. Surely they're going to be quite squishy and easy to kill. They are Okay. Oh my God, first blood in arenas. Yeah, in solo shuffle. This is solo shuffle between 2100 and 5k rating. The first blood stat means that if they are the first to die in an arena. Now, bear in mind that there is way more demon hunters in these games than anything else. So at the top you have feral druids. There is 145 matches like as the pool in this bracket rating and they are generally 70% of the first blood. Okay, you go down and you know there's boomkins with 500 games played at 68.7. The Destro Warlocks 737 games and it's at 65.7%. You know you've got all of these games. Armors Warrior is the highest at the moment that I can see, with 1,087 games, but that's a 41.8% first blood. Demon Hunters 1,631 games played. This is the pool. Yeah, they have been the first blood 16.5% of the time. They are not the target because they are quite unkillable. That's a problem. That is a real problem. They are lower in terms of the kill, like the first blood, than Holy Paladins, and Holy Paladins are a healer. Healers don't get targeted a lot. It's rare for a healer to be first to die in a solo shuffle. Holy Paladins are obviously more so than most because they are susceptible to being swapped to, but it is not a common thing. This shouldn't be a thing. Demon Hunters need to be taken care of in one way or the other. They need to have less mobility, they need to have less damage output, they need to have less uptime, they need to have worse cooldowns or something. One part of their kit needs to be nerfed. They can't have everything and that is a problem. That is a massive problem that needs to be dealt with by Blizzard and hopefully we'll see some class tuning soon. But who knows? Because Season 4 is just around the corner and I'm fed up of playing against Demon Hunter Destrolok. I'm fed up with that bloody comp. Same with Demon Hunter Ellie Shaman. I'm fed up with these comps. They aren't fun to play against. They really aren't. Give me melee cleaves all day. Give me double casters Anything apart from Demon Hunter Ellie Shaman, demon Hunter anything. It's just boring at this point and we haven't had class tuning for a while, so hopefully there's something big in the works that Blizzard are preparing. But I'm going to leave it there. Thank you all very much for listening to this episode. Do check out all of the socials down below Constant stuff happening over there. Once again, thank you all very much and go ev'lla, friend. Goodbye all.