So from the beginning of Warlords, there was something about PvP that seemed different. Pruning abilities had a profound effect on the play style of classes in PvP. From season 1 of WoD, I remember just being the cc bot on my team, only using ice novas on the kill target when my team wanted it. In season 2, I played god comp which felt absolutely atrocious at what we could do with the least amount of effort. And now we have season 3, which describing how the state of PvP is at this point is beyond words.

Throughout this entire expansion, I have seen the disintegration of my friends list. From Wotlk players who were appalled by the state of the game instantly after coming back, to my gladiator friends who can not bare this game anymore. My shaman for example, can not do anything against certain compositions but die. Is it fun to hear your partner upset at the fact that he can't play his class because he's caught in silences and stuns from ww/dk or feral/dk? It really isn't. WoD arena (at a high-ish rating I was around 2550 mmr weeks earlier) is just a matter of seeing what composition you queue into and instantly knowing whether you win or lose. Sure, you can try your damnedest to keep your partner alive, but ultimately it's always negative and you lose in 30-45 seconds where as any decently matched teams can fight into deep dampening. I no longer have friends who I know I can queue with because of how horrendous the state of PvP is (hyperbole).

Playing Legion alpha, I realized a few things that I dislike:

The game seems VERY reliant on damage modifiers in order to do sufficient damage (for certain classes/specs like frost mage). An example of this could be the following: We eventually get a poly on the enemy healer, now I have to make sure I have a high stack of Bone Chilling and retain this stack while I use Icy Veins which grants me Chilled to the Bone, now I have to use Ice Form to buff my frost bolt damage and finally place a Rune of Power down to increase my damage even more. It feels so clunky trying to get all of this set up because other classes sustainable damage will prevent you from having a "stars align" moment where you can get all your modifiers up.

I don't like "PvP Talents" which are just pruned normal abilities from our classes toolkit and added back as a must take for PvP. Having to do arenas and battlegrounds in order to unlock abilities does not seem fun to me what-so-ever. Nowhere in PvE do you see this, at all. This "special treatment" feels like just a cleanup of PvErs action bars because they don't use X talent and Y talents in their rotation. The prestige system is a cool idea for only cosmetic reasons. Hardcore PvP players who just hit 110 and want to play rated won't have a fun time because their abilities that they have had for a few expansions are now gated until they farm up a high enough level to earn them.

The current meta of 3v3 arena seems bland and unexciting. From playing 3v3 skirmishes, it seems to me that the current meta of arena is the following: Stand in the middle and do damage, if you do more damage you'll win if you can get a cc on their healer. Now, this is not hyperbole because this is actually what happens. I don't think this is fun, personally because I'd like excitement which is some of this "scripted" gameplay such as a mage has to run in for a poly so his partner stuns the dps and the mage deeps into a poly (which deep is gone, I know). Things like that which kept you attentive and engaged while playing.

There are still compositions which seem really strong so far, but I understand it's alpha and tuning will maybe fix that. But it definitely seems like some classes in arena are better than others in terms of sustainable damage. What are your thoughts?