Retail is pretty awful now. So I'm here.
MoP was bad, like really really bad. Cross realm zones were a joke. Noone actually went out in the world and did things or pvp'd anymore. Even finding duels was a lot harder since even the temple was usually a ghost town since it wasnt CRZ and guess what? everyone was either botting bgs/professions or sitting in Raid Finder queue fingering their cornholes.
Warlords was somehow worse. Ashran was more awful than anything I could have possibly imagined. Everyone was a bot. Go into a BG and see 10-13 of the 15 on your team in eye of the storm taking the same routes and stacking perfectly around the map. Kinda horrifying. Oh and now people are botting arenas. Arenas are bad now too, personal rating ruined the comrade-re between arena players and they just kind of bounced around, even adding a way to queue for arenas solo. What kind of PvP is this? Duels were also dumbed down via garrison professions just letting everyone bull**** with 90% heal reductions and the like.
I rarely see bots on Molten. There's the occasional speed hackers and a plethora of bugs to be sure, and the community is a little sillier overall with the majority being somewhat newbcakish players compared to what I was used to on retail [there are good players for sure though].
Call me crazy but I'll take all these problems with a wide grin, just because I can at least know that, whether another player is a noob or a speed hacker or whatever, there is an actual human being controlling said character. Whatever frustrations they bring is nothing compared to the sheer cosmic horror of realizing everyone around you is a bot.
People are always ****ing around in hellfire or dueling or even attacking each-others cities. Even down the battleground meta where in AV for example, the 2 mega-zergs at the start meet in front of galv in a meatgrinder of shadowmournes and mass dispels that pretty much decides the momentum of the match, so much more intense than how on retail it's just 20 bots on each side running past eachother on opposite sides of the map avoiding conflict and sitting in front of vann and drek..
I was reminiscing a bit and decided that I didn't want to do cata since it's not even in season 9 which is the one I liked the most, but that I would go back to a time when I was still pretty new, to wotlk.
And now for a little about me:
I'm Riince, an old PvPer from retail, I played back in wotlk and was awful at the game, and then in cataclysm I was significantly less awful. I mostly running around bgs/the world looking for 1v2, 1v3's etc, and I also dueled a lot. I rarely did arena. My first venture into arena with a friend ended with 1800 with only 1 loss in a single day. Never really bothered after that. Arena's a bit boring, too sandbox-y.
Anyone who played on blackrock during s9 probably saw me a lot, i spent a brief period of time in A Substitute for Friends with Vrocks, and mostly in Durotar. I was pretty much the only fire mage stacking crit at the time, it was during a time when people still hadn't all decided on what was the best, and this worked the best for me.
I play on Ragnaros, btw. Currently guildless, I intend to deck out in full gear, gems, enchants, professions, etc. before I go looking for one, I want to be ready for any kind of duels/world pvp/arenas/etc that people might want to do without slowing people down. I randomly got like 100 something coins because I lost all my characters even though I only bought like 15 coins in the past for premium account status, and I used those to buy some wrathful and of course an ICC25H weapon since I really doubt I'll be doing much progression.
I'm not the best player in the world and certainly never was a priest player, but I know how to manage my focus, when and what to dispel, how to offheal and spread pressure and position, and all the essentials of pvp you'd expect from someone who pvp'd a lot on retail. I hope to make a lot of memories here.
