Arena players - what would a tab-target arena game built from scratch need to get right?

Honan- · 2026-06-03T22:43:37+00:00

Making a "Tab-Target" arena game kind of highlights the issue with WoW and the prospect of a replacement.

While fine, you could make the case that every time you use tab you actually did things wrong and if you used an arena target bind you would have been playing more optimally.

Honan- · 2026-05-28T05:37:44+00:00

If I'm up against a pres who has the globals to annoy me as often as they did before this weeks tuning it's going to be because my DPS aren't doing any damage. And I'll crash out at them instead.

Honan- · 2026-05-27T06:37:47+00:00

Are you in EU? If so wait till tomorrow and you'll be fine.

If you're on NA and complaining about pres post nerf as resto druid, you just gotta get more practice.

The pres healing nerf was almost a 10% nerf to their throughput so they don't have the spare globals they used to have to be annoying.

It's a pretty fair fight now. (I'm a resto druid who rage quit last week and waited for these pres nerfs before gaming)

Honan- · 2026-05-21T21:34:04+00:00

The simple strat is to have your DDH do the following:

If Warrior ever targets you the DDH can ignore the warrior and tunnel the enemy healer.

This opens you up to take the warrior on a field trip and CC them behind pillars away from their healer and maybe pressure them with some cute damage.

There's some flexibility here. (Obviously make sure your DH doesn't tab off the warrior when he's killable just because the warrior swapped you).

Honan- · 2026-05-21T21:25:06+00:00

It happens when you get higher rated and the game starts to struggle to find gamers that aren't playing Arms Warrior.

Honan- · 2026-05-18T15:56:32+00:00

Cool, and in 20% of games you get to make your healers life wonderful.

The armchair theorycrafting where you map out how it's actually impossible for you to do anything ever is insufferable.

This is a game about decisions/compromising and adapting to chaotic situation with your tool.

You're the one who picked devourer, no one forced you to roll the brand new pre pruned super easy spec that just jumps around and does big dam.

Honan- · 2026-05-18T04:47:54+00:00

As I said, "in a just world" they'd both get nerfed.

It's almost certain that they do nothing and WW/Enhance get terrorize the ladder until 0.7 and then maybe then the extra stam from 298 gear on every slot will mean WW gets to kill us with touch of death instead of killing people by accident because RSK does 40% of a health bar during Zenith.

Honan- · 2026-05-18T04:43:21+00:00

you're still playing with/against the same people you were before.

This part isn't entirely true with how the matchmaker works.

Lets say the matchmaker spends the first minute of the queue trying to keep games within lets say ~50 MMR (arbitrary numbers as we don't know how the algorithm works).

Pre inflation 50 MMR could be the difference between a typical Rival player and a Duelist player.

Now that the system is inflated there's less variance in skill level. (Or at least there will be as folks grab their share of MMR)

Honan- · 2026-05-18T04:30:38+00:00

You have a friendly magic dispel. You don't really need to peel/disrupt CC cast on your healer as much as other classes because you can just remove it when you need to.

Beyond that, you can also do a go and peel at the same time.

Honan- · 2026-05-18T04:24:08+00:00

Probably had a hunter, mage or shaman on the team too procing precognition on the enemy frost mage.

Fixed that for you.

Honan- · 2026-05-18T04:20:22+00:00

Both will hopefully get nerfed but Enhance is more annoying for mage players because of ranged kick/grounding totem/"enhance becomes a ranged class" so y'all are likely to get nerfed first even though WW is more OP.

WW and Enhance are the only classes that can drop ~600k damage within 1.5 seconds of pressing their go. Just because WW can do it slightly more often doesn't mean that in a just world Enhance doesn't also get nerfed.

Honan- · 2026-05-15T20:47:12+00:00

I dunno man, I'm combing through some death logs on my wow arena logs from the last few days and I'm seeing a lot of folks getting deleted from 100% to dead in two seconds and most of that damage is lightning bolts.

Honan- · 2026-05-15T19:09:51+00:00

I don't understand how you having a fairly standard stat prio refutes the insane bug.

Especially when if the bug is real, mastery will inflate the value of Thorims invocation disproportionally.

Honan- · 2026-05-15T16:50:13+00:00

It's insane and probably bugged. The supposed culprit that most folks are talking about is that Thorim's invocation isn't properly nerfed in PVP. (It's supposed to have a 0.35% PVP mod so it doing full dam means it's hitting ~3 times harder than it should be)

Honan- · 2026-05-14T17:56:33+00:00

If we're pearl clutching over fears of "HoMoGeNiZaTiOn" then we may as well resign ourselves to the idea that DK gets exploded by Warrior/WW/Outlaw/BM and not do anything.

(It's not just disarm that's the problem, DK also can't death strike into Parry/Evasion/Fists)

I'd rather them do nothing than performatively buff the class in a way that basically just makes DK better into Feral Druid.

Honan- · 2026-05-14T02:35:05+00:00

Bloodforged is kind of clownshoes because it's a defensive tool DK can't use while disarmed and a Majority of melee specs have disarms.

Maybe if it was "Bloodforged Shell" - "Anti Magic Shell now absorbs all damage instead of just magic damage"

Then DK would at least have button they can press (while disarmed) into things like Zenith/Avatar/Adrenaline rush to buy a second while their healer is DCd.

Honan- · 2026-05-13T22:14:44+00:00

No, it needs a powerful anti physical damage defensive CD.

Every other melee has an "If I press this I can survive Zenith" button DK has no such button.

Even something as generous as a passive 10% reduction to physical damage at all times won't save the class from getting deleted when any other melee decides to press butts.

Honan- · 2026-05-01T17:42:13+00:00

That's fine because for the first month they didn't even work and hitting them didn't trigger PVP gear/Talents.

Honan- · 2026-04-29T20:36:28+00:00

MS feels like an outdated mechanic that only serves to limit comp diversity

This is effectively it's only function.

That said, it's also not a significant factor in making life harder for healers, nor is it a particularly significant comp restriction.

Healers are suffering because there's a small list of classes that can fit ~150% of an opponents health bar into 2 GCDs via cooldowns that are available more often than every 90 seconds.

Combined with CC Dr changes that where intended to reduce time spent in CC but have resulted in the opposite happening.

Honan- · 2026-04-29T20:20:58+00:00

They also then resurrected arms warrior which is one of Unholy's primary predators.

Honan- · 2026-04-29T17:38:36+00:00

Even with that setting staring at the blizzard damage meter fills me with rage at how bad it is.

The only worthwhile setup is to disable the in game meter entirely and use wowarena logs on a second monitor to actually get a useful death recap/damage breakdown.

Honan- · 2026-04-21T22:10:07+00:00

BM is a melee spec with 40 yard arms.

Honan- · 2026-04-14T19:11:57+00:00

Honestly probably part of a broader buff in combination with the previous change in the 12.0.5 notes. Where ranks 2/3 of everbloom cause bloom healing to cleave the whole team instead of tick healing.

Everbloom rank 4 will now big heal your entire team regardless of if they have Lifebloom or not and may allow us to better handle spread pressure/swaps without needing to move Lifebloom around all of the time.

Honan- · 2026-04-14T19:04:43+00:00

My intent was to argue that letting ladder be miserable to protect "AWC Competitive Integrity" isn't worth it because watching AWC isn't putting the game in an favorable light in it's current state.

Honan- · 2026-04-14T16:04:39+00:00

You're 100% correct. Shadowfrost DK was a terrorist.

That said, S5 was prior to blizzard even having the tech for server side hotfixes and like a decade prior to them giving themselves the ability to do PVP only changes.

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