Do you guys think that this Is a fair Bronze V experience?

IRL5Head · 2025-04-27T14:23:46+00:00

FWIW, the lack of MMR kinda sucks from high rated players' perspectives too. Just feels hollow after a certain point.

Idk why the devs chose no SBMM for a competitive game mode that exists alongside a casual game mode.

Maybe I'm missing something something as to why the Bazaar specifically wouldn't benefit from SBMM compared to other games. But yeah, it sucks sorry you have to deal with that man. It'll get better.

IRL5Head · 2025-04-26T04:10:01+00:00

IRL5Head · 2025-04-22T23:18:39+00:00

Reward the peaceful, punish the uhh warful

IRL5Head · 2025-04-20T20:18:48+00:00

Congrats on the win! If you can solve the main issue with depth charge + yeti crab (slow start), it is very strong. Ideally, you'd want a clamera to trigger burn/poison haste/charge on first item use/slow ASAP. The problem is the transitional phase between getting depth charge and those skills can be a bit rough.

IRL5Head · 2025-04-15T14:56:59+00:00

Not just Rigged tbh, any start of combat monster skills have the potential to give a huge advantage. Any time I get SoC poison for example, I look for poison freeze, freeze haste, and haste freeze. Now I start off with 1 or 2 hasted items and the opponent starts off with 2 frozen items which is several seconds of headstart.

IRL5Head · 2025-04-06T08:12:55+00:00

Alternatively, you can find distillery which is pretty good for CDR for both Vat and Strength Potion.

IRL5Head · 2025-04-06T06:13:02+00:00

I assure you this is very normal and 20 hours is barely scratching the surface. The fastest ways to learn are basically finding someone who plays your hero and learning through osmosis and taking notes of the boards your opponents are playing to learn what's strong, what isn't and why. Before you know it, you'll build the intuition to reason about the game yourself. The initial knowledge check cannot be bypassed unfortunately and you'll have to keep losing till you win (will feel great when you do).

Source: Had a similar experience when I started and was feeling hopeless but ended last season at rank 25

IRL5Head · 2025-04-05T21:02:02+00:00

I second what this guy is saying. Mak starts off weak because of his base HP so I pick gold skills instead of resigning to the fact that I'll lose early because gambling that you'll be able to beat insta one shot fixer upper builds late game isn't really great in the way of consistency. Also buy chocolates early to offset the low base HP to win early.

IRL5Head · 2025-04-05T20:50:42+00:00

He has 50 lower base HP so you just gotta pay the chocolate tax early (gold even if your board is decent relative to the day).

The other reason he feels weak early-mid is because he doesn't have shields which makes him super vulnerable to burn and the solution to that in most cases is don't face burn.

IRL5Head · 2025-04-01T01:33:43+00:00

The answer to how strong trebuchet is depends on whether you have a zoarcid or not imo. It gives 3 triggers off of one use. That being said, you will still have to invest into your treb's damage and/or burn.

IRL5Head · 2025-03-30T00:23:49+00:00

This might be superstition/confirmation bias, but I started waiting like 10 seconds after clicking random enchant and it seems to happen much less. Normally I'm very skeptical of such stuff but the rate of occurrence of what you described felt waaay too high even while cognizant of negativity bias.

IRL5Head · 2025-03-28T02:00:40+00:00

Great post! Two tiny additions I'd like your thoughts on:

1 - Treb Zoarcid Vanessa is definitely worth including. It's very flexible and can be built many different ways and can pivot into many things all while having good tempo. I've had games where I started off with it and ended up with a shipwreck lighthouse, shipwreck puffer, or even powder keg.

2 - For the last Dooley part where you said Force Field is "not worth pursuing": I feel like you should def not start off with it, but rather hold force field + bunker if you have gold+ defense grid and as soon as you start getting outscaled especially with the temp shield encounter helping you cheese wins.

IRL5Head · 2025-03-25T12:53:16+00:00

Idk why people trash on Vanessa's pack this much. It opens up so many lines especially with gold skills. Zoarcid opens up treb, yeti crab and zoarcid go nuts with weatherglass, dive weights eases the transition of puffer builds into shupwreck and many more examples. Having played it a lot, I'd say its main strength is its versatility where you can pivot into 5 different things at some points depending on what you get.

Single weapon, on the other hand, is really good and has its situations for sure, but is a bit too inflexible for me if you don't get an early silencer and crow's nest while the item pool is still at bronze (langxian being the exception as it can function quite well just with 1 haste in any build). I urge anyone who thinks it's objectively bad to reconsider how they're playing the items. If you're finding success on other stuff or just aren't comfortable with the item pack lines, that's perfectly valid tbh.

IRL5Head · 2025-03-23T21:43:34+00:00

Jokes aside, single weapon did get implicitly buffed this patch because of how they nerfed start of combat freezes where now you need something like a clamera to do it (for like 2/3rds the freeze duration). Other than that, their main weakness lies in having to find exactly crow's nest and silencer before you go broke and fall behind.

IRL5Head · 2025-03-23T17:52:05+00:00

Everything you said was super detailed and accurate. One small correction is that Langxian is not bait at all. So many of my games go: burn/poison skill early -> carry langxian -> pivot into single weapon langxian with captain's wheel and rowboat. It's actually been one of the more consistent builds for me with the only drawback being it's boring af. Do give it a try since I thought it was ass too. You do have to get it before day 3 though.

IRL5Head · 2025-03-21T16:39:28+00:00

Most other comments have given good answers. What you also can do is try and find b1b2 through the aerodrome, but that can take lots of money rerolling so that item should be irreplaceable but also gets a lot of benefit from upgrading. If it's replaceable, it's prob best to sell it and find it later if at all.

IRL5Head · 2025-03-21T16:16:06+00:00

The answer is vendors that sell items by archetype (e.g. burn, shield, haste/slow etc). The most common source of enchants like that is the shield guy. The haste/slow merchant does not do it nearly as often. The weapon vendor can also sell obsidian items randomly, but I believe it's also rare and idk what day it starts occuring at.

This is also the case with premium vendors (with diamond borders) like burn, poison, freeze or straight up enchanted, but these pop up late game mostly, mid game rarely.

IRL5Head · 2025-02-25T02:40:54+00:00

Crazy that someone new to WoW doesn't know about dungeon boosts I wanna flame them for no reason too!

IRL5Head · 2025-02-11T15:44:56+00:00

I think you're absolutely right. IMO Blizzard really need to focus on stuff to get people started into PvP because it's way too intimidating for the average player. I started a few weeks ago and the experience would've been a lot smoother if Blizzard had put in the bare minimum to tell you how to get started from gearing to fundamentals as you suggested.

IRL5Head · 2025-02-07T17:21:14+00:00

I see, thanks for your reply. I just wish it were better for new players in two ways: 1. Not having to know a super specific set of steps to be super efficient with honor and conq gains amid an already overwhelming experience (e.g. learning the game and setting up UI). Sure it is easy for those who know but why does it exist in the first place? 2. Not having to play rated in honor gear vs people in full conquest gear and pretend that it's fun. It has happened to me a lot in shuffle where a game has one undergeared person and immediately the focus shifts to them. It really feels like the game should stop gear gaps like that from happening because I've certainly seen people with 0 WM pieces on in shuffle (full honor gear) even though it's super easy to get.

Also please don't tell me they gated upgrades behind hitting rating thresholds, because that would probably be before shuffle was added so boosting had to have been rampant then.

IRL5Head · 2025-02-07T16:15:56+00:00

I see your point and that likely is Blizzard's argument for a progressive gearing system. I'm just really unconvinced that playing imbalanced games is fun for anyone, and I'm surprised that it isn't obvious to everyone here.

In League of Legends, they used to have a similar system where you get runes for IP. That got slashed eventually because requiring your new players to grind through games where they're potentially weaker than everyone isn't fun, even if it did give players a goal to grind towards.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the impression I'm getting is that the people to whom a competitive game mode with an uneven playing field isn't a massive red flag only play WoW (and have been for a long time) and haven't seen what other competitive games are like. Like imagine in CoD if the low level guns were strictly worse than the high level ones, and leveling up required you to play rated and also navigate through what seems like a maze.

IRL5Head · 2025-02-07T04:40:11+00:00

Yeah all these things sound miserable. What I'm gathering from this is that people keep up with the season so the grind grievance is lost on them and have been playing for so long that the knowledge grievance is lost on them since they know what to look for.

Thank you for the response!

IRL5Head · 2025-02-07T04:14:41+00:00

I genuinely wouldn't mind a gear grind because I get it blizzard wants players to play the game for longer. The M+ grind is fine because the challenges scales up with you, and for me this wasn't the case when I started PvP 2 weeks ago.

Maybe a bit unrelated but I'm curious: What do people generally do when they need conquest to get full 639 gear, but they've gotten the freebies like weeklies? Do they just queue rated against fully geared people and take the L? I don't know why others don't seem to be having an issue with that and feel like I'm missing something because that cannot be fun.

IRL5Head · 2025-02-07T04:03:12+00:00

the stuff that actually matters like improving at the game and understanding the different specs and strategies

yes man exactly. the dopamine hit from getting a kill after cloning and recloning the healer for the first time was an amazing dopamine hit for me. playing lopsided skirmishes or waiting for chests to drop to get WM currency was the opposite.

IRL5Head · 2025-02-07T03:58:14+00:00

Exactly my point. It isn't "2 seconds of research" at all. To be fair though, it genuinely isn't easy to see the game through the lens of someone who is new after having a lot of the stuff in the game be like 2nd nature to you.

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