As a werewolf from 2015, I am not going to even try doing that to my companions. However I don't discrimate against free meat in pvp either friend or foe...

The other thing I think people are missing is just on live, even if a "zerg" comes anywhere close you can normally deal with it. But thats usually because on live a zerg guild is usually 24 players and rarely more, which you can just streak and walk away from at 200% movement speed. When back in the old day or in vengeance the dynamic makes most zerg groups upwards of 50-100 players sometimes more which will just run you down if you are not specifically built for speed sustain.

There's also the question of do we really rather ballgroups vs zergs holding control over the map? As an old 1vX smallman player I would much rather these 100man zergs running along the transitus. Then I can focus on pulling smaller groups off to the side or to resources. Its dumb to go stand in the middle of a transitus getting run over by 100 people and complaining "its just zergs"......Uh yeah thats how a 900 player server is like, there is going to be large groups. If I ran my old ballgroup even I would prefer zergs being an overwhelming force, its the only way they stay involved in the campaign and helps prevent population collapse.

That being said, veng doesn't have the right build elements in it to get build diversity to the point where we can tailor for specific content. I would much rather change the perk+loadout stat bonuses into a vengeance UI based stickerbook gear system. This way you can unlock veng gear and then drag and drop it onto your veng character which would be saved when you exit/enter pvp. This way we get the best of all worlds where we can make it quick and easy for players to jump in and out to play without hours of QoL issues sorting gear and messing up their pve loadouts. Start off with simple noproc gear and then SLOWLY introduce good performative proc stat sets like clever alch, avoiding sets with absurd proc conditions and over complications. Personally i think for pvp health you are better off sticking away from sets like viper that do an off GCD skill automatically for you, which can also cloud the visuals of pvp with overblown VFX.

I know many, many people who really enjoy subclassing, and its opened up new ways of playing and new areas of the game for many people.

The people I know that left, left more because of the complexity and need to relevel than anything to do with the idea of subclassing. And people I have seen coming back, are only really coming back because they've had a general break from the game because of real life elements and not because of anything to do with what is changing with the game or how the game was. I've seen more people leave because of the battlepass than because of subclassing. I also know people staying away because of the perceived complexity of the game compared to the game they played before.

People with an issue or ideas will always be more engaged with forums, be that subclassing, vengeance, connectivity, list times in traders, the trading system, that's there's too much to do, that there is too little to do, too much downtime for patching, take more time to do patching, speed running of dungeons, why do I have to wait for others in dungeon etc etc. The vast majority of people are silent on forums (90-9-1 rule for engagement)

With the play as you want approach there is no way subclassing should be removed and its only really an issue for DDs, I wouldn't mind if all the class mastery passives were there to deal with power discrepancy caused there, in my opinion subclassing has put tanks and healers are in a much better space, but it hasn't changed the viability of the pureclasses.

I agree that one way to handle the situation is to ignore all the stuff you don't want to do, but it's annoying how difficult the game makes it to do that.

I have multiple addons to remove or minimise unwanted notifications and pop-up text and other noise about things I'm not currently doing and even then there's a few steps to go through to clear stuff I don't want to know about so I can focus on actually playing the game. Which is especially frustrating for a game that was originally advertised as having a minimalist UI and "play the way you want" approach.

It also doesn't feel great when the choice offered is "you either do this now, on our schedule, or you don't do it at all". Yes players can make that choice, but it's very different to the system we had up until recently when the majority of things could be played on your own schedule and it was only occasional events which were time-limited.

You can learn to ignore it, you can accept you're going to miss out and that's ok, you can clear out the clutter and shut off the noise and learn to focus on what you're doing, but those are the kind of choices you make for something you have to get done, not something you're choosing (and paying) to do for fun.

Having to jump down for 1-2 seconds on a team that can already beat you is like salt in the wound though. They need to give spawn invicibility for a few seconds so people atleast have a chance. Sometimes you take fall damage too cuz eso spaghetti code