The new arena map

Initially I liked the new arena map. It felt like a standardized way of fighting in a flattened smooth gym environment that featured flat ground, elevation, stairs and pillars without random stuff in the way to get stuck against and without the fps issues. The old Deathmatch map had pillars some classes could go up and camp in and lots of stuff like roots to get stuck against. But I along with what feels like a majority when I talk about it have grown to prefer the old map.

Detaching from combat is very easy for anyone and if you play priest (or rogue) you can just jump up and down the layers because if you walk off a ledge you can do a jump with the height of ascend. This means that if I try to do everything in my power to win a fight I have to win it in a completely unrealistic and cheesy way that will never work in extraction. Priests are very strongly favoured on the new map and that makes it unenjoyable for me as a priest player.

The stairs up are very narrow and favours frost mages very hard since they can cover it with an ice path.

The map is an ok size for solos but too small for team fights. The 5 minute timer is also too short for some matchups and its very hard to run out of meds or class tools unlike before.

You could in a way say that the old Deathmatch arenas were better designed because they were worse designed. They were just a snippet of greenwood day green ruins or the castle and that made them more realistic, you could find yourself having a fight in those environments in extraction and it made the combat be more like rehearsing a scenario minus the PVE. Random spawns meant that an uncertainty and surprise attacks existed which is a normal part of extraction games but on the new arena map you more or less always know where your opponent is.

The new arena map has a function which is to be a fun jungle gym to fight in but other than that I believe most players would prefer to fight in a cutout of extraction maps. It could be one map for most POI or at least one map for each of the most popular fighting zones because that is the environment players desire to learn to fight in.

Alternatively the new map could be redesigned to be perhaps 4 times bigger, only 2 layers, some ruins building. Something to replicate a realistic extraction fight to make it a good map to train in where you won’t pick up bad habits.