Seconded

I thought maybe ranked was solo only or something, but, no. Neither casual nor ranked can be played with a friend? Absolutely mad.

Blah blah pre-mades, I dealt with pre-mades in WoW BGs for 15 years. They're annoying but the solution is to just match pre-mades with pre-mades. Either through the match making (Which I will assume the game simply can't do) or a team queue. The mode itself is pretty fun but not being able to play with my usual friends from the Feast days is really saddening.

With Feast gone my friends and I have no team PvP to do together as a small group. We don't like Frontlines as there's no ranked mode and the 1v1v1 nature of it makes it a mess outside a casual daily (Which most just AFK in anyway). And while I know team queue will be less popular (It's the case in most PvP games), I'd happily wait a few minutes longer if it meant I could actually play with friends.

At the very least make it a ranked thing, casual? Sure, solo only. I expect most will play casual mode by default anyway.