I know it sounds ridiculous at first but try to consider at least. Modern blizzard’s custom interactions buffed Ulduar PvE gear which created insane entry barriers for PvP and made it fully PvE dependent (252 ilvl pvp vs 232 ilvl pvp).
In Season 6 this lead to more than 50% reduced arena participation compared to all 5 PvP seasons before. Season 7 reached new all time low participation in classic wow and while ICC phase is probably gonna bring many people back, Im afraid it will be even worse for PvP.
With the Shadowmourne changes many people will have it which will make it mandatory for all of the classes that use it to have it in order to be competitive. It’s less likely (and also completely wrong) to expect many PvP players to have prio in a guild for it and the gdkp prices are like 1 mln.
Please note that this suggestion is a counter meassure against the custom PvE buff to the weapon drops which will again negatively impact PvP by floating it with legendary weapons. Having the original approach would keep it away from s8 long enough, however with the new changes it will be a disaster.
The PvP alternative may scale worse in PvE and only be equal in PvP.
I would say that they should just ban it in pvp instead (to the level of you cant have it equipped in arena but BGs sure), then no pressure for the pvp players to get it and no need to add something new and try to have it balanced with less than a month left until the phase starts
As a prospective SHM owner:
Outright banning it isn’t a great idea, since for some classes there are no good alternatives. For example, for warriors the 2nd bis for PvP is a polearm that warriors don’t even use in PvE, and therefore you can only get it for offspec once all the hunters and ferals had theirs. So I’m firmly against banning it, HOWEVER, there are many alternative solutions:
You could add a PvP weapon to the PvP vendors, which is the equivalent to 25hc weapons in stats, a lot of which would be resilience so that people don’t use it in PvE.
You could also just take away some of its stats, and/or disable its proc when in arenas to bring it back in line with other 25hc weapons.
You could also provide a PvP avenue to earning it. If you’re worried about PvE players abusing that avenue, make the PvP version only usable in arenas/bgs.
There are lots of ways to fix this issue, that don’t affect PvE balance, and would be an objective boon to PvP balance. However, we are all aware that Blizzard thinks of PvP as an afterthought, more like a minigame in the context of the actual game. Therefore I doubt they would spare any resources to figuring it out.
I do not see a specific problem with shadowmourne. While its much more powerful than alternatives, it was part of wotlk that pve items were necessary for most classes/specs in arena to stay competitive. For example, having or not having the icc/rs trinkets is impactful on a similar level to having or not having shadowmourne. For healers, having or not having solace/bauble was a game changer too. Wotlk arena is raid or die, especially for physical dps classes.
The only change that I would advice is disabling all legendary item procs, for valanyr/shadowmourne, but also the coming cataclysm legendary items in arena, to keep the power levels a bit more in line, at least for the weapons.
you can run your own icc 25 full normals with shards hr, it will take you approx 2h per week to fill it up, and another 3-4 for the run. you will have ur shadowmourne in less than 2 months even with bad groups and semiunlucky drops.
you make the problem seem bigger than it is, yes legendary are unbalanced in arena, but then again all the legendaries (tbc ones included) were op in arena, and all the previous legendaries were harder to make as well
Sir thank you for explaining the issue better than me and prooving why Blizz shall interact.
Many people will do exactly what you are saying and this will flood arena with SM, therefore every pvp player that doesn’t find it a good game design to spend 6 hours per week doing a normal raid for 3 months will leave the game.
Also players that enjoy PvE will not commit to losing their HC id for 3 months.
Like ye wotlk pve gear is good but blizz makes it mandatory with 2023 changes and people just simple quit - they didnt quit first 5 pvp seasons while pve was op there as well, people quit pvp the monent modern blizz interacted with PvE gear.
i think a lot of the pvp players quit back in tbc, when blizz changed the arena mmr system, and they were never convinced to come back. i do agree with you tho, 1600 rating teams are gonna be full of warriors with sm and their valanyr holy pala friends. i dont think there is a reasonable solution to this tho