I’ve never really liked gearing in PvP because I think PvP is most fun when everyone is on equal footing. GW2 has a good system, but it probably wouldn’t work for World of Warcraft. I think the three tier system was a decent enough compromise. This system pretty much requires PvP stats to work, though, for reasons already highlighted in this thread.
This, for instance. Taking down a boss in a mythic raid is more challenging than playing a battleground x number of times, so should the gear reward really be on the same level?
PvP stats are a solution to this problem. It may not be the most elegant solution, but surely a solution is better than no solution.
Didn’t have them in WoD. We just had all PvP items go up 20 ilvl in PvP. (Which left conquest gear 5 ilvls above mythic) As a spec that thrived on specific stats I thoroughly enjoyed that more than losing my haste budget for resilience or similar.
It also meant if I wanted super specific stats that weren’t on PvP items, I could drop 5 ilvl and grab them in pve on things like bracers.
I’ll take your word for it. I didn’t really play in WoD, so can’t comment on what PvP was like during that expansion. I did most PvP in Cataclysm and I thought the three tier system back then was pretty decent. You had the crafted gear and then you had two tiers from PvP. It didn’t take too long to get the best gear. Finally, if you were an arena god, you got a cool paintjob to show off your skills.
Bliz removed PvP stats from gear completely. The items were indistinguishable from PvE except they had their PvP set bonus (Usually not something relevant to DPS in the way a pve one was) and they were 15 ilvls lower (I think) than their respective pve difficulty item.
Then in PvP they went up 20, putting them 5 ilvls above instead.
The only issue this had, and I agree it was a problem, was that honour gear by default ended up just being better than any of the catch-up gear systems added in 6.2 for new players. Maybe this can be solved cleverly but I don’t think it was reason enough to scrap a whole system either.
Honestly I believe templates would have worked if they came with some sort of interface that allowed me to shuffle my stats around a bit and make different builds.
I don’t see how they are, because despite templates helping a tonne in pvp, having a character that actually functions in the game is good too.
While pvpers might not want to do dedicated pve content like mythic plus or raids, many still enjoy collecting / completing story content, farming gold, and other such things that a semi competent open world ilvl tends to help with.
If I put all my “competitive” time into PvP and all I get out of it is 400 ilvl blues, even if my gear basically doesn’t matter at all in the PvP, I’ve still put a tonne of time into something and would expect to get something competent out of it. That’s what the honour system did, and what I hope it’ll do again.
OMG. All scaling system is awful trash. Staircase system the ideal option was, is and will be. Its when you step by step upgrade you gear in brave and honor fights on BG’s, Arenas, World PVP, earning honor points and arena points. This RPG! The weak player must be killed by the strong. No system to help should not be. PVE crabs must remove their pincers from the PVP direction. Bring back the PVP vendors, res, etc.
Make these claims to Blizzard. This is again a poor scaling system. Need to do: the higher the level of the enemy, the less chance to hit it. Damage is also reduced in progression.
And how exactly do you think you can only play pvp and gear up when the entire expansion is about covenants, soulbinds and legendaries?
Add more stats to the mix and it’ll only make it much harder to gear up and when you do, you’ll be useless in PVE with that gear and vice versa. Not to mention the mess it’ll be for balancing. Even worse than what it is right now.
The solution is to make pvp gear as valuable as pve gear depending on the difficulty of the content. Not to replace it with pvp gear.
This is the problem though. PvP is not difficulty correlated content. You have rated and unrated, and a ladder, but nothing about that specifically correlates to difficulty by design. You’re playing against people, not tuned NPC’s in scripted environments.
Casual PvP content, namely battlegrounds, is also such a different environment compared to queue-able PvE content that any comparison feels forced. Queued PvP content is a melting pot of all sorts of skill levels, item levels, classes, specs, motivations, and dispositions. You don’t move on from it, so to me the idea that anyone who does just battlegrounds is significantly worse off in battlegrounds than someone who does less of that content is ludicrous.