I like to play some casual battlegrounds to pass some time, without needing or wanting any rewards from it, I just think it’s fun and relaxing. Or I used to.
Not too long ago gear didn’t matter, was it Legion? I can’t remember. Anyway, everybody had like a template so everyone was on equal footing no matter their item level, give or take class balance. That was awesome.
In Battle for Azeroth that wasn’t the case, so when I returned from a long break mid-expansion my favorite pass time of running some casual battlegrounds sucked because I didn’t have the gear to compete. Thank god that expansion ended. In Shadowlands I’ve been having a blast again! Or rather, I was. Not anymore.
Now I’m having the opposite problem of what I was having in the previous expansion, now I’m finding myself out gearing a lot of other players. THAT IS NOT FUN!
It’s fun when it’s even, when you have to work for it. Not when you can steamroll the enemy team, or vice versa. Playing against players with higher or lower gear than yourself is simply no fun. You had a good system several years ago. Why did you change it?
P.S. While we’re on the topic, Deepwind Gorge sucks. I liked the old version. No idea why you had to replace it. Could’ve just added the new one as a separate battleground and kept the old one.
I am happy that players kind of have a similar view to what I am thinking about. I made a topic about it here: How To Improve The WoW PvP Experience if you want to read my view on it. I totally agree with what you say though on the point where it feels like either you are too strong for your opponents or they are outgearing you. For casual players I do not think that will make them want to stick to pvp.
Sadly I do not think that templating is a good solution either, because then you lose the progression feeling from getting gear. Instead I think they should make the progression like they made it in WoD for example where you geared up slowly with honor and then conquest. I can not remember being completly useless in WoD either but I still had fun gearing up because I did not get oneshot and it did not take ages.
Either make all gear equal and just have progress in ranking earn cool skins and mounts etc.
Or make the difference in iLevel like 10 levels so that the person who has the better gear has earned an improvement and the person who doesn’t have the gear still feels like they have a chance to compete or still offer some value to the team.
This system sucks for both geared or not geared. Sure some ppl will have fun, cos they like stomping ppl with zero effort, but its generally the worst pvp experience I can remember. Most things could potentially be solved by reasonable ilvl differencies between sets. Who the hell needs to go from 184 to 226/230 in a single tier of gear.
It is not the only solution, remove the 12 ranks of gear you have to grind through in order to get max gear. Also remove the rating cap - this way everyone is able to get the same gear.
Gear IS needed. Different gear gives you different stats and that is what can be fun about the game. Like in MOP when you could reforge your gear into one stat.
Remove the grinding and imbalance - not what makes players unique.
some players, or a large majority of players? My opinion is gear progression is needed, otherwise this game would seem completely pointless.
Problem is “only” the gap is too large. My 220 ilvl healer is unkillable for 207 ilvl players, this is the problem it should not feel like that. According to me it can’t be only these displayed stats, there is something else. i mean, i am 95% certain there are some damage reduction hidden behind ilvl diff. otherwise, you couldn’'t die in 2 seconds against players of your ilvl but be like immortal with only +2% versa / +3k hp more… If source code was open we could highlight this but all is a such mess, blizzard has probably lost track of it
If they just closed the gap from 197 to 226 to something like 216 to 226 it would be much more bearable. It would also mean the better players can simply have slightly better gear.
It’s all gone wrong with the upgrade system unfortunately.
Same ilvl for everybody should NEVER be added because of lazy people who prefer sitting in 197 ilvl since release,complaining about unbalance,rather than farming and gearing up to avoid getting farmed every time they enter bg.
Even tho they are minority,system like that doesnt deserve to be ingame.
What about sub 197 players (alts, newbs, returning players) complaining about imbalance, they being lazy too?
What about rated players complaining about imbalance? They lazy?
…is it just people who don’t/can’t play rated who qualify as lazy? …& that players shouldn’t have balance because of those people?
Don’t you find it lazy to win vs someone 1/2 your size? I think only being afk could someone exert less effort.
‘Gearing up’ isn’t the solution to massive ilvl disparity. Still.
And it won’t be tomorrow.
Well, we had this, but blizzard didnt consider this good enough, so they started innovating, I mean going back to the roots aka recycling the old content that doesnt fit nowadays wow at all.
Gear progression is for pve. In PvP only create imbalance and unfair games.
People cry about premades, but the main problem is the gear. People make premades to avoid 20k pug. Because when you queue and your whole team is pug, and the enemy team is full 40k, in the next bg you will look for geared premade.