Every time Blizzard has removed incentives to PVP in the past through gear progression people stop playing it. Right now there’s a strong incentive to keep playing ranked PVP to rank up your gear, when that’s gone it will basically be back to Legion templates.
Good, I want to enjoy some casual PvP after a long shift, thank you Blizzard Entertainment.
20 Likes
Yes it might kill PvP for like 20-30%. But it will revive it for another 70-80% of casuals like me who left after Legion when game became absolutely unplayable (because of terrible gearing) for people who just come home after 12h at work and want to play 2h of random BGs on 4 different classes just for fun of playing PvP. Or arenas at 1200 mmr as arms+hunter with your friend. Just for fun, nothing to lose or gain.
As for solo unranked(or below 1500 ranked) player MoP and WoD were the best. You could play the game like MOBA, gear fast, swap classes from BG to BG and have just pure fun without any goals and numbers in mind. Also game felt much less sweaty too. This season even 1200 is pure sweatfest. Noobs and casuals died out because of this BS gearing and chores of BfA and SL.
16 Likes
The upgrade bs made boosting popular and made the game less alt friendly, i’m so glad its gone and you can still upgrade your gear for PVE ilvl.
6 Likes
F rating gating. Nobody cares.
2 Likes
What statistic is your statement based on?
It was always the other way around.
Seasons with gear bound to rating had very low participation while expansions with easy to farm were very popular.
Examples:
S1, S2, S3 (BC) had huge participation drops
SL has the worst pvp participation and is on a level with BfA while WoD and MoP had great numbers of RBG/Arena teams and even Ashran was popular at one point.
Best thing when gear matters less and you don’t have to go full rating is:
Less boosting.
3 Likes
You mean random battlegrounds will be more popular for casuals, but rated pvp will have lower participation.
there will be gear progression. like in cata, mop and wod, you’ll start on the honor gear and replace it with conquest week after week.
1 Like
nothing wrong with that in a game with terrible balance.
And this is untrue too.
The participation this season is terrible in any rated bracket.
Reasons for this:
You get more booster teams running because people want rating for better gear which leads to a lot of people quitting because they are blocked in their rating by those boosting teams. You can’t beat players which are normally on 2,4k rating and full geared on your 1700 team. So you basically will always hit a wall. Either you lack the gear to get over a certain rating or you fight boosting teams 50% of your playtime.
This is exactly the situation we had in BC S1, S2, S3 with terrible low arena participation and this why Blizzard made rating irrelevant for getting gear in WotLk.
I don’t really know why they started beating that horse again in SL, maybe they really love making errors twice, but the current situation is exactly the same one from 15 years ago and putting gear behind rating will always lead to this situation.
You may want to look in one of the many threads in arena forums or this one here. And you see what you get when you make gear the most important part in pvp.
Normally it should be Skill > comp > gear. In WoW it has been a long time Comp > SKill > Gear and in SL it is Gear > Comp > Skill.
Under those circumstances players don’t wanna participate - except they are involved in RMT.
5 Likes
And gear is also gated behind rating, which is an absolute joke with how important gear is in shadowlands thanks to their 200000 stat multipliers on every ability
2 Likes
Good.
I really dislike the current ratrace.
Indeed, while it should be Skill > Comp > Gear
2 Likes
We’ll see but I highly doubt Blizzard is going to let people get geared out in a week like some are expecting. To compensate for no rating lock they will probably make it take months to get geared up, and then give a lot more honor and conquest in rated pvp than random BGs.
I get your points, but the current system of buying gear with conquest, then achieving rating before upgrading it further with honor is downright terrible.
I’m not even going to argue bUt wHaT aBoUt tHe nOoBs fAcinG gLads aT 1400!!!.
Its terrible because of the absolutely massive gap between honorgear and conquest gear. The higherst achievable gear for PvP right now is 311 Itemlevel, while a fully upgraded piece of honor gear gives barely 285 (and can’t even be made into tiergear which makes some classes borderline unplayable). Thats a gap of 26 itemlevels. That’s massive, you’re missing about 20% of raw DMG or Healing Amp (through strenght, agi or int) and not to forget secondary stats.
People should atleast have a decent (albeit theoretical) chance to whoop an elite/glad player in honor gear if he plays badly. Right now you could probably sit a Honorgear Andy’s burst without using defensives, go afk, get yourself a beer and then turn around and kill him through his def CDs. In my eyes that’s a massive problem with the game.
In rated content you most likely will never meet a fully geared player, unless it’s a rare booster, or the boostee who dropped back to 1400 after his carry, but the game isn’t only rated. I don’t got numbers, but I’m pretty sure the current system is dreadful for casual PvPers when they join a BG, Skirmish or Soloshuffle only to meet Mr.Glad who proceeds to oneshot the entire team.
The DF system seems more promising in that regard, if they don’t arbitrarily make the gap 20+ Itemlevels, which would be crazy. It would also help keep casual PvP alive, and perhaps some of the casuals will make the transition to rated if the game is more welcoming in the beginning.
5 Likes
It’s not how fast I can gear up, but the gap between honour and conquest gear, and between conquest level 1 and 7. The iLevel gap is far too big.
The current system seems tailored towards boosting, and that is definitely not what PvP should be about.
2 Likes
Pretty much. Legion was one of the expansions I played the most PvP, and it had templates.
1 Like
Legion was bad, since you had no control over your stats, created one dimensional gameplay. In my opinion WoD pvp gearing was the best (only positive from wod), but WoW still missing soloq grindable pvp content, bg’s should give more conquest, or they could make the offpieces cost honor again.
3 Likes
No gear should ever be hidden away in rated content. The basic of PvP is that you have good fight with people in your favored bracket. If people prefer solo queue over rated arena, let them. If people prefer random bg or epic bg over rated bg, just let them.
But never bring them into a massive disadvantage because they want to do solo content. Especially when they still have to fight people that do rated.
It was just great times when you could just fill your conquest bar without jumping through blizzards loops.