Gear over skill

Hello all World of Warcraft PvP enthusiasts,

What is this topic about?
About gearing in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands PvP scene.
What is the motive for the topic?
To get the Devs attention off the horrible state of Shadowlands PvP.
Why write the topic?
To either get support or a good debate from the rest of the community regarding the negative impact gear has in PvP at the moment.

I have recently leveled a mage to 60 and am now well under way to get him geared, he is currently at iLvl 230. While doing Battlegrounds and Arena for farming honor and conquest I finally realized how much gear actually matters. Never have I been more discouraged to play the game in any PvP scenario. When you join a BG and see the other team has +10K more HP in average than your team, you just go AFK in a cornor and wait for it all to be over. You have NO chance whatsoever to win and your skills and coordination can not compensate for it. Problem with this type of gameplay is that it encourages people with low gear to just forfeit, and all the fun is sucked out for all parties.
Now, I also mentioned arena. I am not a high ranked player myself on that scene, but Absterge is. If you want to see how a professional player struggles to get out of 1800 rating, just because his gear is bad, you should see some of his videos on Youtube or Twitch.

In short: Decrease the impact of gear so that skill matters more and way more people will actually be motivated to play the game. As Tyler1 would have said it: ā€œFix your ****ing game! It sucks playing this ****! But I am addicted so I canā€™t quit!ā€
The reason for me to bring in that quote is; even though people still play the game, does not mean that state of it is good. Some of us hopes for changes and better times. Fix the game - start by gearing and its impact - or you will see a bigger decrease in members.

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They already answer all is fine, l2grind (l2buyboost, l2play) - we are zupa gut.

They are approaching PvP like its PvE when in fact PvP starts when players have full gear. Now random people who love random BGs canā€™t do that no more.

Many players arenā€™t interested about 3v3 for one bit, but they are being forced there because in this expansion PvP gear power has never been this impactful. Blizzard thinks players will learn to like Arena because they must like it, for reasonsā€¦

So obviously their ā€œphilosophyā€ is not working because every big server I knew from EU back ā€œthoseā€ days are almost dead. And how do I know this? AHā€™s are fricking empty as hell, so is Durotar and Elwynn. Activity of Guilds has dropped to almost zero.

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Nice try, sir. Now the only thing missing is making Blizzard to read pvp forums.

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In the past, Blizzard did tried to make the pvp more fair, by creating templates and PVP scalling, with little disparities between a well gear character and a low one, but people just asked for the return of ā€˜ā€˜Gear should matterā€™ā€™ mentality in PVP for Shadowlands and complained about the PVP scalling after Rextroyā€™s videos. Well, sometime listening to the community isnt that great after all.

The problem with PVP in Legion and BFA (outside of corruptions) was way more tied to gear aquisition than this scalling system, but Blizzard had no choice but removing if after all the bad press this system had, system that were working fine for 95% of players, preventing anybody to oneshot another player only by gear disparity. Without it, the only moment where PVP feels good for casual PvPers is the first week of an expansion. After that, it becomes harder and harder for a Casual to keep up with Ranked players. 9.2 will be even worse on that if nothing is done.

The addition of PVP vendor should have been enough. Scalling shouldnā€™t have been removed but refined.

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Like who asked for it? PvErs? Because all I can remember was screwed scaling system that did not work as intended. Fixing it would fix the issue, but instead they just removed the mechanic altogether and gave us pve gearing, which makes zero sense in pvp.

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I remember when SL released, the complaints from non-rated players rolled in about the impending imbalance & resulting garbage gameplay.
There was a ton of pvprs saying how great this system was & ā€™if you donā€™t do high end content, you donā€™t deserve high-end gear / itā€™s mmorpg / but progression / gear mattering (huge gear disparity) is goodā€™
I saw posts talking about ā€˜gear should matter againā€™ back in Legion.
The community push back on Templates & complaints of scaling. (Admittedly there were some legit complaints, but the whole point of those systems were to balance PvP to make it more skill based).
PvPā€™rs did complain about it.
Now we have thisā€¦

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I think what they should do is scale down (or up) all pvp gear to 233 in non-rated pvp content (random bgs, ebgs, etc.), this would discourage monkeys to create honor farming premades with full elite geared people to stomp randoms who are just trying to gain renown or farm some conquest to purchase rated gear while also stepping up the level of skill. This will however never happen, because, from what i read on forums, theres alot of PvPrs that refuse to even acknowledge the fact that gear matters 1000 times more then skill in this game which is why the PvP community is literally dying right now. Too big barriers of entry, almost no skill involved until you hit high rating and even if these 2 things dont discourage you from touching PvP and you push through them chances are you will burn out very soon, push a bit more to hit 2.1k, quit and never touch PvP again for the rest of the season because of how god awful it is.

Its also very fun to sit in Oribos for 30 minutes to try and get some dude that will call you grabage and leave after the first loss. But then again, alot of PvPrs were against soloQ.

Imo, let the PvPrs have PvP their way, if they dont care that the gm they play is dying who cares, just dont make badge bis pve trinket for ret next season.

Some members of the PvP community (not the majority ofcourse, but theres plenty of them) will eventually cause the death of PvP. The biggest enemy of the WoW PvP arent the devs, the devs are the 2nd biggest. The 1st place take these diehard PvP Andys who want to make their gm as inaccesible as possible for whatever reason.

I agree that this current state of pvp system is horrible,i feel you my friend and like hey
some people try to get some qonquest gear by doing random battlegrounds and in the worst case enemy gear is much more above yours and you loose because of this.

Iā€™m not trying to say that trying is bad to achieve a victory in a battleground, itā€™s just the fact that many times you canā€™t stand a chance against double gear of what you have earned.
Iā€™m fine with the fact that i have to work to achieve getting my gear but making it fair for people is something that has to be there.

All i can say since have seen much more better days in past is hey fix it this isnā€™t warcraft we loved play since TBC,addicted yes but come on this isnā€™t fair at all.

Cheers and have all a great day and hope for better days.

Is this a joke? Nobody asked for that during Legion. People asked for customizeable templates because playing a caster with 10% haste was awful and you had some melees with 20-25% mastery where they needed crit.

Stop lying through your teeth.

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Well, iā€™m all with you on that, but iā€™m not lying. I am all for customizeable template and a fair PVP. I despite gear systems in PVP settings, but the devs did not listened me or you, but those who wanted to come back to a more Classic way of gearing, where gear progression is a thing in PVP.

If you want my honest opinion, Wow PVP is not skillfull at the moment. The mecanics are great, but the gear is just getting in the way of being a great feature. I tried Gw2, Teso, Swtor and FF14 PVP systems. I cant say Wow is the worse, but clearly, the Templates from Gw2 and the fact that you can create a character and almost immediatly go PVP with it without having to farm levels, stuff or any other system is awesome. In PVP everybody is scalled evenly. The 2 only difference between two players are their skill and their build.

I advocate for that in Wow, customizeable template build, and scalling to max level in instanced PVP. Just pick a character and start PVPing. Furtermore, free players should be able to play with everyone by the same system in instanced PVP to reach a bigger audience and then, and only then, wow could really pretend to have a great E-sport scene.

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Man I really hate this argument.

Do these people actually realize in ranked arena there is no gear / power progression? To explain this, let me give a small example.

Lets say you are playing in the 1400 bracket and your ilvl is 246. Majority of the time, your opponent is going to have a similiar ilvl.

You played, got better, hit the 1600 bracket and now your ilvl is 249. Hereā€™s the funny part; you did not make a ā€œpower progressionā€. Because guess what; now your opponents too have 249 ilvl. You are literally at where you were when you had 1400 cr.

Power progression matters in contents where you canā€™t beat a difficulty but later can due to increase in power. M+ for example, you couldnā€™t do +20 keys with 225 ilvl but can do now with 252 ilvl.

Please keep in mind this rant is not towards you, i read your comment. Its towards people that defend ā€œpower progressionā€ in ranked PvP or PvP in general.

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Absterge enjoys the struggle thatā€™s why 1800 is easy for him but maybe for you it doesnā€™t look easy because you donā€™t enjoy the struggle?

I see your point on that, but still, actually there is 3 problems with gear progression actually, even if everyone has the same ilevel in a given bracket.


1. Some people dont play in the bracket tied to their gear, by intentionnally reducing their rank, being for boosting or just to play against weaker ennemies. This could be solve partially by scalling the gear to the maximum ilevel of the bracket.


2. Unranked BG and skirmishes are facerolled by geared players and the principal target of this mode, being the Casual players that dont want or have the time or team to rank, cannot have fun when there is too many of geared char in the other team, making them virtually unkilleable for unstuffed players.


3. Even the Matchmaking is sometimes an issue, particularly in RBG, where after 3-4 consecutive wins, you are kind of 200+ over your rank as association rank, making you playing against player with two more brakets of gear upgrades than you. This is really a player participation issue tied to the lack of teams in RBG, but still, the gear is an issue, until you reach 2100 where everybody play with the same ilevel, outside of some glad players who have better weapons.

All those problems could be solved by scalling the gear to the maximum ilevel tied to the bracket where people fight, but in the end, why would we have any stuff at all if itā€™s only to get it scalled? Customizable templates would do the same, in the end, without any need to gear in any sort in PVP.

This is basically what always happens and what happened before and what most intelligent people playing pvp warned about:
We had this with the introductions of the arenas in BC, we had this in Cata (not sure exactly when Blizzard again tried a system like this, but I think it was Cata) and Blizzard and pvpā€™ers never learn.
In the end all thatā€™s left are some fixed groups, boosting groups and they both compete because there is no one left to fight.
PvP should never be about gear and never be about rating giving you a gear advantage. Thatā€™s not how good pvp works, but this is how you make a large percentage of your playerbase quit.

edit: The really funny aspect is that the same behaviour by players killed New World. In the alphas and betas the loud majority of players wanted ā€œmore grind, loot on death, more pvp, etcā€. Even not giving them 100% what they wished the game is dead because ā€œgrind, bad pvp, gear differencesā€.
Never listen to loud minorities of players and make games enjoyable for casuals first - not for 1-5%. (similar to raiding, dungeons btw)

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I dont know. I like to be able to attain pvp gear through vendors but the gear difference is TOO big. Templates and scaling are a no go for me personally. Its boring if theres no path to character progression.

Also absterge completed the zero to hero challenge @ 248 pvp item level which is around challenger II gear.

I like gear over skill. It allows my favourite but forever off-meta spec to be enjoyable. With templates you play meta or you quit.
Now crushing weaklings is its own reward. But if they decide to normalize gear in some way there also must be a new pvp reward system. Now for unrated content we have just 5 copypaste horses and 1 pet for honour levels and 2 titles for 100k and 250k HK. And it takes like 3 years of casual playtime to get those.

Yeh I heard lowbies/levellers were killing max-lvl folk in N.World through skill alone, causing max levelled players to complain that they ā€˜shouldnā€™t be able toā€™. So devs changed it to give max their insurmountable advantageā€¦ & killed all PvP below max level in the process (because why would anyone continue to PvP, if they cant win?).

I think fundamentally, PvP has to be competitive. There has to be a chance to win, or thereā€™s no point playing/trying. People will continue to afk/quit & itā€™s hard to blame them, -whatā€™s fun about insta-dying & not getting to play your char? Itā€™s soul destroying.
Making unrated players grind garbage gear by repeatedly dying to max-geared folk is so so bad, almost sadistic.

I remember making some awesome plays back in Legion (probably down to the awesome WW design -not this SCK spam gimmick), but BfA & SL is just garbage for unrated folk, weā€™re barely useful. And weā€™re expected to pay and grind our way up to ā€˜barely usefulā€™. :crazy_face:

Alts are a non-starter for me in SL, I donā€™t have the time to invest grinding multiple layers of systems & gear & renown & farm a tokens worth of gold to buy a Lego (x2). I realised Iā€™ll never get to experience how my chars should/could play, so thereā€™s little point investing anymore time ā€˜tryingā€™ to have fun. I only resubbed for the Xmas festivities, but they butchered Korracks Revenge & kept unrated players as fodder in their own content.

Brackets/templates/scaling/ilvl capā€¦ anything would be better than max lvl PvP in SL. People will party sync down, afk or just quit to avoid this garbage experience.
I get that some people enjoy SL PvP, fair enough, but an option for everyone else to play on a ~level playing field (for those who donā€™t have a permanent string of friends levelling through lowbie brackets) would be nice.

Maybe itā€™s bad design, or maybe itā€™s perfect design & itā€™s just the wrong game for a lot of us.

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Iā€™m not a high rated player, nor am I very fond of arena but I do like BGs (rated and unrated) and I find the Shadowlands PvP gearing rather enjoyable overall.

The only issue I have is with the amount of honor required to upgrade gear, this was especially noticeable upgrading from 1.8 to 2.1 last season. The streamer you mentioned also referenced this issue when commenting about the amount of time he spent grinding BGs just to increase his overall iLvl by 1.

Honestly Iā€™m a bit sad they are moving away from the PvP vers trinket bonus and gear that we had in S1/S2. I really found the overall scheme to be quite elegant, straightforward, and satisfying, the addition of BOA conquest boxes this season nullified my only other issue.

??? pretty much the whole pvp community was supporting soloQ xD

Absterge isnt good he just plays skilless healer specs and gets carried by dps