As someone who moderately enjoys PvP; getting destroyed by sheer ilvl difference is just boring. I’m forced to trudge through the gearing process just to not get insta deleted but the gear difference. current season is just queue and balancing issue not gear incentive. To the contrary, I would prefer if PvP allowed you to gear for pve to avoid starting from 0. That’s it, nothing more or less. PvP should have everyone be same ilvl, since it gets boring trying to climb to the same power level as others to not be dumped on
I dont mind if gear upgrade A BIT (mby just 2 itlv per upgrade max) when you reach 1400 1600 1800, but then remove all the honor required from it. The SL honor grind was just terrible.
Nah but many pve players stopped doing arenas because the PvP gear even upgraded is now worthless. In Shadowlands, duellist gear was already above heroic raid ilevl, not to mention the first season of Shadowlands which obviously brought many people in who wanted this way of gearing up.
Whether they liked or not is irrelevant, however the participation was all times high.
In df on the other hand while it’s very nice that PvP ilevl is now immediately the highest you can get for PvP, in pve even at elite rating it’s complete trash.
Which contributed to a whole different problem, boosting. A massive number of pve mains bought pvp boosts in Shadowlands, which were not something which was fun to face for most players. Yes you are likely playing against a potato but that potato is backed up by 3k+ or r1 players.
So it was quite literally an artificial increase to player count in arena for the wrong reasons.
SL system created the issue where you not only were not only fighting people in the higher bracket to push/improve but also a gear difference. The issue with the current system is that it’s not inflated early in the season. Everyone is just capping and not really trying to push unless it’s a rank 1 player. Not to mention that rng played a huge role in the fact that you either had 4 set early or not at all. Some specs will get better with crafts. Some players will just join mid season with conquest cap being removed. They will just push their goals and leave. Ranking system needs rework and I believe we need separate PvP and PvE set bonuses - something like TBC → MoP where PvP sets were more utility based but thanks to PvP stats/scaling were superior. This RNG vault distribution is a bit toxic imo. Not to mention that some specs have terrible 4 sets and won’t be using them.
I played this game for a long long time, and for me SL gearing was at its finest!
It wasn’t sweaty, I enjoyed the moments when you got a rating upgrade and can go chill n play some bgs, it turned out FUN to play BGs and have a reason to do so.
In a world without reasonable non rated BGs wow pvp is less enjoyable, all you have is a ranked meta based mode.
Also giving a good pvp equivalent to pve gear hense to upgrades felt good too, you can actually join friends and do some pve n do pretty fine.
Also it stops ppl to do billion of alts and I think its healthier for the game. Gearing 1-3 characters with SL system was totally fine.
I’m rly sad that Blizz listened to equality cryers, at the end it didn’t make the game better, they just chopped a big piece of fun of the game.
i swear this dk, just ckeeps trying to create topics on subject that everyone literally EVERYONE agrees on
1 is equalized gear
2 is tanks in pvp
and he just keeps doing this, forever, no matter what people keeps saying and telling him he is wrong, he just does it.
Yes, and, adding to that, their far better gear allowed them to thrash and gatekeep “honest” players. I know of a lot of “honest” players who got hardstuck between 1400 and 1800, with no way to improve.
But you are comparing apples to oranges here?..
In SL people didn’t have solo shuffle… Now the introduction of SS has seen the majority favor that infront of 2s and 3s… Dumbing it down to “Did the gear experiment fail?” is as flawless as trying to argue that its the lack of borrowed Power because people were quing up more in SL and BFA than now, so therefor it must mean people enjoyed grinding for corruption gear and anima to get more powerful…
I keep hearing about this “massive gear difference” in SL but I don’t get it. It was 3 ilevels per rank. 3 ilevels isn’t the reason you were losing. The gear difference for a new player entering rated pvp now is bigger than in SL because baseline conquest was 3 ilevels above honor gear, now it’s 13 plus set bonuses.
Are you forgetting we had rated solo shuffle at the end of SL? It was popping and dps queues were like 10 min, even after removing tanks because way more people were queueing healer to upgrade their gear. So we have a direct comparison. As soon as DF came out dps queues doubled compared to SL.
The point I’m making is that most people don’t play healer in arena for fun, they only play healer for instant queues if there’s some kind of reward they can chase. Removing gear upgrades had a big effect on the healer/dps ratio.
Yes, because we didn’t… It wasn’t “rated” it was a Brawl, the same way we have the 10v10 BGS now in Dragonflight. Rated solo shuffle was introduced in patch 10.0.0
So of course theres going to be shorter ques when peoples skill levels aren’t taken into account and players like Venruki and Peekabo can be qued up with Mike who just dinged 60.
But what you are talking about is short term solution… As people have pointed out multiple times, you are gear capped after X weeks, then what? Then people stop playing again… And it has no motivation for new players to enter the arena when you go in as a fresh 70 but are playing against decked out players that are helping their friends.
And again, you aren’t taking Solo Shuffle into account. Before some people went healer to be able to play. People wouldn’t take a 1600 exp WW monk, but would gladly accept a que from a 1000exp MW. But now people can actually play classes that they want to, and when every class just goes out there and one shots, and all the DPS in the group flames the healer, of course its gonna push them away? I main a healer in pvp, and the reason I stopped was not because of the fact that there wasn’t gear upgrades… It was quing up, having 4 dps that gave 0 attention to me, running around trying to zugzug and then being killed through defensives and me spam healing… Only to whisper me with everything from me being boosted, to how I should just uninstall the game etc… THATS the reason healers dont want to que… Its not fun to heal, and it would be even less fun if you had to sit through hours and hours of grinding just to be even a little competitive.
i think it has nothing to do with gear upgrades but more with overall situation in mmo, healers issue in pvp and DF being to that popular expansion as SL had been.
I think the issue is the insane burst damage every class can die within 2 seconds. Even in the opener, which is really frustrating for healers. This can happen across all ratings, blizzard should remove all ms and heal absorb effects from all classes.
After that we can look at damage numbers again
Ok but if thats the case, could you explain, as I asked you to before, how come MoP and WoD had the most active pvp seasons of all time? S14 is universally hailed as the best season to date.
And yet, gear was equal. Even legendary cloak and ring effects were dampened in pvp.
So again: Can you explain?
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It’s nonsense.
Healers aren’t signing up because healing isn’t fun and quite toxic, and not because of a lack of rewards or because of instant queues.
This is false. Rated solo shuffle came out a month before DF released. There were many healers queueing constantly because they wanted to get rating to upgrade their gear.
I’m pretty sure SL S1 was the most active season of all time. I didn’t play WOD but I’ve read comments by multiple people saying pvp was dead.
Heard this heard that guess what some of us actually played through those seasons and I can promise you whatever participation SL s1 did have (which was great!) pales in comparison to WoD season 1 or s14 in MoP.
Also the lead pvp dev holinka literally stated when people were saying that PVP is a minority activity that people played PVP in equilevaltn numbers to pve. It is not a minority activity.
I am going to that the word of a lead dev over your sources, whoever they are
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If you think gear shouldn’t matter in pvp then why aren’t you arguing for Legion-style templates to return?
Because templates do not work in world pvp or duels. Pvp gear that is equal for everyone is a one-size fits all solution that has been and continues to be the best solution.
It is interesting to read all the comments. Because it seems like one, somewhat crucial thing is missing in the conversation. The fact that this game is still considered to be an MMORPG. And as with most Roleplaying Games, you get to expect some sort of character development, of the character you play.
Personally, I have never been interested in the destruction of slightly-more-intelligent target dummies, who does not care whether it wins or loses (PvE in a nutshell).
So to me, WoW has always been all about PvP (and the faction war). And yes, gearing up in for example Cataclysm did hurt, when you just hit max level and started doing BGs to get that honour gear.
Because more often than not, you faced people who were stronger than you. But you could still contribute to the best of your abilities (CC, interrupts, etc.).
And as time passed, you could feel your character get stronger, through gear upgrades. It was a fantastic feeling, when you could suddenly stand toe-to-toe against 1 other opponent. Even more so, when you started getting conquest gear, and through skill + gear, you could possibly take 2 enemies down at the same time.
I never cared much for rating. Only the rewards that rating was associated with, such as transmog, titles and gear upgrades.
So when you have 2 aspects of improving your character, in this MMORPG, those being skill and power (gear), and you remove the most tangible one of the two (power).
Then it quickly starts resembling non-RPG games, such as Dota 2, LOL, Counter Strike, Battlefield, Hearthstone, etc., where everything is reset after each game and more importantly, where the character you have spent countless hours building up, matters less and less.
Apologies for the wall of text. But I guess my point is, that someone should probably ask, what kind of game it is, we expect WoW is, or should be, today.
Is it an Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, where you play and build up a character over many hours, or should it be more akin to the more competitive E-Sports, like Counter Strike or Dota 2, where everything between the opponents are as fair as possible?