Instead of assuming incompetence, this has been going on for too long already. One expansion, fine. But 3 expansions in a row? That shows there’s clear intent.
So as for that intent, you’ve gotta look at the effects. And the effects are twofold:
PvPers are basically arm-twisted to PvE for their gear, because of the huge differences in reward system efficacy.
PvP as a whole is made easier. Referring to both the trimming down of gameplay punishments (meaning you can’t really “choose wrong” like in the past, just less good) and a massive overflow of passives which has been a thing creeping up since Cata. This, with the differences in gear reward designs, leads to favoring PvEers much more than the ones only sticking to PvP.
So their intent seems very much to intentionally push PvE as the frontline for core gameplay, while rated PvP ends up as a stress relief with much less significance than it used to have, for those very same PvEers.
inb4 people say “Legion was different”, Legion was the start of the removal of PvP vendors, the templates would still benefit PvEers more than PvPers (not as much as in BFA, but still much more than WoD and earlier), and artifact traits went through some changes here and there but overall it went faster for PvEers than for PvPers most of the time.
The artifact relics also were much easier to acquire, and with a higher maximum ilvl, in PvE than in PvP.
And no, templates did not make ilvl meaningless. It just reduced the effectiveness of ilvl differences by a factor of 10, but at the same time they sped up the ilvl progression by more than double. ilvl mattered much more to some than for others, with CCers being viable with the lowest amount.
And that’s “fine”. Unfortunate, but fine. What’s not fine is this hap-hazard refusal to acknowledge it.
The problem with templates is that they made everything except iLvL meaningless.
Games like World of Warcraft, that is to say RPG’s, have three components of combat: Identity choices, preparation, and execution.
The first one is stuff like class, spec, role, and of course Covenant.
The second is things like your gear, talents, flasks, potions, etc. as well as a plan of attack based on the information you have about identity and preparation of the enemy you’re about to face.
And the third one is your rotational execution and combat planning.
The issue with templates is that they strip away some of the 1st and all of the 2nd, causing meta to settle extremely quickly, and as for the 3rd WoW’s skill ceiling isn’t high enough to be carried by that alone, and it never has been. It was never meant to be. This isn’t StarCraft. Not even League of Legends has a skill ceiling high enough for this - it has the other two elements as well.
Templates do a lot of damage to a game like WoW. They were a terrible solution.
Yeah I’m just saying it deserves a special mention in the whole template topic, since that proc was never properly scaled. It had like, a reduced effectiveness of… what was it… by a factor of 10 again? iirc
It was a literal requirement for some classes to even play, to level up that damn proc enough to make the burst possible to kill something and so on. And healers needed it to counteract that same damage taken, if they were playing anything other than full CC comps. Otherwise they’d go oom too fast, or not even be able to keep up with the damage taken.
Well, that’s just a cherry atop the turd isn’t it?
You do all this work to make everybody the same so it can be balanced, and everybody becomes the same in such a way that individuality and strategy is deleted from the game… and then it’s still not balanced.
The problem with templates is that Blizzard still doesn’t understand that BGs and arenas should be separated, at least when it comes to damage output. Templates didn’t work well because they were a “one size fits none” solution in Legion.
U asked from where the ridiculous thing about the strongest char came.
It is from Ion " watcher" lead “def” dev.
U are not Ion. Nobody wants to be ion.
i think PVP vendors should sell armor components (rather than complete armor pieces) which can be combined in a way similar to crafted gear in order to gain the stats and ilvl that you want.
