Has the Item Level variance changed in Shadowlands?
No, 1 item level should still be about 1%.
The rate of inflation has probably shrunk slightly as it used to be 15 item levels between tiers, but now we’re down to 13 item levels.
Players doing multiple times less damage than Mythic geared players is frankly, an issue of skill.
Has he already played his game or what is it like?
he actually does. hes a mythic raider… 
take from that what you will.
Yep, he plays a Resto Shaman (I think) in the “Elitist Jerks” guild.
He was referring to PVE when he said that, and sadly is true, like 70% of the problem is skill issues.
Cause people with 200 Ilvl doing 2k dps is not a gear issue.
The differece between lfr and mythic gear ist tremendous.
Between LFR and MYTIC are 3 dificults of raid.
So is normal have near of 45% upgrade on stats.
65% stamina is a lot but have no impact on damage.
85% twinket use effect is a bit to much.
Both Ion and Preach don’t care and don’t mean PvP in A&Q.
Would you REALLY want to play a game, at home that you worked on all day, for a living?
No. Raid tiers are between different raids.
Wow is not a PvP game 
is not easy fit a PvP on a RPG cause RPG means gear progression and people want everyone wih same Ilvl on PvP.
When I said Raid tier I mean dificult tier.
The first two things are true (well, the second isn’t exactly true, they changed ilvl pacing in other ways as well, but whatever), but the third is completely false and doesn’t follow from them at all. 1% more stats result in not 1% more output, but in 2%+ more output. Because effects from stats multiply. In PVP, there is an additional multiplicative factor from health / damage reduction, because survivability suddenly matters, too.
Ion knew that they have no plans to address the stupid high ilvl imbalances, so he started inventing excuses, ended up being horribly wrong right on math. An awful dev.
the only thing ill say in regards to what ion said is that, its all well and good saying its a matter of skill where the problem lies… but when you clutter up the spellbook with spells and utilities where people dont clearly use them or unrelated to the spec then it does get confusing for people who dont know where to look. Also theres the factor of the GCD, ill take BM hunter and before anyone says, BM is a good spec still. But i found playing hunter in SL as BM (the only spec which i wanna play), GCD massively reduces your dps outtake.
Ion also stated you should be able to play any spec or class for any reason and be unaffected. Well he’s clearly wrong about that since systems like covenants and generic class/spec meta tuning always takes places.
So in regards to it being a skill issue, then its not all the skill, sometimes its about whats going behind it and whats affecting a skill for a player. From one expansion to the next, they change classes/specs which in essence makes gameplay different and therefore skill is different.
he is resto shaman who doesnt have yet ksm regardless of 226 itlv he has from raiding.
this tells a lot .
Enemy Ret wings Critting you for 35k from distance is an issue of skill.
Just LoS Bro
Dude is a mythic raider and he has a point : there’s less power Inflation in SL than there was in BFA and perhaps Legion.
As for the skill part I have no idea tbh.
On the other hand then not playing the game for “enjoyment” can lead to design decisions that aren’t based in how fun it’ll be for those playing for their enjoyment in their sparetime. Something can look like it’ll be fun on paper but upon its implementation it becomes clear that it either isn’t all that fun or even may be downright harmful to the game.
I dare say how they made the covenants fall under this when the developers over the years have had a major focus on more competitive endgame content and then implements something that has more of a root in more traditional single player rpg aspects where min-max’ing isn’t the goal.
Yeah it tells that he’s interested in raiding and not pushing m+.
I don’t know what else you’re trying to insinuate but you’re making a fool of yourself.
… or even outdating Raiding philosophies, that have been superceded & that encounter designers would be better placed to know how they’re ‘supposed to work’.
Exactly. What opened my eyes is when one of my guildies was encouraging me to push myself harder, saying “People were clearing 15s in 194 ilvl gear”. It is an issue of skill - knowing your rotation, knowing when to burst, when to save your cds, knowing HOW to burst. Top players right now can pull insane damage because they’ve done the dungeons so many times that they know the timing of their CDs incredibly well. To me this was the biggest challenge, and it’s something I have to learn now with timing frost mage cds. It’s not hard, but I need to get used to it.
Then of course you have things like PI and all the other weird damage buffs that exist in Shadowlands and I love them, but they do skew the damage statistics. And of course you’re gonna PI your best DPS, causing the divide to grow even larger.
After Ion hinting that a lot of the player base enjoys repeating the covenant campaigns on alts, im not sure what he is seeing anymore. 