First of all I apologize if this question was asked 10000 times before. I have read several threads about it and watched videos of low-lvl people killing 120 lvl’s with good gear but I’m not quite sure how the scaling system works(and if it is still the same - the threads I read about it were quite old like a year or so) because I have read contradicting comments everywhere.
I’ll state how I think is working please correct me if I’m wrong:
ilvl does not matter in pvp anymore, the stats somehow scale so higher lvl people do less damage to lower lvls and lower lvls do higher damage to higher lvls so everyone is more or less equal in pvp(that goes for all sorts of pvp, arenas, bgs and world pvp).
if the above is correct then what is the point of gearing for pvp? why are there pvp items? are they just to show you have a high rank or do they also give some sort of traits which provide an advantage over someone with normal gear? also what is the advantage of farming azerite for pvp? I guess there are some azerite traits that could give a small advantage but if that’s the case how much azerite should I farm? I’m guessing I should farm less than a person who is focused on pve.
if items do not matter in pvp that means secondaries stack as well? so everyone has as much mastery for example?
I would like to return to wow but the ideea of farming azerite all day does not appeal to me because I’m very busy. But if that’s how the system works right now then I would love to come back. Thank you for reading!
A 300ilvl won’t put out the same numbers as 350+ from my experience. Also tend to have more health.
However the margin isn’t as huge as it used to be, as I’ve seen good players beat much higher ilvl in arena multiple times now.
This ofc could be wrong and every match I’ve seen the other players were just plain bad? I would think so if it was 3/4 matches at 1800 but some of these are 2k+ matches where people are usually a bit more savvy.
I think in PvP it scales at a very small margin like 1%? I could be totally wrong. So if let’s say you’re 340ilvl and you face a 380ilvl the % difference is small enough that you stand a chance with skill alone.
I’ve beaten 390ilvls on my 325ilvl feral in duels before. I’ve also beaten a lot of players higher ilvl than me on my DK and it felt pretty fair.
However I was totally squashed by a fair few 400+ilvl players a number of occasions. But as I said before they very well could of been much better players than me as I’m pretty casual
Edit: on the mastery note, I believe because of the neck and how gearing works now it’s fairly hard to stack one stat over the others. That and mastery isn’t the be all end all for every spec in the game, some benefit a lot more from say haste or Crit for example.
nobody really knows because blizzard aren’t coming out to explain how it works for some reason.
from what people have found and pieced together, your damage is scaled. a low geared player sees lower numbers than a higher geared one. say i hit you for 30k on my screen, but you have less gear than i do, so on your screen i may have hit you for 25k, and the other way around. not sure exactly how the numbers work out.
in season 1, your damage scaled slowly with higher item level, while your secondaries did not get scaled at all, so a higher item level player hit only slightly harder, but did it more frequently and with more crits. BUT azerite traits did not scale, and since the rest of your damage and health is scaled, it would work out so that if you had high azerite and the rest of your gear was low, the azerite trait would hit harder on others because your average ilvl was low. sockets also did not scale properly. so for a time it was optimal to have max ilvl azerite along with full greens with sockets if you had a strong trait you could stack, like death throes on shadow priest.
now in season 2 it is generally agreed that the scaling has been toned back dramatically, so now a high item level will make you do significantly more damage than a low one, while still retaining the advantage of additional secondary stats you had in season 1. at the same time azerite traits were toned back to 50% strength in pvp so the wonky azerite scaling with low other gear has become unviable, although it is unclear whether that has been changed or not.
so in short, as of right now it matters a lot to have high gear. you will do significantly more damage, you will do it faster and you will crit more frequently.
Don’t get fooled by this, people keep saying that because they heard about scaling. In truth, gear matters - a lot.
Ilvl is very important, secondary stats are very important and trinkets/traits are very important.
There might be some scaling in place that slightly reduces damage done against lower geared people, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.
Secondary traits have been important right?
Even in season 1, scaled up or down, 15% haste is 15% haste, if the scaling was only applied to damage done then wouldnt massing secondary stats would be the best ways to up damage output in general?
I mean sure the damage would be roughly even after scaling but that shouldnt matter if your abilities crit twice as often or you can push out 4 spells in the time others do 3
What i can say, its that the pvp is not scaled in BFA open world (aka war mode) for sure. Maby in arenas or bg’s, but for sure not in open world. Or if it is, its scaled only if the difference between players is low (ex: a 385 ilvl vs 390 ilvl). I fought against players with 30-40 less ilvl than me and i noticed that i defeat them very easy,compared with players with equal or a little bit lower ilvl than me. Thats my personal experience.
Item level is scaled in wpvp. The amount of scaling is just supposed to give the lower ilvl opponent a chance to win. Especially if they have low ilvl, but good skills, against a higher ilvl but lower skilled player.
I don’t really know much about it(just like everyone else) however it seems like the higher ilvl player scale down a bit and the lower scales up to meet somewhere in the middle. When i attack a higher ilvl player my secondarys usually scale up a bit so 15% for example becomes “16% against current target”. When I attack a lower ilvl target they usually go down so 15% become 14% etc.
Thus secondary stats will always matter and even more so if your lower ilvl I’d say, since it seem to just temporary increase your ratings to match a full ilvl kit of the determined scaling formula. I mean once when i played on my shaman I fought some super orc with 240k+ hp early on i S2(I had about 170k). My haste and crit jumped from ~20% to ~35% against current target however the health difference was still noticable.
Yeah which prolly means that people with lower ilvl get a bit more of a bump. For some or rather most classes it whould mean that correct secondaries matter more then acctually wearing the “best” item from a PvE perspective.
I mean If you equip a 15 ilvl higher item in most cases it will be stronger, regardless of which rates are present on the item itself. But since you will be bumped up and presumably the enemy bumped down, secondaries matter even more in PvP. What makes it even “worse” are that a socket in that case are even more valuable in PvP.
That Chris fella should really stop making stick-man drawings and start working on getting us some proper PvP itemization so we don’t have to guess what were supposed to wear when we leave the safe haven of the tavern. All he illustrated there was something we already knew to a certain extent without even mentioning any details on how it’s calculated at all. Or he could ask a friend on the gear department and while he does… he might aswell ask if we can get static sockets and ilvl back so we don’t have to pray for a jackpot roll on everything we loot.
That’s their stance, but it just doesn’t work that way. It’s impossible to tell to what extent ilvl is better than secondary stats in PvP. I’ve just gone with +15 ilvls for bad stats, +30 ilvl for rings. No idea if thats accurate or not though.
Apparently, if an item is significant higher ilvl it’s normally the way to go. But ye, if you lose important stats, tricky.
I use the Pawn addon for easy upgrades. It’s upgrade suggestions are not always gonna be necessarily correct, but seems good anyway. I have lost a lot of Haste, which I thought I needed, but Pawn has been guiding me to more Crit, and lower Haste seems to have little impact. Whereas at start of expac, Haste was really important for me, it’s less important now than Crit it seems. Pawn appears to know this. But ye, you still gotta make final decision.
Ye but the situation is, according to blizz, a significant higher ilvl will always be more powerful than a lower ilvl. The lower ilvl is not anywhere near equally scaled with the higher ilvl. Therefore Pawn, or manually deciding, upgrading significant higher ilvl should work. Going by training dummy and wpvp, taking Pawns auto suggestion certainly doesn’t hurt.
Be careful with that. Pawn is for PvE rotation, and Crits do 50% more in PvP rather than the 100% more in PvE. It is still a good stat, but according to Icy Veins Feral PvP guide - Mastery and Versatility are better.
---------www.icy-veins.com/wow/feral-druid-pvp-guide
I’ll keep that in mind. Pawn is ofc for the lazy, so I use it.
I think ilvl is more important though, as long as your secondary stats are reasonably correct. Even though Pawn is for pve, the secondary stats suggestion seem ok for wpvp. Could be different on another spec.
Since there is no sim for pvp stats, I guess you just have to use judgement, icy veins pvp spec guide, and comparing performance in a fight.
The gear matters the most. 20-30 ilvls higher means +60-70k HP. I have ilv374-375 and 166k hp and I face warriors with ilv400’ish and they have around 220-235k hp. Forget about warlocks I don’t know what’s happening to them but they run around with 270-290k hp.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
![:exploding_head:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/exploding_head.png?v=6" ":exploding_head:")
Or he could ask a friend on the gear department and while he does… he might aswell ask if we can get static sockets and ilvl back so we don’t have to pray for a jackpot roll on everything we loot.