Possible Solutions for Improved Gearing in Instanced PvP (Updated)

The current state of PvP is garbage. We (the PvPers) are being forced to do PvE content in order to obtain gear, because there aren’t any PvP vendors & literally have to depend on “RNG” to get gear, hoping we would get our best stat one. And even then, some 400+ ilvl PvE Hero can come and faceroll with his Meta class.

Alts are Unplayable, have to spend weeks doing PvE & gearing up your character if you want to even stand a chance in Arena. Anyway, enough rant. I’ve posted after a long time, so here are my suggestions: Edited Main Post with updated feedback.


:star: Solution #1:

  • Add the PvP Vendors back in addition to this current RNG system, so we can work towards obtaining Gear Pieces of OUR choice through pure PvP Progression: Arenas, Battlegrounds etc. instead of being forced to do PvE or Depending on luck.
    (This is the easiest solution, since they don’t need to change anything, just add the damn PvP Vendors to the game.)

:star: Solution #2

  • Upon entering Arena or any Instanced PvP, gear should be scaled to a Same ilvl for all players.

  • Let the secondary stats (Crit, Mastery, Haste, Vers) will remain customizable, and so will the trinkets. This will allow players to tweak their gear accordingly and will maintain diversity.


Add your suggestions, thoughts to this post. But, I don’t think any devs care about the EU forum, so the best possible thing is to spam their twitter with these issues so they can atleast think about making changes - https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs

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The problem with equalizing the item level but keeping the stat customization is that players will then obsess over the advantage that lies therein. We saw that in WoD where players went haywire over the fact that the trinket with Versatility came from the weekly Ashran Strongbox.
So the gear optimization process doesn’t go away, it just changes focus.

If you were to do it in BfA, then players would obsess even more over optimal Azerite Traits and tertiary stats and proc effects.

I find that to be insufficient. Especially once you consider the fact that the reward system has reach beyond the borders of Rated Arenas and Battlegrounds, and also encompass Skirmishes and Random Battlegrounds and even World PvP.
Titles, mounts, and transmogrification appearances are something you associate with high-end PvP accomplishments, not random rewards for winning a Skirmish Arena.

Gear rewards that make your character more powerful are just an incredibly satisfying and useful reward, and one that can be given often and frequently. That sense of character progression is difficult to replace with vanity rewards like titles and mounts.

And PvP has a way of being more compelling and attractive to the player population at large when the gear rewards are compelling. We saw that early in BfA Season 1 where the gear drops from Arena were really juicy – and that Season became the most popular ever, thriving in its early days.

To me there seems to be two camps on this topic.

There are those who want WoW PvP to embrace the character and gear progression that is classical for PvP in an MMORPG. Working toward a goal and seeing your character get stronger over time is part of the journey that is essential to the MMORPG genre.

And then there are those who want WoW PvP to embrace a more standard eSport format where everyone is equal so the competition is kept fair and the players’ skill becomes the driving factor.

It’s difficult to please both camps at the same time. :confused:

Keep this in mind when you’re making the next “give me glad mount for BG grind” post

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If you’re referring to my past suggestion on a reward structure for PvP, then my suggestion included gear rewards on top of the vanity rewards. The bottom line basically being that PvP should be a horn of plenty and offer a plethora of all kinds of rewards.
That is still my point of view. :slight_smile:

I’m talking about “Instanced PvP only”. It’s quite easy actually. When you enter any kind of “Instanced PvP”, your gear should be equalized. This will give the players who want a fair, balanced & competitive PvP, their satisfaction. This will also make PvP, alt-friendly. Of course the alt will be weaker in the outside world, so you’ll still have to progress by gearing up.

For the other lot, you’ll still get your Weekly, RNG (lol) items from doing PvP, Arenas, battlegrounds etc, which will scale according to your Rating or Progress (The current BFA system that is). This gear will obviously work everywhere else, World PvP, Raids, Questing and basically everywhere except Instanced PvP. So we don’t lose incentive to play.

Players who want gear from PvP, will still get it. They just won’t have to depend on it to win Matches, or worry about being outgeared in Arena by some 410 Mythic PvE hero.

That’s what Legion did, more or less. The consequence of it is that World PvP gets completely messed up.
If you balance only around instanced PvP through special rules that apply to the characters, then outside instanced PvP it’s going to be a complete mess, because those special rules won’t exist.
And as successful as Legion Arena/Battleground balance might have been, as unsuccessful was the balance for World PvP.
And considering the prominence of Warmode today, I’m not sure it’s wise to focus balance exclusively on the instanced parts of PvP.

But that is a loss of incentive!
If you’re doing Arenas and Battlegrounds and you’re given a piece of gear that’s only useful for other content you don’t do, then that’s not a strong incentive to keep doing Arenas and Battlegrounds.

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The gearing in pvp, the incentives and the combat in general is sub par atm in pvp.

I dont want to do content i DONT enjoy to be competetive in content i do enjoy.

Its better to just quit untill they get their act together.

And yet, PvP participation in Legion was a lot more compared to BFA. Also the subs were higher. Some minor changes to the system and it would’ve been fine tbh. Like allowing players to retain secondary stats from their gear & bringing trinket bonuses back. If this was implemented in the Legion PvP system, it was good. Leaving Class balancing the only pending issue to fix.

Warmode is one of the worst things that has happened to WoW. Literally divided the community in 2 parts. WM off and WM on. I hope they remove that trash or atleast fix it so we still get to see people on the either sides, but not able to attack them.

EXACTLY my Point.

This is what is happening now, until they fix things.

No, BfA Season 1 was more popular than any before, evident by the high amount of Rank 1 titles handed out.

That doesn’t detract from the fact that it exists. Blizzard can’t just ignore its presence any less than they can ignore Arenas or Battlegrounds. They have an obligation to balance the game with everything in mind.

The epitome of PvP balance and reward structure lies in a model that encompasses all the various aspects of PvP and which embraces as many playstyles and player preferences as possible.
The approach of “this is what I want and I don’t give a crap about anything or anyone else!” is too selfish an approach to looking at the state of PvP.

Templates are a terrible idea on their own. WoD’s last season had, by far, the best implemented system.

When BG’s and Ashran (and other instanced PVP), your item level was scaled up to 385, which was essentially the entry level gear you could farm from tanaan jungle after hitting 100.

To improve, you’d farm honor (and conquest) by doing various, low-entry level pvp content- Both Normal BG’s, Ashran and skirmishes, as well as rated arenas.

Since there was a catchup system in place accountwide, you could wait until the end of the season (if you so wished) and practically gear up your alts in full conquest & honor gear in a matter of 2 days or so.

On top of this, during the season, players who achieved higher ratings could not only get rewards nobody else could (Elite pvp set appearances, cloaks, enchants, mounts and titles), but also get access to their conquest gear faster- Meaning that higher rated people would have access to full pvp gear faster than others.

But the real kicker was that the gear capped at heroic item level- But it scaled up to mythic item level in pvp.

In short, the system allowed:

  • Gearing was a no-issue.
  • Entry to PVP was easy and convenient (Compared to both legion and BFA).
  • Rewards were comparable/viable option compared to PVE.
  • There was incentive to push rating if you so wished- And if not, you could enjoy the game as a casual without a fear of being stomped by a mythic dragonslayer without having any chance to fight back
  • Catchup system was the most alt-friendly it has ever been in the history of WoW.

We’ve been over this already but basing your argument on rank 1 titles is both silly and wrong.

The reason why rank 1 titles are more handed out than before (in that season) were because it was easier to get than ever before, as the system by it’s design (dividing ranks to brackets) allows for this to happen.

For players who weren’t aiming for r1 (most), BFA season wasn’t popular. You can look at the amount of people que’d in both 3v3’s, 2v2’s as well as RBG’s during S1 (and tragically during s2) to easily see that PVP participation is nowhere near the golden ages of MoP’s latest season.

Your assumption, again, would only work if pvp participation followed a linear design- Which it most certainly does not.

There’s no way you are ever going to convince me or anybody else in this forum that an expansion that had a max of 4-5 (down to 1-3 million active subs since) million people has had a higher overall pvp participation than MoP, Cata or WotLk which had playerbase size of +8 million. Even if a far smaller portion of players played PVP back then they’d still easily outnumber whatever number you could pull up.

It’s not a complete fix (As those need a new expansion), but to start with, I’d make getting pvp gear even more predictable than it already is, and have the rewards scale with your rating- Always.

  • Weekly pvp item (the non-cache) should scale with your rating. Additionally, the random items dropping during the games should be scaled to your rating- Not a bracket lower.
  • Random battlegrounds and skirmishes should reward you with gear that’s item level is competitive and rewarding (Normal +?), with every victory dropping you a quartermaster coin on top of some loot, which you can then turn in for a token to upgrade the said pieces to match your arena rating.

These would drastically increase pvp participation, as there’d be incentive for people to do normal battlegrounds.

Additionally, I’d ditch the concept of soloque for arenas, but I’d implement it for RBG’s. You could still make groups for RBG’s, but they’d fight against other premades, rather than soloque RBG’s.

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You are missing the point. We PvPers don’t like the fact that we are forced to do PvE to gear up in order to stand a chance in PvP against the PvE heroes. Or if you don’t want to do PvE, then rely on a trashy RNG system and “Hope” you get your BIS stat gear.

I honestly can’t believe how you are defending such a broken system. PvP in BFA is trash compared to earlier expansion, if you don’t believe me, just scroll through the forums. Stop being a Blizzard Sockpuppet, being okay with whatever they are doing to the game.

We are NOT playing this game for free, we are paying real money. So we should NOT be okay if the system is broken.

Agreed. WoD PvP gearing was nice.

This BFA system would have been okay if there were gear vendors like earlier expansions, where we could work towards a piece of gear, but no. They aren’t giving that option either, here atleast Legion was better, our gear did not matter so that RNG was tolerable. But in BFA, they have put the worst of both. RNG + Gear required. And only way to gear up is do the boring Mythic+ dungeons or Raids, which PvPers loathe.

No, it’s the most accurate way of comparing Seasons to each other, because the 0.1% criteria has always been constant, so the total amount of Rank 1’s reflects the total player participation of a particular Season. And since BfA Season 1 had many Rank 1’s it means it had high player participation.
That’s all I’m saying.

But you are most definitely right on other accounts.
The player activity may be much lower these days than in the past. Players may simply not play as many Arena games as they used to.
The most active players may also be less active than the most active players were in the past, and it may be an influx of first-timers who just want to check out Arenas that inflate the participation numbers.
And the field of players in the very high end of the ladder may also be less competitive and rooted than in the past.

So even though the participation numbers were high and you’ve had lots of people who’ve done some Arena games, you may still have less player activity than in the past, resulting in the feeling that Arena is in a downward spiral – which it may be.

My point is merely that there’s a correlation between participation and rewards.
If the rewards are lucrative, then lots of people will participate. That does not mean they will devote themselves, but they will dip their toes, so to speak. Mythic+ dungeons are a wonderful example. The amount of die-hard Mythic+ players is probably not very high, but the amount of players who do a Myhtic+ dungeon once a week to get their weekly chest is insanely high. A lucrative reward is a strong incentive to participate.

So if the goal is to get more people to do Arenas and make it worthwhile playing Arena games, then more lucrative rewards is the obvious solution. And that means compelling gear rewards. That is the bread & butter of the reward structure in WoW and what most people seek above all else – an increasingly higher item level.

There are lots of players who don’t give a crap about Mythic+ dungeons, but they do them anyway, because the prospect of an item upgrade by the end of the week makes it all worth it.
By comparison, then the item rewards offered by Arenas are incredibly weak (and weaker still in the proposed changes by the OP). So unless you’re God’s gift to Arenas and you want to devote yourself to it and become a Gladiator, then the activity is completely pointless and a waste of time, because it doesn’t yield any worthwhile rewards. So naturally people just ignore Arenas. There’s nothing to be had from them unless you devote yourself to the pursuit of the Gladiator title.

How am I missing that point? You haven’t brought it up until now. The point I responded to was that Blizzard can’t just ignore the existence of Warmode even if you personally don’t give a crap about it.

But hence so far as PvE gear overshadowing PvP gear goes, then that is an issue for sure. But your suggestion doesn’t address that at all. If you equalize the item levels as you suggest and make it all about the secondary stats and trinket effects, then PvPers will still feel “forced” to do PvE for specific trinkets or items (upcoming Crucible of Storms loot would be the ultimate loot in regards to your suggestion).

I am not defending the current system. I think it leaves a lot to be desired and I am not happy with it at all.
I don’t like the underwhelming reward structure.
I don’t like the lack of a stronger gear and character progression.
I don’t like the hidden scaling system.
And so on.
All I’m saying is that I don’t think your suggestion is a solution or an improvement over the status quo.

Won’t work.
On paper is a good idea, on the practical side is near impossible. Just look at timewalking weekends and how bad the scaling ends up to be.
Squishing certain classes to a fixed ilvl (or bumping them) makes huge difference in how the class work, and you can’t expect people to adjust on the fly in 30 sec before beginning an arena their secondary stats to compensate.
And this is outside the whole azerite traits balance and issues.

If you really want a levelled gameplay, add a vendor with pvp only gear. Fixed ilvl (low to avoid abuse in pve), single stat on every item, free azerite choices.
And then lock entrance in instanced rated pvp to having only those items on.

It hasn’t.

IF the player participation was linear- It isn’t.

It had higher player participation for gladiator entry in the bracket (Which didn’t exist prior to the expansion). The gladiator bracket has nothing to do with the rest of the brackets (below 2400 if we’re generous, lower if we want to extrapolate near the cut-off rating)

Your statement would be more correct if you argued that PVP participation for R1 title was the highest to date (though, again, I’m skeptical of that as well as said), but to extrapolate the whole pvp participation on the top percentile requires 2 things to be true:

  1. PVP participation is linear (untrue)
  2. PVP participation follows normal distribution (it doesn’t).

Most players stop pushing for rating once they reach a reward they’re content with- Be it the elite set appearances, high item level gear, or whatever else. Most players do not enter Rated with the goal of “I’m going to be R1” because that goal is unrealistic for most of them. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t try it, but it’s a fact nonetheless.

Even if we take this sentiment that the activity of players is higher nowadays than it was in the past (which there is no evidence for, though I’m sure Blizzard has some statistics on average playtime spent graphs over the years they could extrapolate the info from), your argument essentially boils down that fewer players are playing more- Which, doesn’t mean that there is more arena activity, still. It just means that some people would be playing more than others.

That doesn’t increase the amount of participation, that increases the amount of activity.

I don’t know even why are we arguing about this. It’s absolutely obvious just from the subscription point of view that Arena participation (like any other content) has gone down. Whether it is proportionally more popular or not I can’t say for sure (though I’d suspect it’s less than it used to be, but I could be wrong), but ultimately it is less popular than before, simply due to overall sub numbers.

You are right about that. Even I have done some mythic + (despite loathing any and all pve content) just because the rewards are so good, but I stopped doing them personally 2 weeks ago even if it means I’ll lag behind in gear item level, because I don’t want to do PVE content fundamentally.

I disagree, because by doing this you just flip the problem around: Now PVE players will feel compelled to do pvp activities for PVE gearing.

This was essentially what my fix was suggesting as well, but the thing is I don’t think it is a working permanent solution. Yes, it’ll make a part of the playerbase happier, but at the cost of the other.

The only working solution, therefore, is the WoD system. Separation of PVE and PVP gear (with PVP gear being optimal for PVP and vice versa), with low barrier of entry for each. Most players don’t do both of these activities anywa and as a result they will no longer find a dilemma of having to do two types of content to maximize their performance in that part of the game- Which is the whole problem that all of the Q&A’s have brought up. In fact, people who want to do both types of content will be indifferent to this change: They can still choose to do both, but the benefit will be less of a “This will make me significantly better than others” and more of a “I wanna do this content today.”

I also think that fundamentally, PVP is about more egalitarian growth and improvement as a player, whereas with PVE it is more of a journey as a group (as is evident with larger group sizes in content). As a result, PVP players like rewards to be consistent and within their control, rather than in PVE which like the randomness and excitement (to an extent) downing a boss and getting access to the loottable gives.

PVE and PVP separation are necessary for the game to be healthy. Both Legion and BFA prove my point.

Problem with this is that you have to keep another whole gear set in bag, because ilvl doesn’t matter in PvP, so you hunt for secondaries. And then you find out that some cataclysm gear is better than current gear you drop and running with current gear is disadvantegous.

That said, I’d like for gear to matter lot less (or not at all).
Just not with secondaries used as you described.

Vendors and PvP Gear.

Elaborate on that. To my awareness it’s always been the top 0.1%. If I’m mistaken I’d love to when and how it was different. The only thing that comes to my mind is that the 2v2 and 5v5 brackets also qualified for Rank 1 in the past, but these days it’s only 3v3.

No, I never said it was.
The beginning of a Season will see the highest character influx because it’s new and everyone is chasing the gear upgrades and lots of people are playing and so on.
Patch releases and balance changes probably also result in spikes of increased participation. And on the flip-side there’s probably a decrease as the game settles into the daily grind routine.

No, that’s a misunderstanding of how the Rank 1 criteria works. It isn’t 0.1% of the qualified people in the Gladiator bracket. It’s 0.1% of all qualified Arena players, i.e. the entire pool of players. That’s how it’s always been. The Gladiator bracket is just a fancy name to add structure to the way different item level gear is rewarded, so it makes a bit more sense to players.

I agree. I think that was what we saw in BfA Season 1 as well. The initial gear rewards from Arena wins were very generous, so everyone and their mom grinded Arenas to get quickly geared up. Then Blizzard tuned the gear acquisition from Arena wins down, and then everyone who wasn’t devoted to Arenas or had secondary goals (Seasonal mount for example) stopped playing.

I think we’re using the terms in different ways.

Participation to me is just the total amount of players who have played the minimum required amount of games to be included in the calculation for how many Rank 1 titles are handed out. I believe it’s 20 or 50 games or something above rating 1000. Something like that. Anyway, that number was high for BfA Season 1.

The player activity is just the raw amount of Arena games played on a daily basis. How many Arena maps are the servers having to load every day? That’s open to speculation, but I suspect that number is in a downward spiral and has been declining for a long time. It correlates with the fact that WoW as a whole doesn’t have 12 million subscribers these days, so everything sees a decline. But I also think the people who have always played Arenas are playing less these days, though that’s speculation on my part. But that’s what I’m gathering from what people on the forums say (i.e. that they don’t play as much Arenas these days as in the past).

I don’t think this is ideal. The main reason is that it structures Arenas around the die-hard Arena fans who just want to do Arenas and nothing else. And that’s good for them (probably why the suggestion is so popular around here!).
But on the flip-side it creates zero incentive for anyone else to get involved in Arenas. It becomes an area that you can – and likely will – completely ignore if you are not an aspiring Arena Gladiator or such.
And as time goes the Arena population will just shrink and shrink, because the structure doesn’t create any motivation or incentive for new players to get involved. Arena becomes fenced-off, placed in a corner where everyone can easily pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s not sustainable. Arenas need a constant influx of new players. It cannot operate under the assumption that everyone who currently does Arenas will keep doing so until the day WoW shuts down. There has to be something that makes the PvEer go: “Uuuh, that looks juicy. Maybe I should give Arenas a try!”

This always struck to me as a really odd problem/non-issue critique.

The bag space has gradually increased over the years- Surely we can fit two sets of gear easily within these 32+ size bags? And if not, the only fix Blizzard needs to do is increase bagsize? Problem solved, literally.

Even if people would have different sets of gear for pvp and pve (which they do even now, due to azerite traits, mythic + vs pvp vs raiding), it’s not a problem.

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well you too much focused on the first part, ignoring the actual critique
it’s mostly that you still need gear, just old one, it will be weird to farm etc.
it might be easier, but really…

In that it has never been a proper statistic to use. You could give it more of a leeway when we actually had a far larger playerbase (as extremes tend to smooth out especially on normal distribution the more people you add), but not now when the subs are down by 5+ million players.

But no, it’s never been a good statistic to use.

You misunderstood me.

Let’s say that we have a total pool of 100 players who pvp.

You assumption that the top % would be representative of the entire pvp participation rests on the idea that everybody is trying to reach rank 1- All of those hundred people are pushing for the rank 1.

They aren’t.

Even if we say generously the high percentile of 15% of the players are trying for the rank 1, that still leaves the rest of the 85% unaccounted for. Some of them do pvp just for a weekly reward. Some of them do it to get the pvp elite set. Some of them do it to get mythic equilevant gear at 2100-2400+ bracket.

If everybody was linearly pushing to rank 1 your assumption would be correct, but everybody is not doing that. We could have (and we do, unironically) have these couple of teams that que into each other over and over again near the cutoff rate, while having no connection whatsoever to the players who are stuck (either by their own choice or not) at lower ratings.

Again, the same logic that I explained above applies.

Well it doesn’t matter how you choose to use them.

Having 1 player play arena for 100 times a day = More activity, not more participation.
Having 100 players play arena 1 times a day = More participation, not more activity.

Participation is tied to the amount of people participating, activity is tied to the amount of how actively players are playing arenas.

Participation has gone down. That’s a fact, and undisputable at that.

Activity could have been higher (as you said) at the start of the season 1, or season 2 or whatever, but that has nothing to do with how the participation was.

No, it doesn’t. You could earn conquest from normal battlegrounds and other content as well (like in WoD). I for example geared my MM hunter simply through ashran and normal BG’s because I had so much fun doing it- I only took part in rated arena when I wanted to.

I disagree. Both MoP and WoD had high pvp participation, so that alone gives some empirical evidence of the contrary.

Could the rewards be improved? Sure. Add more cosmetic rewards. Mounts, titles, arena sets, recolours, weapons, etc.

People only care about the gear when it matters- And the only time when it should matter, is when you are entering an activity. That gives you something to work for and feel rewarded for once you get that small task done, and then you are good to go!

So the question to this is why no PVP templates? I think they are genuinely too simplifying and hard to implement so that they work optimally- As Legion proved (They promised frequent and quick changes but actually the contrary was the case). + Having a chance to customize your own stats and gear is a big + in an RPG game, so there’s that. Templates don’t allow that.

As said, gear should matter but only at the entry level, and not by much. Once you are done with your gear farming, you can just focus onto other things- Challenging yourself to reach higher rating, farm some cosmetics, or just go and blow up people in BG’s and other entry level pvp content- Which has all but died out during BFA and Legion.

No, you are wrong.

I propose this: What if Blizzard spends resources onto a system of progression in the game, but people choose to ignore it? Is that really a problem?

Look at Island expeditions, for example. I’ve not done them in +6 months. And I am happier for it.

Forcing people to do content they despise won’t improve the game. Letting them decide what they want to do (and having reasonable rewards in those systems that aren’t exclusive to them, but easier to get in them than others) is the way to go.

Fundamentally, I think that rated content should be the best source of conquest, which allows you to get conquest gear quicker, but you should be able to get it under a reasonable amount of time in normal pvp (BG’s, skirmishes, world pvp) too. Currently, this is not the case.