PvP don't need gear

Community General Discussion
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Sure, it’s fun to see your character progress in power. But as far as pvp balance is concerned, PvP should not reward any piece of gear that improve the efficiency of your character whatsoever.

The reasoning is very simple. If you give a player who won a fight an item that increase the probabilities that he will win again in the future, it only has one effect: artificially increase the gap between good and bad players.

Ok, that requires a bit of nuance, now. There are not just two categories of players: good on the left and bad on the right. It doesn’t work like that. Without taking classes imbalances in consideration, it’s a spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum, you have players who are consistently winning and the other end of the spectrum, you have those who consistently lose. Players live somewhere on that spectrum.

If you reward winner with increased chances of winning, then what happens is that characters who were the first involved in pvp have a much higher chance of winning than the others.

It can be seen as a minor effect, but in reality, you don’t reward an athlete with steroids when he finishes on the podium.

You can argue that wow is not a sport, I’ll tell you: sure, but it’s a game.
You can argue that wow is an RPG, and i’ll tell you: sure, so it should focus on the story somehow, to keep it satisfying. But as far as instanced pvp is concerned, there is no story, only gameplay. The same gameplay since arena/BG were first introduced.
WSG hasn’t changed over 10 years. Yea, the map has changed a little bit. But if you’re telling me that, you’re just trolling. You know precisely what I mean when I say that WSG hasn’t changed. It’s still the same battle, the same concept gameplay wise, and no story whatsoever, nor any consequence story-wise or world-wise is attached to winning or losing that battle.
So, no, world of warcraft PvP is not an RPG, it’s more like quake multiplayer (deathmatch, capture the flag, etc).

Character stats should be normalized in instanced PvP. Without that, even if classes were miraculously balanced, it would still be imbalanced, and ultimately unfair.

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You are either a troll or extremely stupid.

The game reward good players with better gear so that they’ll climb faster and scrubs will get rid of them. If it weren’t for echo farming the ladder would not be so chaotic.

We can also apply your logic to PvE, let’s not reward PvE players with better gear because PvE is always same mechanics an item upgrade makes PvE directly easier each time but in PvP if you mismanage your cooldowns even if you have gear you die.

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They tried templates in Legion and players were not happy.

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So I suppose we should artificially increase the gap between “good” players who are in a hardcore raiding guild, and those who truly enjoy PvP in its own right (they exist btw).

Like that doesn’t happen in PvE? There are constantly people everywhere “whining” that the catch-up mechanic is far from adequate and that at the end of the expansion things shouldn’t be gated by time or currency?

There is plenty of PvE that doesn’t change either, but we have to necessarily go through it each time. It’s called leveling. Except older BGs manage to stay relevant.

I’m not a PvPer but unlike you I do not claim to be a better authority on how they should play. So don’t bother going through my profile.

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maybe bad players should just consider getting good ? then they might win

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Before more people come up with comments like those above my current reply:

Already said in multiple earlier threads that PvE vertical progression is not something required. You can very probably make the game work with giving no raw power gain to character from level 1 to level max.
Basically, every player has the same health and power (attack, spell, healing power). Then every item provide a zero-sum secondary stats modification to your character.
If it has +100 on critical strike, it can have -100 on haste (or -50/-50 on mastery/versa, you get the idea).
Then, have items give different active/passive effects.
Result is that players will actually hunt for items they enjoy all over the world, and not just from your very last M+/raid or whatever gives the highest amount of stats.
And if you want to keep some sort of “clean” end-tier, you can disable the effects of items of past tiers in the mythic last current tier.

That being said…

They tried templates in legion, people were unhappy. Template is not normalization. Normalization is scaling your stats so that the total is the same for everyone. That means you still have control of your character.

Well, yes. Because something is not satisfying in PvE it’s no big deal if it’s not satisfying either in PvP ? What’s your logic here ?

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As much as I hate to defend the OP, a couple of years ago these forums were chock full of pvp’rs moaning about “why do we have to get gear? Give us templates so skill and not gear matters!”

Oh how things changed when you realised it was the gear you needed to stop noobs. Turns out it wasn’t your mad skillz yo.

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You’re arguing semantics. Templates did more or less equalize stats, and a lot of players hated that passionately. For some reason they want their gear to matter.

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Some math here, ok ?

Let c be your crit chance rating, h your haste rating, m your mastery rating and v your versatility rating.
Also let pvpc, pvph, pvpm and pvpv be the respective stats you’re going to have when entering a PvP instance.

Template is:
pvpc = 500
pvph = 1200
pvpm = 1700
pvpv = 800

Normalization is:
pvpc = c * k / (c+h+m+v)
pvph = h * k / (c+h+m+v)
pvpm = m * k / (c+h+m+v)
pvpv = v * k / (c+h+m+v)

So, basically, you’re telling me that both of these, template and normalization, are the same… Since I’m just playing with semantics, according to you.
Obviously, they’re different. You’re wrong. Probably because my explaination wasn’t good enough ?

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fixed for you.

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I was. Could queue on any alt and zerg people. Good times.

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I disagree with you. I think character progression is a core mechanic in any RPG game, pve and pvp wise.

This feature will surely please the casuals that want equals chances with players that play a lot or the players that are skilled but they are undergeared. But if you played a lot I think you should be rewarded with power, not only cosmetics.

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Already addressed the “it’s a RPG, therefore it should have character progression” in the original post.
So, I’m not really convinced by what you say. Especially the part where you say “you should be more powerful just because you play more”.
You should be more powerful because you play smart. If you’re playing for a long time, you had more time to learn how to play smart. The difference should end there.

BTW… By your logic… I play since 0.9.1. That’s the stress test of vanilla. I should therefore be among the most powerful player ever, right ?.. I mean I should really have an artificial powerup against someone who started in TBC or later.
That’s just unfair.

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Both scenarios provide the exact same total stats, so yes it’s semantics. My point is that templates were good enough to normalize entry level players and mythic raiders, but for some reason it it didn’t work(otherwise why remove it)

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So, you’re saying that a constant is equal to a function ?..

I think you played yourself here.

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Yeh I liked Templates and scaling, for this reason.

But people wanted their PvE gear to matter, so now we have a system that clearly everyone is happy with (65k hp vs 1.5million hp).

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Normalisation always breaks somehow. You can do silly things like equip terrible gear but all of it has high mastery, then slide in mastery trinkets and rings with extremely high amounts on them, and then the game will scale your mastery up like crazy because your avg. iLvL is low, and suddenly your mastery is just broken, and equipping better gear will decrease your mastery.

Normalisation also doesn’t protect against OP trinkets and procs.

Even in BfA, with its limited, but present, normalisation, we have repeatedly seen cases where equipping blues is actually better.

That is completely counter-intuitive and feels really bad.

With the templates you can’t get the gear required for different builds, so the meta converges to a single build and that’s the end of that.

So… please don’t? Just reduce the variance in the power of rewards, and make sure the max PvP rewards are awarded at a sane rating, like 2.1k or 2k - not 2.4k.

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That would be interesting to have a mathematical example of this.
But there’s very certainly a workaround this problem.

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I know you addressed it, but that’s my opinion so I had to say it.

If you play smart, you rank up, get better gear. I don’t see any problem with that.

If you played since that stage of the game at least mentally you should be stronger than other players. I didin’t think that I had to mention the fact that the power progression changes every expansion. The world is constantly changing, you have to keep up.

That’s life.

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Smells like a bait thread to me.

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