Smells like a bait thread to me.
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Fair.
Let’s play chess. I win the first match (most likely because I chose to play white and white statistically have an edge over black in chess).
Next match, I am rewarded with a piece upgrade. One of my pawns become a knight, a rook, a bishop or a queen, at the very start of the match.
You agree ?
Which has nothing to do with my toon.
Sure. But since the logic of pvp rewards is flawed, it doesn’t really matter in our discussion.
No, it’s a game.
Chess is not a MMORPG. I truly understand your logic and what do you imply by suggesting the implementation of such thing in wow, but I simply don’t like it. I want back pvp gear, stats and sets that are more powerful as you rank up.
G’day!
3 Likes
Hey Thýri, I had to look up your previous posts and your profile, Arena achievements to understand where your frustration comes from.
Now, I do. You’re a highly skilled M+ runner but I can see you are struggling with rated PvP and it appears that you have just hopped into the Arena in 2020 according to your achievements. Ooof, worst possible time.
I agree with you on one thing, PvP is absolutely trash at the moment and it was way better in previous expansions. Climbing the rated ladder, is completely down to who has the luckiest/most corruption procs.
I can tell that you think back to Legion PvP, where as soon as you dinged, you could hop into Battlegrounds and just have fun. Those were good days, and I agree with you as a matter of fact.
I do not believe that gear should influence PvP. Unfortunately, here is the problem.
Players in a MMORPG believe that the more gear acquired and time spent on the game, the more powerful they should be.
And they are not wrong about that, it’s the fundamental core of a MMORPG.
- Time + gear = increase in player power
But how do we put that into a PvP perspective?
- Skill = increase in player power?
- Skill + gear = increase in player power?
- Skill + gear + time = increase in player power?
The problem is skill. You’ve seen it, some ilvl 425 utterly destroys a ilvl 475 player.
How do you measure skill? The gear and time investment is there to lower the influence of the skill factor. Think about how little your ilvl carries you in PvP and how much it carries you in PvE.
Legion spoiled us. A LOT. It’s hard to return to that fundamental core. We don’t fully know how Shadowlands PvP will be, how much will rely on gear, will some gear need to be acquired from PvE and how far behind PvE gear will it be.
I would hold off on BFA PvP and really give it a go in Shadowlands again. Keep pushing for Challenger and Rival 
I’m rooting for you!
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Just want to make things clear about this. I’m not frustrated. I played some arena/BG in 8.3 so I could get blood of the enemy and conflict and strike rank 3. There was no other reason.
I already knew pvp was a complete mess in BFA.
Why did I start this topic, then ?
Because I’ve seen the other topic where players actively want gear rewards, pvp vendor, pvp power and pvp resilience and pvp whatever, to make their character stronger in pvp.
Unless I am mistaken, only during legion we had some kind of normalization (through templates). It was tried, and discarded in BFA. So, we’ve basically had ~14 years of PvP with imbalance caused by gear and about 2 years of PvP without gear imbalance.
Some ilvl 425 utterly destroys an ilvl 475, you say. Basically arguing that skill is the biggest factor and gear is only there to lower the influence of skill.
If that was really true, the gear rewards would go to players who lose battle. Not those who win. Don’t you think?
You also don’t want to forget that there is still some kind of hidden normalization in BFA.
I’d be very interested in seeing actual numbers on this BFA hidden normalization, btw. Because maybe what is really happening is exactly equivalent to what I was describing earlier.
Then, my suggestion would just become “make things transparent instead of hidding them”.
What? Then you have completely misunderstood them. It’s not because they want to be stronger in PvP, it’s because they just want to gear through PvP and not PvE.
BFA made the forced mandate that if you want to gear for PvP, you need to PvE. Because:
- It’s faster
- It’s easier
- Requires less skill
Sorry, but you are mistaken. Back when we had Resilience as a stat, this problem did not exist.
It compensated for the massive ilvl difference between PvE and PvP gear.
The problem was raider crybabies who couldn’t handle that their BiS gear from raids, was useless in PvP.
PvP’ers never complained about their gear not working in raids.
WHAT??? No?! By that logic, raid or M+ rewards should always go to the lowest dps/hps in the group/raid? Dude, come on…
Also I didn’t argue that skill was the biggest factor, I argued that it plays a factor and is normalized by time and gear investments.
This was discovered back in Legion. BFA made it criminal, the numbers that appear on your screen in PvE or PvP are a blatant lie. It’s especially disgusting in world PvP where it makes no sense at all.
Another trash system approved by the Dev team.
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You’re playing with words, here. Why do people want to gear through PvP ? transmog ?
We can argue about why. Personally, I’d say because PvE is less broken than PvP.
You don’t get me. resilience or not, as long as raw power given by gear has an effect in PvP, there is gear imbalance.
When resilience was a thing, your toon was basically useless until he had resilience.
Compare that to PvE, since people like to compare PvE and PvP progression.
- When your toon is ilvl 430 (for example) in PvE, you can start gearing using WQ, then mythic0, then mythic+2, and you’re climbing into higher difficulties, because your character stats allows it… And also because higher difficulties exists in game.
- PvP, now. When you have no resilience (or any pvp stat without which your character is worthless), you are worthless. And not welcome. Remember all these threads suggesting to ban players from PvP until they reach a high ilvl ?
Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of gearing through pvp, btw ? PvPers should, at the same time, gear through pvp but avoid PvP until they have good gear, because it spoils the game of other PvPers who have good gear. Don’t you think there’s something dumb here ?
So, we agree. Except that it’s not my logic. It’s yours, when you say that gear serves to lower the influence of skill in pvp.
Agree to disagree.
They’ve tried that in Legion and it was so unfun to play my mage back then I don’t think I even reached 1500 rating. Not allowing you to pick your secondaries is a bad idea especially if the devs are out of touch with what stat a spec relies on. I remember dropping from 65-70% crit in Emerald Nightmare to ~40% after entering instances PvP. That did not feel good.
Even if we want the gear to not matter, we need some way of picking our stats.
Make the gear easily available for everyone then we will see who is good and who is corrupted.
I’m commenting here as someone that doesn’t PvP so I know no details about the actual mechanics of the play style. Ignore my comments if you don’t think they’re worth reading.
Even as a non PvP player I can see that PvP is in a bad shape. Asking someone that just wants to PvP to have to do endgame PvE is IMO silly.
For PvE we unlock dungeons and their difficulty levels as we increase our Item level. So is there any reason that PvP BG’s and whatnot be separated by Item level ? And then get rewarded with gear that will help towards getting access to the next difficulty tier ?
I see no reason why PvP shouldn’t reward gear that’s on parity with PvE gear.
I think the removal of the PvP vendors was a mistake and the current situation where we have players going into PvP not because they want to PvP but because it gives better PvE rewards isn’t healthy for the PvP game.
As for PvP not needing gear, I think that’s not right and there should be some gear progression in PvP as there is in PvE.
The argument that PvP requires more skill is sorta right, I see it as needing a different skill than PvE, but that’s just my opinion.
PvE is all about knowing the moves and the mechanics of the fight, PvP is far more reactive and needs fast thinking and reflexes against an opponent that doesn’t signal where they’re going to place that AoE and can do something totally unexpected.
As I said, this is from a non PvP players PoV so ignore if you wish.
3 Likes
Have you checked my normalization suggestion ?
Just a question, here. What exactly are the next difficulty tiers in PvP ? When I say “tiers” I mean exactly the kind of PvE tier you’re referring to.
See my comment on the following for more insight:
The difference between PvP and PvE, at least from a theoretical point of view (in other words, without considering broken things like corruption procs) in terms of skills is that:
- in PvE, you need to learn what is happening in dungeons/raids and how to react or anticipate these things in order to overcome them. Once you have learnt these things, there’s not much to learn.
Of course, there are things that doesn’t matter when you’re in lower difficulties and they become wipe-worthy if you ignore them on higher difficulties. But again: once you have learnt these things, there’s not much left to learn. - in PvP, you have to learn how to defeat the tactic of your opponent who is also a player. He does the same. Once you have learnt how to beat him, he will learn how to beat you, and you will have to learn how to beat him again.
So, there is some kind of “meta”, that is also dependent on what is available to use in pvp.
But there’s a limit. Once you’ve reached that limit, you can’t learn much more either. It just takes longer to reach that limit, because players adapt their playstyle, whereas mobs don’t.
That said…
In PvE, higher tiers typically offer gear with higher ilvl. So there’s a growth in raw power. And in order to keep challenges challenging, mobs also have their health and damage increased accordingly.
Notice that, as I already said, it could be done otherwise.
In PvP, what kind of growth do we have exactly ? We have players learning how to beat players. But other than that, what’s happening ?
We objectively don’t need gear progression for PvP.
Worse: as I said, gear progression for PvP can (and will) actually have bad effects on the game.
For example, splitting the community even more with arguments like “he has bad gear he shouldn’t get into my BG because I have good gear and he’s being useless”.
So, you’re basically left with a split community that don’t PvP a lot, hence there’s even less players to come play with you, thus the BG queues are horrendously long. Or you have to accept that there will be lowbies in your BG that will be like a dead weight. But hey! You have gear progression, so it’s fine. You can have a bad gameplay experience as long as those numbers go up, right ?
Well that’s just the thing, there don’t appear to be any difficulty tiers in PvP, I see numerous posts and threads from Ilvl 470+ players complaining that they’ve been grouped up with a bunch of Ilvl 440 or so players and blame that for losing the BG, Why can’t there be Ilvl bands for PvP BG’s ? So everyone in a particular BG would all be at approximately the same gear level and it would be down to the skills of the players that decreed the result.
The other extreme would be to totally negate your gear stats and Ilvel and have a completely level playing field but wouldn’t that remove one of the incentives to do PvP ?
If the BG’s where split as I said and rewarded gear for a win that enabled that player to progress to the next ‘tier’ then only the good players would be getting that gear anyway. I see no reason why there shouldn’t be a personal score awarded (damage done. no of kills, % of total damage/healing done) , that way the players that decided to AFK would get a lower score and therefore a worse reward than the players that got in there to get the job done.
The main reason is that there’s not a lot of PvPers. So, if you split even more the community, there will be even less players to play with.
Kinda. But this is really all artificial.
Consider gear rewards in PvP, even with this idea of PvP tiers you described above. You’re still doing the same thing. Numbers are just getting bigger, but you’re fighting opponents who also have bigger numbers.
So, instead of having, say, 100 health, you have 150, but your opponent also have 150 health. And your damage both increase aswell… So… The only thing that can really change is that if health and damage don’t scale at the same rate. In that case your life expectancy in PvP either increase or decrease depending on your ilvl.
You could probably say the same about M+. Afterall, M+20 is, fundamentally, the same as M+0… Don’t jump on me for making this comparison, I said “fundamentally”. I know that things are quite different, and I already explained why. So, just these differences between lower and higher difficulties are enough to say that it’s not comparable to “PvP tiers”.
But if that’s not enough of a difference, take in consideration the fact that in PvE, your opponent is a mob. It’s job is to die. He’s not gonna complain about it. In PvP, if a player has an edge over another “just because gear”… You could argue that he earned that gear. But then I should rolfstomp you with my mythic raid gear. I earned it.
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Then shouldn’t there be an effort to make PvP more attractive ?
Maybe there’s not a lot of PvPers because the genre is in the state it’s in today.
Why don’t you PvP ?
I used to, but unfortunately age and ill health (Vision and hearing issues along with nerve problems that can cause hand/eye co ordination issues) means I’m no good at it whatsoever and I don’t enjoy doing things that I don’t have at least a little competency with.
I’m also not a big fan of having PvP hived off as a sort of side show and put out of the way in BG’s and arenas. When WoW introduced phasing it was one of the factors that killed world PvP, which was something I enjoyed doing.
I don’t dislike PvP and regard it as an important part of WoW but as the years have passed my approach to the game and my attitudes regarding how I play has changed and I tend to adopt a more relaxed and chilled attitude to playing. I don’t regard the game as a competition between me and the other players and don’t feel the need to prove I’m better than anyone else so this, along with the health issues, has contributed to my loss of interest in competing in PvP.
/Facepalm I can’t believe what i just saw , nevermind special people need to express their opinions too…
Oh and tl/dr all, it is too much asking not to write a bad comedy script !
On the other hand a lot of PvP’ers don’t like to do PvE content and hate the fact some really good items are ‘locked’ behind Raids or Mythic+. I’ve seen a lot of complaints from avid Arena/PvP-players that don’t want to do PvE to get (even) better gear than they already have.
Corruptions are obviously a WILD example, but you see what happens when somebody has better gear(or better effects). Paladin’s doing Hand of Justice several times within a minute because his gear(corruptions) allow it.
If that Paladin wins the game based on that, is that skill? No of course not.
The differences are not that extreme when you compare a gap of just 10-20 ilvl’s opposed to corruptions, but your gear still gives an edge over an equally skilled player.
So yeah there’s something to say for both preferences.
Templates/Equalizing gear
- Winning a game is purely based on skill.
- Not gear dependant
- Don’t have to participate in other forms of content to remain relevant in PvP
- Items don’t have to be balanced for instanced PvP-content.
The downside however is class-imbalance, a bad class or spec would not be very loved in Arenas. On the other hand the ‘best’ specs can’t use gear to further increase the gap. It also doesn’t give you a sense of progression gear-wise.
Current/gear based
- Sense of progression gear-wise
- A close-cut game can be won because you have better gear than your opponent(s).
- More variety in gear/effects
The downside to this is that gear is partially responsible for wins, BOE’s and boosts for gear can be used to quickly increase your ilvl which in turn can increase the gap between you and others. Balancing of both classes and items need to be done in order to retain a level playing field which is apparently quite difficult for Blizzard. You also need to do other forms of content to remain relevant in PvP as gear from PvE-content usually is more readily available.
Personally I feel Blizzard should at minimum disable effects like Corruptions for instanced PvP-content, so in Shadowlands that would be Covenant abilities, Soulbinds and Legendaries.
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PvP need templates back, but tho it wouldn’t happen.