A few years ago, I played another MMORPG by the name of DC universe online.
Mediocre in comparison to wow for sure, but they got a few things right.
There was this transmog system that allowed you to change your appearance at will, and change the colour of each piece too. You could have gotten materials instead of normal colours and those were either in game shop or earned through the game. Honestly, SIGNIFICANTLY better than wow’s transmog.
And then there was the pvp scaling. In that system, since the gears were a lot less complicated than wow’s with random proc trinkets and random proc covenants, corruptions or whatever else, they made pvp gears instead.
If you didn’t have a pvp gear, you’d be scaled to lvl 96 in a pvp arena. Highest lvl was 101 back then. There was a significant boost with each lvl you gained, but it was a hard grind per level too. This made sure that even if you were a newbie, you weren’t a pushover either. But if you’d been grinding for weeks for all that, you would be rewarded for your efforts.
Something that WOW simply misses. Effort to reward is there for pve. You feel it and you like it. But it’s not available in pvp, which waters down the whole experience.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s gear or templates or whatever. Scaling is dumb and it has no place in an MMORPG.
Most of the time people don’t even understand how it works or how to best approach it. And when it always gets so convoluted that it doesn’t even make sense to anyone, then it’s obviously not something that should be in the game.
If you get beaten by someone who is a higher level or has better gear, then the solution is to get more levels or better gear yourself - not rely on some artificial scaling to even out the playing field.
I have better solution. No scaling at all. Remove 2-3 difficulty levels for raids and reduce power creep back to TBC level. No expansion level differences between previous patches gear no scaling needed.
