Can we please remove the ilvl brackets for rating in pvp. I got 1800 in season 1 of Shadowlands, and i know im going to get the obligatory “your just mad your not good enough”, but i got 2100 rating in BFA so i would say im not bad at pvp just not the best. Most of season 1 Shadowlands for me was spent spamming arenas with random players because all my pvp friends quit after a month, so what happens when you have players that are usually 2400+ rating coming down to 1800 to boost people for gold? They generally tend to wreck us lowly scrubs and rightly so, but this wouldn’t feel so bad if it didn’t have the caveat that they are also technically two gear brackets above us.
The skill will always shine through with WoW pvp so i do not understand why we need the different gear brackets based on rating, especially with the pvp gear having much less of an effect on the raiding scene as in season 1.
For years Blizz made conquest gear all the same except i think the 2200 rated gear, which they disabled in 5.2. Here is the quote for their reasoning when they did it.
Rating Requirements
The current rating requirements on PvP gear create an artificially sharp division between players over 2200 rating and those below that rating threshold, which is unduly difficult to cross. We’d prefer that teams progress up the ladder on a curve against gradually more difficult opponents, instead of running into a wall at a certain rating.
Why since the end of Legion have they tried to use this system? It has only increased the number of arena boosters in the game due to it being 10x easier to climb with 2100 rated gear than if you try to do it yourself with 1600 rated gear.
Sadly i don’t think that Blizz will stop this because they are raking in the money from people buying tokens for boosts, but i don’t think they realise how many discords are doing this for real money, because i truly believe the number of people RMT’ing for this is way more than those buying tokens for it.
Would love to get some other opinions on this, as i came across the update from 5.2 and found it very interesting that they have U-turned so hard on this. Because i think most can agree MoP was one of the patches for WoW pvp (personally i liked cata more but thats just me) and i think it shows, when they made changes like removing 2200 rated gear to make the competition at 2200 rating fair, and nowadays we have this gear imbalance throughout the pvp ladder.
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Only way to fix this is to bring back mop/wod gearing
Also remove all of that pve grind, I couldn’t care less about any of it.
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Idk, why they return gear based on rating. They already said it was mistake in the past and then it come back in SL… 
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Because it was too good, juts like reforge in mop that’s why they changed it because your were happy for once.
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No rating req for higher gear > no motivation to push higher (play more) > more bored people unsubbing in time > less income. Got it?
“The chase is better than the catch”
No. More people engaged with pvp and it was alot easier for people to enter into pvp, because they weren’t entering in with a massive disadvantage.
Yes they would be initially disadvantaged due to to not having the conquest gear, but they knew all they had to do was grind out the conquest and then they were on a level playing field game wise.
The current system does not allow for this as if you start now your ilvl in pvp will be 233 if you have all the conquest gear which most would not have but lets use that for a basis. Then you fight someone who has had 1800 in arenas but for whatever reason is now fighting in 1k mmr arenas, which does happen with boosting and people just wanting to drop to lower mmr’s. Now you have someone who is 233 ilvl vs somone who is 253 ilvl. The rough health difference between those players is going to be 10-15k. How are you going to be more motivated by that system, than if you could just get the gear and then your skill becomes the main factor once you have every peice filled out.
The motivation of pvp is that you gear out your character and then you play for the rating because you want the skill and to learn. People don’t do M+ 20’s for the gear do they?.. They could just spam a +15. They do it for the challenge and the need to get better.
This less motivation thing isn’t correct im sorry. Maybe for a select few it is but if your mentality for PvP is to get the best gear then your in the wrong place personally. Thats what PvE is for.
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Reaching 1600 right now is a joke. And you get an upgrade to 246 for it. + you won’t see 259 players every game since they are much higher. A little push and you get 1800 rival gear. Yea sometimes you face teams with better gear near the “wall” ratings like 1750-1799 and 2000-2099, but the difference is not that big to entirely decide the fate of the match.
Believe me, you will get bored way more faster if they give you max gear on the plate instantly. Saw that in wod, was a victim of that boredom.
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You mean like how they did for every expansion before Legion and i loved the game the entire time and only ever played pvp, just making new alts and trying out new classes in pvp. I had 6 years from 2010-2016 where all i did was pvp. So if you want to say this pvp gearing would bore me im sorry you don’t know how much i love pvp. I just don’t hate myself enough to bother trying to gear in this crap system. Its also not instant you have to farm the conquest and that will take days with a normal amount of time played per day.
Tbh it might be, if i was at an even playing field but my 220 ilvl spriest that was my main at the end of S1 now feels like a paper bag when i try to do and arena with people that have 20k hp more than me. This would be fine if i knew all i had to do was grind out one set of gear and then i was done. But to get back to the 1800 rated gear i had before i quit in S1 i will have to essentially grind out four sets of gear and thats whilst trying to gain rating against people with 60k hp.
The only drawback of the current system is weekly rewards you miss for every week you are not playing. For the rest there is a catch up system. You were happy before legion, someone wasn’t - it is part of people’s own preferences. I am confronting your statements about how hard it is to GET gear right now. And you must agree with me it is not. The conq cap grind may be tedious, long, but not hard. Daily rated bg wins help a lot there.
I have a 2nd ret to play with my low skilled irl mates and i went from 35 renown 200 ilvl venthyr to 225 ilvl kyrian in 3 weeks of casual gameplay. All you need is skill and will to play.
You don’t grind through 4 sets of gear since 3/5 upgrade is 1600 and you lose 0 rating on the 0-1400 road. 1400-1600 is a child’s play. I guess you just have no fun from the game/burned out a bit so you see all this in dark colours. The system isn’t perfect, but it is better than the past.
2100 geared people don’t have 60k hp btw. I will correct you soon as i farm all needed honor for my 5/5 ups (got my 2100 in 2s yesterday).
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I think there is probably some truth to this, but i played a lot in BFA and enjoyed it alot even with all my friends quitting but my #1 complaint throughout BFA was the fact that there was rating locked gear, this isn’t something i decided because i stopped playing Shadowlands, i have personally hated it since the start of BFA.
Well its atleast around 55k as im watching freezion atm and he has 55k on a hunter.
This is true but i think you are missing my point about the overall health of pvp, because whilst there will still be people buying boosts for pvp, they don’t have any affect on the other players at their skill bracket as most of these players will get boosted to something like 1800/2100 and then drop back down to slightly above their original skill level and then gatekeep the brackets for others. i.e someone who was a low 1600 rated player buys a boost to 2100 and then drops back to around 1700-1800 they are now fighting people with 13 ilvls less than them but they are roughly the same skill level. Whilst 13 ilvls is not the biggest thing in the world i think we can agree that it can still have a fairly big impact on players of the same skill level fighting one another.
Boosting is not the problem - gear itself is
Yes but what im saying is that the boosting and the fact that the gear these boosted players get, negatively affect other players around their skill level. If you have just one set of gear that everyone has access to, then i do not see how there is a problem with this. They have tried to add endgame gear progression into a part of the game that does not require the same system as PvE gearing. The order should go. Get Honor gear → Get Conquest gear → Climb rating.
The main problem i have is that it has all been blurred into one pile and it makes it very unecessarily complicated. I mean if you look at my original post the link i shared shows that Blizz at the time agreed with me and you can say many things about MoP but boring pvp was not one of them.
Yes i could grind to 2100, i did it in BFA and i could do it in Shadowlands, but with the game in its current state and the attitude of the company i honestly don’t see it as a worthwhile or fulfilling, and its made 10x harder by the fact the barrier to re-entry / entry is so high in all parts of the game. I think 9.1.5 needs to make a fair few changes to bring back in players like myself that want to play the game but aren’t going to spend 10x the amount of time than it should take
13 ilvls won’t let you ignore pvp fundamentals. You will still melt under convoke, hunt, necro ww burst and other.
Boosting will exist no matter what. It is in human nature. You won’t find a system to fight it, except making the game so bad that no one will play it (so there will be no one to boost).
You have to answer to yourself: why do you need 5/5 gear right now? And what next?
Regardless of the impact on boosting, removing rating-locked item level will make it far more viable to play alts as one can just cap them each week and get full gear. This means more activity on the ladder, which means it is healthier and people can find games more easily.
Edit: AND people will have less reason to sit rating which might mean that people won’t be too scared to queue because they want to keep their 1600, 1800 or so on…
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id even take legion pvp gear scale system over this clowndesign now^^
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This is the point im trying to make though, because the boosting will not be as necessary.
I’m not saying the boosting wont be there, because it will always be there. It will however stop the people who think they need the gear to climb rating from buying the boost because they think they need the gear to get the rating.
You have to answer to yourself: why not have 5/5 gear right now? What does the game really offer that makes the grind worth it? Reduce the barrier to entry for new players and older players who want alts to play on. It will overall make the ladder more free flowing and stop people from sitting on rating and will allow people to play more.
The difference i think right now is, you are fine with it and tbh so am I. I can play with it atm because i love pvp and will still carry on playing, but all my friends who were always more PvE focused got really hyped for pvp this xpac at the start but they got to like 1550 and quit because they were being locked at the bracket by people who had similar skill but higher gear.
Look i know your going to say “well the ilvl difference doesn’t matter that much and a good player should be able to push through”, but as the numbers showed alot of the players that couldn’t push through just quit playing PvP all together. So why not remove the barrier to entry a little bit and it will allow newer players to really get involved in the ladder. Yes lots will still quit because they wont climb much further, but i know a good percentage will carry on playing or make new alts to play on.
The problem is not boosting - it’s gearing. Basically <1400 you get full honor + PvE geared people who have more gear than +1400 bracket. This makes others feel like it’s impossible so they buy boosts.
Boosters are probably less than 10% of your games but PvE players geared from +15 and from that Brawl are. The fact that PvE gear is still viable in PvP is pathetic. Getting +15 is not even close to getting 1800 in 2s atm but such people will play at <1400 now and people will call it “boosting”.
Also people below 1600 are actually better geared than these above. This needs a change and there is nothing to defend it. Gearing in PvP doesn’t work and it is not fair.
Basically we can announce that “character creating period is over”.
If they not rethink about gearing system in 9.1.5 in won’t happens in this expansion and you should deal with it till 2023. They will try to do some fixes for at least stop mass exodus from the game, to show that they don’t care about players wishes and opinion. They already promised to improve LFG system and gearing system for PvP, will they? Its a big question.
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It’s not even they have to do a lot. They have to review late MoP and WoD gearing. Review them and choose one. It’s clear that “WoW as a whole game approach” where you get rewards from everywhere doesn’t work. It also forces PvP gearing to reflect PvE one so you get these stupid upgrades. Also costd were increased for no reason. From 10 wins per week in Cata-MoP to 21 in 2s? This is just madness. Now imagine you come back to the game (what is the ultimate goal of Blizzard now) and you face 48 k hp people in <1400 bracket. Gl farming conquest points.
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I have no illusion about that tbh. I’m not shure they will do something relevant in near future about gearing. PvP playerbase is very tiny, players who cares about gearing even less. People loging for boost or being boosted. I think they focused on casual PvE players and mb M+ gearing(i hope). Legion templates and tuning was good times, but it will never return. This game about PvE. Deal with it. There is better even MMO for PvP.
When u sit on casual lvl MMR in PvP and can’t find with whom playing to for hrs and hours. Meanwhile u can reroll to PvE and find M+ run in 5 minutes, even 15-20 keys. After months or two in M+ fun you will have full gear with versa and 
on casual players in any kind of PvP brackets. Idk, this game is so bad for PvP.
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