Personally I think the gear does need to be gated in PvP. Just throwing a ton of time with no requirement of becoming a better player, should not give you the best gear available. In PvE, the difficulty of the scripted encounters is what determines the quality of the gear.
In PvP, there needs to be an equivalent difficulty which isn’t based on purely throwing time at it. The only way to do so is that only a percentage of the competing playerbase can reach a high enough rating to obtain the gear, hence determining the difficulty component.
Why does that difficulty has to reward gear? Ratings / titles / cosmetics are perfectly fine.
But that’s even beside the point. If you want rated PVP to reward gear and don’t want unrated PVP to reward that gear, fine. But then folks from rated PVP should either not be able to come to unrated (not realistic) or should be scaled to the maximum ilvl obtainable in unrated (realistic). Same for people from PVE.
If you are 2400 in arenas, can you queue vs 1200? You cannot, the system doesn’t let you do it. So, how come you can go vs 0 = random BGs? Makes no sense. Either you should not be able to do this (eg, the gear obtained in arenas goes gray when you zone in to random BGs), or you should be scaled down, or they should be scaled up.
Well this is always going to come down to opinion, but I think WoW has always relied on the incentive of improving as a player & obtaining stronger gear as a result of taking on bigger challenges. Doing so makes you a more potent foe & ally in PvE AND PvP.
I don’t see anything wrong with this - I’ve never had top level gear myself, but when playing in a random battleground, it is somewhat fun to work together with a team to take down a powerful player, or help your strongest team member etc. + There’s a great satisfaction when you somehow manage to single-handedly kill a player with much stronger gear than yourself (knock him half way down a hill etc?)
Personally, I find battlegrounds where everyone has equivalent stats to be pretty dull.
And how do I do that? I have never done rated arenas(did some rated BGs yesterday tho) so how can I get over that hurdle when everyone requires you to have exp? Tried making my own group but I just sat there for 30 mins without applicants.
Only fair that being better at the game and doing harder content would award better gear.
There are plenty of people in the group finder who aren’t asking any requirements, and you can always ask friends/guildies if they’d like to play with you.
Yes, when I started playing arena in 8.1 a 1650 cr druid joined my group, I was a Fury Warrior and 1400 cr I guess (lol). I didn’t even know not to hit Thorns against druids.
Wrong Spec for PvP + Lack of class knowledge + lack of exp + lack of cr + wrong race for Warrior (Void Elf). I had every negative aspect of a bad arena player and asked him “Whyd did you start playing with me, I was a noob?” He said “I don’t feel nervous when I play with you”.
As a result despite being a fury warrior, we reached our highest ratings together. I was just a chill guy with determination, and that was it.