Shadowlands PvP Vendors Temporarily Closed

To solve an issue with the new Shadowlands PvP vendors, we need to despawn them temporarily.

The vendors will return with the next realm restarts.

3 Likes

Apparently honor didn’t reset before u relogged so ppl getting to 60 in one go could buy full gear :joy:

Not to mention the folk that bought old gear from bfa and are now refunding a bunch of weapons.

Should really just have put a cap on honor like in the past.

3 Likes

Yeah, they forgot to reset conquest / honor.

While we are on the topic of PVP gear, please make sure people who do random BGs can be competitive in them. As it stands now, they have to either PVE or go rated.

You fixed things for rated PVPers and they no longer have to do PVE. That’s great. But you inadvertently made things even worse for unrated PVPers than they were before. Please fix it so that unrated PVPers do not have to do PVE or rated PVP.

Thread for context (one of many):

2 Likes

No scaling thanks.

If you want scaled unranked pvp you got the 1 - 59 brackets.

1 Like

BG’s are about as challenging and low-level dungeons or questing. Yes, there’s potential to smash it and overdo it enormously and have a lot of fun, but no - it’s not difficult, and therefore shouldn’t reward tremendously amazing gear.

You want good gear from Player vs. Player? Fight some good players!

Do you know what the objections to scaling even were? Because they are irrelevant for the type of scaling suggested.

This is an urban cliche, so to speak, a thing repeated without thinking. No disrespect, but it is.

Ask yourself what we are talking about with “challenging content” and “gear progression” at all.

Here’s PVE: you go to a boss, you wipe. You think “well, got him to 50%, should get more gear”. You go get more gear. Then you get him to 20%. That’s progress, feels rewarding. Why were you able to make that progress? Right, because the boss STAYED THE SAME.

But it doesn’t work for PVP. Your bosses in PVP gear up themselves. Imagine what it would be if you were doing the same raid over and over, gearing up aiming to down all bosses, and then you come to boss X who you already downed last week and suddenly it got 20% more hp and that’s more than you got. Would gear progression work in this case? Would it feel rewarding? Of course, not.

That’s the difference between PVP and PVE. Because of that difference, gear progression in PVP has to be aided, else it doesn’t work. In rated PVP, it is aided by ratings. Ratings generally match people of similar gear / skill levels. But in unrated PVP, there’s no aid anymore. The traditional aid that we had was PVP gear being the best in PVP, with people in random BGs having a path to that gear. But that path no longer exists. And this is a problem, it has to be fixed.

To be clear, I am not suggesting giving best gear in the game for participating in random BGs. Obviously this has negative consequences for other parts of the game. But if they cannot give out best gear, then everyone’s gear - in random BGs - should be forced to the level where people who are doing random BGs and only random BGs, are competitive. Ie, they should limit everyone to 197 since 197 is the max ilvl obtainable from random BGs. Or, say, scale everyone into the 210-220 range.

3 Likes

We’ve been here before.

I understand you don’t mean disrespect, and neither do I when I retort with this: I’ve thought that through many, many, many times. I’ve played this game for 16 years, 10 of them as mainly PvP’er. I am a dungeon master in D&D, and I have been designing encounters and stories gameplay and PvE and PvP in it for 10 years. On top of this, I now know several of the old vanilla devs, who have also thought it through.

Trust me, I have thought about this - a lot.

Let’s get to the meat of it.

This is less true than it should be due to level scaling and M+, but yes - in an ideal world the boss fundamentally stays the same. It feels good to become stronger to be able to take on evermore dangerous foes, yes.

Already here the logic falls apart.

It is indeed true that people are gearing their characters up, but it is also true that people join and people leave, and of course people make new characters that themselves need gearing up.

Think about a school. It has a number of school years. Everyone in it is getting educated and growing up, yet the average age of the mass of people at that school stays exactly the same.

For PvP it’s similar unless some catch-up or iLvL upgrade happens that moves the average, such as a new season. Each individual player grows, the flow of people that are interested in BG’s stays the same.

So as you gear up, you are able to take down a larger and larger proportion of the players within the BG. The progression is not felt from being able to defeat that exact player - rather the sense of progression comes from finding another player very similar to that one and defeating it. It comes from the feeling that, 50 BG’s ago, you could defeat 5 out of 15 players in the BG’s enemy team, and now you can defeat 13 - or before you needed the help of another player, but now you can 2v1, etc.

High-end, difficult PvP is inherently competitive because PvP itself is inherently competitive. You are competing for who survives in each individual fight. You’re just going to have to get used to it. The only alternative to it is “play until your eyes bleed” vanilla style.

Bunch of things here - first and foremost BG gear was never better than full on raid PvE gear, so we can discard that argument instantly.

Secondly, the “aid” you describe here is not actually to aid the player, which had me confused for a sec before I reread it. Instead you seem to mean a system that helps us tell good and bad players apart so we can figure out how well to reward you. That’s what a rating system does. We can hide i to give you the feeling that it isn’t there but it is, but then we undermine the feeling of gear progression.

The average rating of all PvP’ers actually stays the same throughout a season except for a system that I actually suggested in 2011 and which got implemented.

The core idea was that we didn’t want very good players to get to Gladiator instantly and then stop playing, making it impossible for people below to catch up, so we give everyone a small leg up throughout the season of 10 MMR per week, which causes the entire rating system to slowly inflate, moving the old Gladiator’s within reach of Duelist so they have to play more and practice the season. This also has the effect of moving 1400 up to 1700, etc. But personally I don’t consider that a problem.

The problem with this is that it’s impossible to do technically. Blizzard have tried many, many times to do it in various ways, and it always ends up mathematically wonky somehow.

Look - if you want to be competitive in PvP, compete.

1 Like

Damnit, if only i did pvp

1 Like

Do you mean that the average ilvl of people doing BGs stays the same as the season progresses? If you mean it, then you are wrong. If you don’t mean it, that makes my point that bosses in PVP get stronger all the time, my logic doesn’t fall apart and my consequence stands: gear progression in PVP does not work without specific measures that help it work.

Why are you saying that it is impossible to do technically? Not only forcing people to a specific ilvl or ilvl range is possible, it’s easy. It just has to be done clearly and visibly.

The scaling that they removed was objected to because it was invisible and, as such, unpredictable. It was also too complex in that if player A fights players B and C, his spells hitting B are scaled one way and his spells hitting C are scaled a different way. It was the invisibility and complexity that was making it infuriating. But scaling doesn’t have to be invisible or complex. WoD scaling was both visible and simple. You get into a BG and your PVP gear scales up. Honor gear to one ilvl, conquest gear to another. All changes immediately seen on the character screen, all ability numbers seen in the tooltips, numbers in the logs agree with numbers in the tooltips, everything absolutely clear.

They removed the clear and simple scaling in WoD and tried to do a smarter version of it in Legion. They failed, yes. But it’s just the smarter version that failed. The clear and simple version didn’t fail. They can do it and it will work.

Rated PVP and unrated PVP are different types of content. They just are. Let’s even put aside differences between arenas and BGs - they are self-evident, and yes, a lot of people dislike arenas and like BGs (and vice versa). Let’s talk just about rated and unrated BGs. In unrated BGs, there is an auto-queue. In rated BGs, there is none. This is a huge difference. If rated BGs had a solo queue, we wouldn’t have been talking. But they don’t have it.

People in random BGs absolutely want to be competitive. But not in PVP as a whole, because that includes arenas which they don’t like for one reason and rated BGs which they don’t like for another reason. They want to be competitive in random BGs. And they are fully prepared to put in the work. By playing a lot of random BGs.

You are saying to them - “go play rated”. And that’s exactly like saying to people who do arenas - “go do PVE”. It doesn’t work.

1 Like

No, that is exactly what I mean, and I am not wrong at all.

In the BfA and Legion there were generally too many well geared people in BG’s because it was useless for gearing up. As a result people don’t go in there with their new characters - instead they go in there with their old, powerful chareacter and gear their characters up through PvE.

What this means is that low geared characters only enter BG’s at the start of a season where no higher geared characters exist.

If BG’s are a viable method for gearing up, then people will use it for gearing up, and I will be right.

I remember when it was. For 10 years I remember seeing exactly the same proportion of good and bad players in every single BG in every single season. Legion is what changed it, and now it’s being changed back.

It means you need to do a bunch of extra calculation to work out what your secondary stats will be.

I’ll go back to my character as Frost: I need 33% crit. How do I ensure that in PvP? Well, first I have to take all my items, rescale them, and then work it out that way. Alternatively I can try to work it out inside the BG waiting rooms or something like that.

There is also an advantage for me in getting attacked by the other factiopn, then taking that increased amount of stats and using it against mobs. It wasn’t uncommon on my server in WoD for the two factions to attack each other with a single spell, like an Ice Lance, and then farm mobs, making sure to stay in combat and abusing the increased amounts of stats.

It’s also plain wonky in the sense that your character’s power seems to change for no obvious reason.

Compared to that PvP Resilience or Power is vastly preferable.

I agree with this, but it is completely irrelevant. Yes, okay, you can’t solo queue for rated PvP. You know what you also can’t solo queue for? Mythic dungeons, M+, and any raids beyond LFR.

World of Warcraft will persistently push you towards groups and it will refuse to provide you the strongest rewards unless you group up. This is by design, it’s the right thing to do for an MMORPG, and you’re just going to have to suck that up.

Works just fine. Want to be competitive? Compete.

And, by the way, when a lot of players will gear up through BG’s, your BG gear will let you defeat all those gearing up through BG’s. As a result this new system actually helps you.

You are wrong. This is the cornerstone of your argument, and you are wrong. I won’t show you screens from different times in various seasons because I didn’t bother capturing them systematically, but you are damn wrong, period.

Frankly, your own paragraphs after the quoted phrase contradict it. I am not sure why you thought they supported this bizarre idea that the average ilvl in BGs stays the same over time, they do not support that.

The average ilvl of players in BGs increases during a season. This is the entire thing. Yes, there are new players coming, but they are not 80% of the players on BGs and not even 50% of them. Non-new players are a majority and they go up steadily. Further, new players who do come, get accelerated via carries from main faster and faster, the later they come. The gearing period for a new player decreases towards the end of the season heavily.

Finally, if you look at their change in SL that spurred all this, people from rated PVP are now incentivized to come to random BGs as well. Because they need honor for their conquest upgrades, and in random BGs they can get it with low effort, including by afking / botting.

Yes, it does. So what. This is easy and has been done.

You need 33% crit as frost. How do you ensure it in PVP. First, do you mean rated or unrated? If rated, you don’t need to do anything extra. If unrated, just queue it and see what the percentage becomes. Or go to wowhead and pull the slider to the desired ilvl.

Yes, your character power changes. But there is an obvious reason for that, this reason is bringing people closer gear-wise in unrated PVP. Because otherwise people in unrated PVP are uncompetitive in it.

But if you prefer PVP res / PVP power instead, sure, that can also work, let’s do that, I am all for it. Anything.

That rated and unrated PVP are different types of content is relevant because this makes the suggestion to “just go do rated” to unrated PVP people similar to the suggestion of “just go do PVE” to rated PVP people. Neither of these suggestions works, and they don’t work for the exact same reason - because these are different types of content.

There is no this “by the way”.

Nobody will gear through random BGs. Rated PVP guys will use random BGs to farm honor. PVE guys will do random BGs for achievements. Unrated PVP guys will play cannon fodder for a while then either start doing M+ or stop PVPing.

Gearing through random BGs alone, as it stands, is nuts. It was not a piece of cake in BFA either, but in SL, right now, it’s just nuts. Did you see the numbers for ilvls / effort? If you did not, go see them. They are a disaster.

Of course it does - you have to look historically, which is what I said. Blizzard changed the reward system to be terrible and account-wide 4 years ago, and now they’ve changed it back. Using the last 4 years as evidence of how the next 2 is going to play out is fundamentally flawed because the next 2 are going to be like the preceeding 10 (so not including vanilla and before Legion) due to the system having changed back to what it used to be.

So no, I am no “damn wrong”, you are “damn confused”.

Did you consider new characters as well? Because they were pretty central to my argument.

Before, pets and mounts were the central and essential reward. Now they won’t even be a blip on people’s radar.

If you need gear for your conquest upgrades, are you fully geared?

Sure, you’re better geared, but are you insurmountably better geared?

By the way, I think the game should have less iLvL’s over a season in general, so that would help your case, but that doesn’t mean I think your premise is entirely correct, and it certainly doesn’t mean I want another one of those stupid scaling system in the game.

… whut?

I should not have to be scouring websites and/or doing advanced maths to figure out what the gear I have on right now is going to do. That’s absurd. Ideally, I should know easily what all my gear does, which isn’t even the case either.

I do, but you see… that won’t solve your problem.

You’re not crossing from PvE to PvP or vice versa in my suggestion. It’s still PvP.

Telling someone who likes BG’s to do RBG’s is very much like telling someone who likes M+ to raid. Is it entirely ideal? Well… yes! If you want to be competitive, you need to fulfill the 3 skillset requirements of WoW: Gameplay/twitch skills, preperation skills (this includes gear but also many other things), and social skills.

If you want to be good at WoW you have to come to terms with the fact that that is what it takes. Just having good twitch/combat skills has never been enough in this game, and it never will be. It’s just not that kind of game.

Before rated PvP they instead relied entirely on social skills (ironically from the PoV of anyone you knew IRL xD ) and a stupid amount of playtime. That is, in effect, what you’re saying when you say you want great gear from playing stupid amounts of BG’s.

If this is what you want, and I really don’t think you should want that but fair enough, then Classic does this incredibly… well.

But let me tell you: Every single vanilla developer agrees that this system was hazardous to your health and really just not fun. I see no reason to put it into the modern game, even as an alternative path.

You do realise they reduced them drastically several times, right? I will agree with you that it’s too high, but at least the items are actually somewhat useful, unlike in BfA where it was completely and utterly random trash with no way to cover the gaps. So trash, in fact, that nobody bothered so you never met anyone else trying to gear so you got buddied.

So, your point is that yes, average ilvl in BGs was going up before, but now it won’t. OK. Let’s see if that happens. I am not buying your logic that it will, but I won’t spend a lot of space on why, let’s just see. If it happens, I will agree that you have a point. But I am pretty sure it won’t happen.

Yes, I did, that’s right in the text you quoted - they are included with “new players”.

The full difference is 29 ilvls. Say, you are 20 ilvls through. Yes, that’s insurmountably better geared. And if the guy in BG gear is also mid-way through his gearing path and not at the cap, the difference is even larger.

??? Did you read the posts before? do you understand what I want at all? I want scaling in random BGs. Or an equivalent measure. You asked how can you ensure that you have 33% crit as frost in PVP. My answer - if you are asking about rated PVP, then you ensure that you have 33% crit there the way you do now, because my suggestion contains no changes to rated PVP whatsoever.

You don’t have to do any of that, jump into a BG and look at the character screen, done. It’s in the text that you quoted.

Yes, it will. It was fine in MoP. Even better in WoD, but MoP also worked.

These are different types of content. You agreed to that. That both M+ and raids are PVE doesn’t make them same type of content, they are different types of content. They have separate progression paths. That both unrated PVP and rated PVP have the word “PVP” in them doesn’t make them same type of content, they are different types of content. They have separate progression paths. One of them is currently screwed, this has to be fixed.

Frankly, this argument that it’s fine to send people from one type of content to the other because both types have the word “PVP” in them is ridiculous. Let’s send rated PVP people to PVP pet battles, shall we? What? Your criteria for “similar enough” is fulfilled, the word “PVP” is there.

What exactly are you talking about here? What it is that they reduced? Did you see the numbers or not? Do you know what is the difference between gear in unrated PVP vs rated PVP vs PVE, in ilvl / stats / time to get?


Also, a side point:

You are wrong here as well. No, telling someone who likes M+ to raid is idiotic. It isn’t good at all. Before M+ existed people have been asking Blizzard to do some form of PVE content which (a) would be difficult, but (b) would NOT require big groups. Because big groups take a lot of time to form, frequently require scheduling, when they fail there is a big chance it wasn’t due to you (because your contribution is small), etc, etc, etc. I was among these people, had one of the biggest threads on MMO-C on that going with “harder dungeons with an infinite difficulty scale” being the main proposition. Blizzard listened and did M+. And it was a big success. And a big part of that was that M+ were different from raids due to (b). So, suggesting that people who do M+ should do raids, eg, for gear, is not in any way “ideal” as you put it. It is just silly. The entire idea behind M+ is that they aren’t raids.

That’s a reductio ad absurdum.

My argument is that the system is going back to what it was when people were constantly gearing new characters using BG’s, and back then it didn’t happen, so I suspect it won’t happen now, either.

But yes, we will indeed see.

A new player is not the same as a new character, but whatever. Idk why you’re lumping them together. The fact that it’s easier to level a new character and more attractive to gear it early on through PvP is very, very central to why more low geared people will be in BG’s.

So, firstly, I think the difference should be about 15 iLvL, but that’s because I think the LFR and Normal (or Heroic, find something in between I guess) shouldn’t exist, collapsing the gearing system from 4 to 2 tiers and overall making the gear curve much less steep.

But aside from that, you’re actually comparing yourself to a 2.4k rated player with full upgrades. Ain’t a lot of those around.

Yeah. Yeah, I did. I’m not sure why I wouldn’t need to do anything extra? Or is this an extension of “I can just set my gear up in BG’s?”

You know how annoying it is to sit there doing mathematical calculations and trying to sim stuff during repeated 2 minute windows before every BG? Please no, that’s ridiculous.

MoP didn’t have scaling. Anyway, MoP used PvP Power and Resilience, but that doesn’t make less geared players more geared.

There’s a few things regarding MoP:

  1. It had 3 difficulties, not 4, which meant less gear scaling to begin with.
  2. It had vendors and PvP specific gear, meaning PvP’ers were gearing up in PvP, which means there was a more even distribution of gear, which will make it feel a lot more fair to poorly geared players, which was my whole original point.

The fact that you think MoP’s resilience and power stats solved your problem, when it actually doesn’t compress the gear gap at all, proves me right.

No, it doesn’t. M+ also has a “screwed” progression path in exactly the same way.

Bigger groups and competition --> Better gear. Both in PvE and PvP. Raids give better gear than M+, rated PvP gives better gear than unrated PvP.

No, it’s because unrated BG’s have no mechanism to determine if you’re good enough to receive a truly powerful reward. PvP is player vs player i.e. you’re competing with other players. It is the core essence of what PvP is. To assess who should get the truly rare and powerful rewards in PvP, you need the competitive aspect.

It’s about degree, but I also just plain disagree. WoW is not just about twitch skills. It’s just not. It’s about prep, social skills and standing as well. If you try to take that away from it it just becomes a mediocre action game.

Larger groups should provide better gear because organising a huge team is a skill and it should be rewarded. It might not be your fault that it all fell apart, but that’s not hard to prove to the next team that comes around looking for someone to pick up.

RBG’s also give higher rewards than arenas for the exact same reason.

Regular BG’s are about the same difficulty as doing world quests. Essentially just sitting AFK (assuming you don’t get reported) in them for long enough will give you all the Honour you need, which is why it cannot give powerful rewards. It doesn’t test your skill at all.

An exclusively M+ player can deck himself out, but by doing more types of content, especially content with more players, he decks himself out much faster.

Here’s the gist of it: BG’s do not test your skill to provide their reward, therefore they should not provide very strong gear. Want great gear? Prove yourself worthy.

Another topic derailed and is the exact reason the devs don’t come here.

1 Like

I played since TBC. When people were constantly gearing new characters using BGs the average ilvl still grew. I don’t know why you think it did not.

With ‘new players’ I meant both characters of genuinely new players and alts of existing players. I guess I should have just written ‘new characters’.

It is NOT easier to gear new characters in BGs in SL. Heroics are far faster and easier.

We can talk about what the difference should be, whatever. The reason I choose 10 ilvls is that it worked during WoD.

There won’t be many people with 2.4k, naturally. But there will be tons of people with M+15. That’s the same 226. The value of the PVP trinket bonus is tiny, never bigger than 2-3 ilvls and that’s decreased further due to a number of other factors like versa gear existing in PVE as well.

??? You say you read through my posts and know what my suggestion is, but it looks like you did not actually read and do not know. My suggestion changes nothing for rated PVP, it’s about scaling gear in random BGs only. This is why for PVP other than random BGs you don’t have to do anything extra to “ensure that you have 33% crit”. You will do whatever you are doing now.

I said PVP stats would also be a fine solution. You said no, they won’t help me. I said yes, they will help me, and said it was fine in MoP. Because MoP had PVP stats.

Yes, MoP resilience and power stats solved my problem. Yes, they were different from scaling. Still solved my problem, because they were making honor gear competitive. I don’t see how this “proves you right”. It seems you are getting lost.

M+ progression path provides people doing M+X with gear enough to do M+X. That’s working, not screwed.

Random BG progression path does not provide people doing random BGs with gear enough to do them. That’s screwed.

Seriously, I don’t understand this way of debating where you just continue to restate your position without acknowledging what I say. I explained a number of times how specifically random BGs are screwed. You don’t acknowledge what I wrote, you just state that they aren’t. OK, I explained once again above. Now what? Will you simply restate that it’s all fine one more time?

That’s the job of rated PVP. Unrated BGs are M+0 of PVP, they are just one lowest tier. In arenas, if you are at 2400, you don’t get paired with 1200. For some reason you still want to go to PVP+0 = random BGs. That’s OK, random BGs can accommodate you, but then your gear has to be scaled down to the gear of people who do PVP+0, or their gear has to be scaled up to yours. Period.

All of this is beside the point. Yes, larger groups as well as higher difficulty levels and higher ratings should provide better gear, bla bla bla. Who says they shouldn’t? Nobody.

But if you are doing content X, whatever it is, that content X should provide you with means to be competitive in it. All types of content in WoW do that. Except random BGs, which used to do that before SL and now they don’t. This has to be fixed.

I DON’T WANT your “great gear”. Shove it wherever. I want to be competitive in random BGs. They can do this by capping everyone in random BGs - and only there - at 197, which is the maximum ilvl obtainable from random BGs. Or they can do this by scaling honor gear to 220 or so. Or in a number of other ways. I don’t want your effing gear. It’s you who want it, not me.

Frankly, I am going to stop at this. We aren’t making any progress. You keep talking that I want better gear while I do not. You keep not acknowledging that random BGs are the only type of content that now doesn’t provide for itself. From your replies it seems pretty clear that you do not actually know what the numbers on gear / stats / acquisition rates even are.

If you like scaling in pvp and you want gear to be capped at a certain ilvl, there’s a bunch of less successful mmorpg’s out there waiting for you.