The big picture of BG gearing (is bad)

PVP Battlegrounds
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Here is a link to the previous thread where I suggest that they scale random BGs to +/- 10 ilvl difference.

This thread contains the big picture on BG gearing.

BG gear caps at ilvl 197.
Getting and capping BG gear requires about 90k honor. If you get, say, 1,500 honor per day, you will cap in 60 days = 8 weeks. Mind you, getting 1,500 honor every day will take quite a bit of time and persistence.

All other gear caps at ilvl 226.
The easiest way to get ilvl 226 is to do M+15. In 8 weeks a lot of people will reach it. Pretty much everyone will reach M+10, which gives you ilvl 220. You only have to complete a single M+10 instance a week to get a piece of 220 in the vault, and you don’t have to complete in time.

The +40% versa bonus for having two PVP trinkets is by far not enough to change anything. It was added to compensate PVP players for not having PVE trinkets. It can barely do even that. Even if we pretend that PVE trinkets simply do not exist and thus do not have to be compensated, the amount of added versa is only equivalent to about +3-4 ilvl, depending on the piece. So, 197 PVP will be only equivalent to 200-201 PVE in PVP scenarios.

There are three further caveats regarding the bonus:

(1) The bonus versa is not completely versa, it lacks the damage reduction.

(2) In the game the actual value of the added versa was never 40%, it was 4x smaller. A guy with 20% versa going to PVP was being boosted to 22% instead of the expected 28%. Blizzard never explained it, it might be a bug, but it also might be expected behavior with 40% applying to just some part of versa.

(3) More than half of the slots have PVE pieces with versa. Even if you don’t specifically farm for anything, you will likely get 1 or 2 pieces with versa naturally. This erases part of the PVP bonus.

The conclusion:

If things stand, people who do random BGs and nothing else are not going to be competitive in random BGs. In all other types of content in the game, PVE or PVP, people who do content X get enough gear to do it comfortably (if you do heroic raids, you get enough gear to do heroic raids comfortably, etc). This does not hold for random BGs. It has to be fixed. In the previous thread, linked at the top, I suggest that the quickest and safest fix would be to scale all gear on random BGs to a fixed and narrow ilvl range, eg, 210-220. This isn’t perfect, but at least it will work.

If they do nothing, you will have to choose between doing M+ and PVPing in M+ gear or not doing PVP at all. Doing random BGs in gear obtained solely from random BGs is going to be nuts, only tolerable for the first few weeks.

A couple of US threads discussing the same issue:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/are-casual-pvpers-not-supposed-to-play-wow/728119

There are plenty more.

Thanks for your time.

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Casuals - stop being so casual & be start being elite, if you want to play casually.

Honestly don’t know what to do now.
I talked myself into buying SL genuinely thinking it couldn’t be worse (for casuals) than BfA. lol
…then they doubled the ilvl disparity, removed scaling & incentivised elite players to farm bg’s.

I’m lost as to why even start the journey in SL knowing it’s an uphill battle with no light at the end of the tunnel?

Can anyone tell me if/where there’s an active bracket of XP-off queues? -& how long the queue times are, please?
-& why even separate XP-off queues if blizz are content with letting such massive disparity at max level? Feels like a lure.

Lastly, I know this change affects rated players positively & I want to extend a bit of gratitude to the people who aren’t negatively affected by this but voiced support for casuals anyway.
Thank you.

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Yes, it wasn’t terribly great before but this last batch of changes 4 days before the release, which took away conquest, was the last straw.

It was so hopeful when they added PVP vendors. It seemed things were getting better. Them trying to fix PVE trinkets in PVP, doing multiple things for that, was also good. But then we got to know the prices and ilvls on BG gear and it became apparent that honor gear is a pass-through, you’ll just do heroics and at most M0 and you will already outpace it and move to conquest. …And then they said ‘hold my bear’ and removed conquest (gear from random BG players).

As to what to do, I personally will wait the first two weeks to see if they change anything or say anything. And if they don’t acknowledge the issue, I will likely just not PVP. I might do M+, don’t get me wrong, but if I do M+ it will be for other reasons, not in order to get gear for PVP. I am far past that time where Blizzard could command me to do X which I don’t enjoy in order to do Y which I do enjoy.

I am paying a sub here, for god’s sake. Is it too much to ask that I should be competitive in random BGs without having to do anything else? If they think this is too much, then fine, casual PVP officially has no place in this game, so case closed, I’ll find a different game that welcomes casual players instead of pissing on them. Let’s see if other stuff left in WoW will be good enough to hold my sub and for how long.

Regarding pre-max level PVP, the gameplay is pretty niche. You live and die by your spec. The fights aren’t terribly interesting because they are vastly imbalanced. And you have to relevel characters all the time. It might be good enough for a couple of months, but that’s perhaps it. XP-off is a different beast, it’s perhaps more interesting, but queue times are, well… You won’t play every evening, that’s for sure.

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So the only solution to the problem of ‘casuals can’t win BGs’ is that casuals would have to change, so we would all have to become the same elitist, toxic, egomaniacal, gearmongering bstrds?

Listen to what you are saying… you want people to change instead of the game to accommodate everyone. Not everyone CAN change, not everyone SHOULD change, and it’s much easier to change the game than lots of people.

It’s like, you can’t change someone’s personality, but you can accommodate them. Why even try to change people?

No, the only REAL solution is to have BGs make SENSE. Casual BGs should reward casual players by letting them play an hour a day really fun BGs, and that’s that. The way to do that is to make BGs balanced. I still don’t get how anyone can oppose this common sense.

There’s no point in a fight that the other side can’t win, is there?

If some people WANT to work really hard and slave for a game to get better gear so they can fulfill their egotistical dream of stomping helpless lowbies without any challenge, that option can be there for those people. Casuals are NOT taking this away from the ego-gearmonger-monsters.

But why can’t the game ALSO cater to casuals? It would bring way more people in, if BGs were fun for all, don’t you think?

Just make a separate casual BG system that’s NOT about gear, and if you can’t gear from BGs, there’s no reason to have gear matter.

Look, either BGs ARE about gear, so you can gear up doing them, or they are NOT about gear, so gear shouldn’t matter at all.

By the way, why can’t mage kill or damage or escape a DK at all? Why are DKs so OP suddenly? The same DK just slowed me, I couldn’t slow it . it keeps pulling me, I try to blink, useless, it can always get to me, I can never escape. Then it just easily kills me in stun. And so much CC and stun and slow, but I can’t slow it down.

Why doesn’t a DK slow down when I slow it, and even arcane barrage, slow, third wind potion - NOTHING helps. Can’t even damage it, can’t shoot it becasue it keeps me in stun and just murders me. I may have to make a separate post about this, but it’s really shockingly horrifying how mage is 100% helpless against DK.

Surely every class should be able to do something about every other class? Rogues used to he the most OP monsters out there, but now DKs are completely unkillable, I can’t understand.

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I feel like this is the biggest part that makes me confused, the update literally made it to cater more towards casuals, it also changed the weekly chest from conquest to honor so you would be able to get a choice of gear there from honor. so…

because

Skill difference happen, classes have changed and updates have come, he couldve been slowed but used talents that it wont go less than 70% or he had AMS etc etc… plenty of things.
But just as mages are a good counter for pally/warriors, DK´s are supposed to be the anti caster melee class it´s just rock paper scissors in terms of who does what.

Anyway to get back on topic, I think the change they did before the pre patch is the best they have done for casuals, as you can get your weekly chest for pvp done without stepping in arena or RBG.
by making the requirement for the first 2 choices of gear for PvP in the chest easy to obtain.

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I agree with almost everything you said (pre-class balance issues, I’m not qualified to comment on that).

My original comment was summarising blizzards apparent approach to casuals. They’re telling us to be elite & stop being casual.
If you’re not playing high-rated or M+, you won’t be able to survive/compete in battlegrounds anymore -even if you play flawlessly after grinding for months to get uncompetitive gear.

Unless you use PvE to unlock the weekly vault, I think this is incorrect.
It is only accessible to rated players. Casuals will (eventually) be capped at 30ilvls behind max. Without scaling.

Not only will we be 30ilvls lower, but higher ilvls will be farming the currency to upgrade their superior gear in Random bg’s, apparently.

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As a player who pretty much spams epic by a on a daily basis when I play.

Nty.
M+ sucked. It took me weeks\months in bfa to get all 15s and I have no intentions paying my money to suffer that crap again, just so I can be optimally geared for bgs or spend weeks \ months just being fodder to those who do? It is excessive and get a in the way of better balanced bg.

It also sucks having a whole team geared like a wet noodle and getting surely shafted because there is a lack of competent gearing and lack of balance between sides… All because you didn’t go hard in pve??

BGs really been in a downward trajectory and never got the impression they cared much to make it better.

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Agreed.
The BG’s I enjoyed the most & didn’t mind losing were the really close games where both teams are busting a nut & things were really close/balanced.
I’d rather see more balanced games in future, not less.
I want to see wins based on effort & skill, not how much gear one team has.

But this is the direction WoW seems to be moving in. Gear>skill.
WoW PvP is racing away from being skill based imo. Skill & effort is moot when the other person outgears you to this extent.

I honestly don’t know why so many rated/elite players are clutching their pearls & freaking out about playing on a level playing field in a bg. One would think they’d be confident enough in their skill, but they’re clinging to their superior gear like it’s their only lifeline while telling us we don’t deserve to be competitive & ‘just do content you don’t enjoy, it’s not hard!’
I often stood (lay dead) in awe when someone lower than me kicked my butt. 100% fair play, good for him. But some of these ‘leets are abhorred by the idea. ”B-b-but muh superior gear? You don’t deserve to compete against ME!?”

For the people in BfA moaning at having lowbies on their team, SL is going to be painful for those guys too. I actually levelled up a handful of alts during prepatch. Didn’t feel it was fair bringing 10k hp nubs into bg’s, so I didn’t. But as the wider community thinks PvP is ‘fixed’ & unranked gear acquisition is ‘fine’ - I guess they won’t have a problem with it.:blush:

I’ll probably give it until Xmas to see how bad things get & maybe start something fresh in the New Year.

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Honestly, changes to the PVP systems that make it impossible to be competitive in random BGs unless you do PVE or rated have completely erased the excitement for the new expansion for me. I wasn’t excited for BFA, but I was for SL. Torghast, etc, seemed to be better than azerite power and warfronts. We even got a couple of things for PVP. Why the heck did they need to screw up people who play random BGs??

I am questing in SL and it’s beautiful, gorgeous. The launch was smooth for me (I understand it wasn’t for people on Kazzak / Draenor, sorry for you guys). I don’t mind the on-rails style, etc. But there is this sadness because every moment I level up, I am inevitably approaching the endgame that has been poisoned.

All we can do now is wait and pray they do something about the mess they created. The EU forums are powerless here, but maybe they will notice the US forums. The vast majority of the people posting there are BG people, by the way. I wish we could also post there. Ah, well.

If they don’t fix it in a couple of months, well. I guess I will cross PVP off the list.

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The US forums are also powerless because devs dont read them either.

only StReAmEr opinions are sometimes taken into consideration.
you know - the ones that will reroll fotm to play arena.

Many of us in the US forums have been posting since beta, pointing out the critical flaws in the pvp system. There are still active threads now in the bg forums.

People are liiiiiiterally digging up quotes/articles [from old developers] saying how much of a mistake arena was or putting rating on gear was.
One of the pvp devs that quit recently was involved in RBG cheating in the past that went unpunished.

I’ve given up hope and probably going to stop playing very short into the expansion. I want to play a game for fun, not have a second job in hopes of fun. Devs obviously dont care because they cant be bothered to communicate.

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Yeh agreed.
SL is beautiful & they’ve obvs put a lot of work & effort into the experience. Mad props. I’m glad you have a reason to stay without PvP.

Reading through those threads you linked gave me an itchy ‘cancel sub’ finger, I keep having to resist the urge & remind myself to wait&see. I just don’t understand the mentality of some players thinking we don’t deserve the opportunity to compete? No idea of our skill level, experience, knowledge, time played… just a flat, unironic ’you don’t deserve to hit me back.’
Blizz making that decision is bad enough, but watching members of the community justify it with clown logic (‘getting rated gear is easy, just 1hr a week & you’re good! …but if you’re playing 10hrs a day against higher ilvls, well… you need to put some time & effort into the game & don’t deserve to beat me’). I wonder how many of them will be wearing M+ gear in bg’s telling me I don’t deserve to hit them back.

Yeh I was looking for an official quote I’m sure I read, about gear being suitable for the content you’re playing, but I can’t find it.

Can’t wait for Stoopzz’ next video so I can find out how I’m supposed to feel about PvP.

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I don’t see a problem with people getting competitive gear from doing what they enjoy… adding in a solo queue rated bg system would have solved the problem. Some of us don’t have the time to farm the best gear from a different game mode AND play bgs for fun. Therefore the game will just involve working for the best gear and never playing bgs or playing bgs but having no fun because you get one shotted in trash tier gear.

For myself I have around 1 to 2 hours a night. Each day I have gym, work, meal prep, spend some time with girlfriend or friends then there is some time left for WoW. I would LIKE to spend that time doing bgs… because I enjoy them. Instead it will be spent doing arena or M+ (which is not fun for very long). One the small enjoyment I get from the other game modes fades, I will unsub as I always do… stayed subbed for the entirety of legion though where I could spam bgs all day. Legion was amazing for casual bgs.

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It really was.

idc if ppl were raiders, M+, casuals, flower pickers, alts or seasoned PvP vets. All welcomed. Get in here & have some fun.
That’s where I learned to PvP, it was excellent.

But the ‘my gear needs to matter’ crowd have prevailed. Not only that, but they’ve deemed some of us unworthy to have gear (despite playing & enjoying that game mode as much as humanly possible).

Blizz wont have me jumping from one foot to the next though (sub-unsub-sub), I’m too long in the tooth.
I’m either all in or I’m all out.

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I think some of the vitriol comes from rated PVPers thinking that people who object to the change want to revert it. Since the change is good for them, they don’t want it reverted and get aggressive. But in reality, people who object to the change want to just amend or extend it so that it doesn’t harm unrated PVP. That’s all that is needed.

I wouldn’t be harsh on Stoopz and other streamers either. Yes, they are concerned with rated PVP first and foremost, and they might overlook how things are with unrated PVP. But they aren’t the enemy here, their reactions are perhaps mostly defensive. As above, they like the change and when someone objects to it, they defend it thinking that the objection is that the change should be removed, while in reality it is that the change should be amended. They may or may not come around to seeing the bad parts of the change over time, but either way, they are not the real enemy here.

The enemy is Blizzard’s heavy-handedness. Let’s hope that they - Blizzard - see what they did and change it slightly. Because, yes, if casual PVP is no longer possible on its own, that’s a big loss.

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You’re right, thank you.

It’s not my intention to be too harsh on Snoopzz, but even after people pointed out the detriment to casuals, he kinda shrugged & said ‘so? You don’t deserve competitive gear’. As did Asmon.

My comment was more towards the people who see his video & take it as gospel, regurgitating: ‘yay PvP is fixed!’ -without understanding why it’s not fixed. Atleast, not for the casual community.

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By the way, on the number of people who do BGs vs arenas.

The ratio of people who would do random BGs at max-level regularly in WotLK / Cata / MoP / WoD was about 60%. The only other activity apart from questing / alting that comes close was 5-man instances (heroics, with MoP scenarios included) - also about 60%. All numbers from armory scans.

In a couple of expansions which had an achievement for 25,000 honor, that achievement was being hit by 42-47% of all max-level players, depending on the season. More, the achievement for 25,000 conquest was hit by ~40% of all max-players as well. And nearly all these people were hitting the conquest achievement from doing random BGs. Typically mid-season (so, the entire second half of the season you are maxed).

The ratio of people who were doing arenas never exceeded 11%, mostly orbiting 8%. With half of that being casual 2v2 (or PVE 5v5).

In a nutshell, arenas are and remain roughly as big as non-LFR raiding, on the level of 10%. And random BGs are (and will hopefully remain, hoping for adjustments here) roughly as big as 5-man instances starting from damn heroics, on the level of 50%.

Simply as an illustration, the arena discord just now celebrates a milestone in the number of participants. You know what that milestone is? 3,000 people. :roll_eyes: The number of people who arena is vastly less than the number of people who do random BGs.

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Yeah, sadly so, I miss the old PvP forums and players. We nearly all agreed on gear playing only a minor role in PvP. It led to the most acceptable solution; WoD gearing. Templates could have been fine with a bit of fixing and tweaking.

Then Blizzard threw 10 years of PvP development out of the window in BfA.

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I think what happened is this:

They had a good scaling system with WoD. Clear, simple, working.

They thought “ha, we can improve it, let’s make scaling smarter” and made scaling work on a per-target basis. If X fights Y, his spells hitting Y are scaled based on the characteristics of both X and Y. If X fights Y and Z, his spells hitting Y are scaled differently from his spells hitting Z.

This was too complicated so it had numeric issues.

This was also too complex to show in the UI so it remained hidden with the idea of “trust us, it’s smart enough to do the right thing”. And as a result people didn’t know what to even expect, the first numbers they saw were in the logs and this was too late, it was hard to reason what the numbers would be before the fight started.

The smart scaling was universally unliked plus, due to complexity, it didn’t work very well, see Rextroy videos and similar stuff before him.

So they abandoned the smart scaling.

The only thing they did wrong is that they returned to no scaling, instead of to the previous state - simple and clear scaling.

I guess they did that consciously to try and see whether no scaling will work. I hope that they see that it doesn’t work and return to the simple and clear scaling.

Added:

I found this, by the way, was hilarious.

Apparently Chris Kaleiki, the dev that just quit recently, giving his big interview… was being piloted in rated BGs and the team who piloted him included cheaters. I mean, he was arrogant as all hell, but that he went this low was a little eye-rolling and damn hilarious.

A PVP dev. Getting a pilot in PVP. A true hero of our time, and a perfect representative of the rated BG “community” as well.

Thanks for the pointer, I didn’t know.

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