When I originally played TBC, I was a PVP focused player. It was the only expansion where my focus wasn’t PVE. I managed to get up to about 2100 rating as a point of reference.
I didn’t bother raiding initially. I was friends with a bunch of raiders, and I got up to that rating with a literal 0 PVP gear Mage (Druid Mage 2s), where we would just 100-0 an enemy to win.
I then used the PVP gear I had obtained, along with my reputation as a good overall player, to get into the best guild on the server. My first raid was a full clear of an already on farm SSC. Second raid was Tempest Keep, and then straight into Black Temple progression. In PVP gear.
This type of path wasn’t that strange back then. PVP gear was VERY GOOD, and picking up a high-rated player almost ensured that player was good enough to raid.
With this change, that is going to be much more rare. There will be far less people focusing on PVP, and there will be far less people PVPing in general than would otherwise.
This is a bad change. I’ve always hated having to obtain rating just to be able to purchase some gear. The benefits of higher rating should be acquiring the gear faster, and prestige in the form of mounts and titles and other such cosmetics.
PVP in itself needs to be balanced, and players need to be on an equal footing in order for this balance to work. Equipment is the number 1 imbalancing force in PVP, as can be seen in the retail version of the game.
Current ActiBlizz philosophy is that if you can’t beat a player ~23-30% stronger than you, then you don’t deserve to win. This makes no logical sense. The logic should be if you could beat a player 0% stronger than you, then you deserve to win.
Maybe now people will understand what we’ve been saying about the slippery slope. Blizzard is on the cusp of turning TBC into a flop.