This puts a damper on hardcore and casual players. Non rated or rated.
The entire system is very limiting for a spectrum of players.
Also the proposed changes in patch 9.1 seem to hurt pro PVE, pro PVP and players that do both.
Stop injecting your opinion. You don’t even play retail anymore even though the supposed rpg element for gearing has made its return. Go away.
Anyway, I was always a supporter of templates but some people need gear advantage as a crutch.
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Aboms silly comments aside… Templates had plenty of issues. There’s a reason rated PvP participation dropped off a cliff.
In wod you could fully gear without doing rated yet rated was still insanely popular. Templates were okay but mop/wod were better.
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Yes you do. Gear grinders that feel that effortlessly curb stomping noobs is essential to the game.
Shadowlands season 1 was one of the most active pvp seasons in a loooong time and it was mostly attributed to the gear carrot. The quality of BGs just felt great overall. BFA was buttcheeks and so is this expansion.
Without the gear incentive, those that aren’t intrinsicly motivated by test of skill or cosmetics didn’t participate. I personally have never pvp’d on so many toons in 17 years of playing this game than Legion thanks to templates. After an initial honor grind to unlock talents it was plug and play with alts by 7.1 or 2 when they also had artifact grinding be a looooot quicker and easier.
Artifacts and honor talent grind are the only real criticisms I feel.
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To be fair, one of the biggest reasons was because Legion seasons were so short. The only Legion season comparable to a WoD season in length was the last one at 17 weeks (compared to the last WoD season at 35~ weeks) and it had 13% less people on the ladder compared to that last WoD season. Some of the Legion seasons were half the length of the shortest WoD season, only 11 weeks.
Participation actually wasn’t too bad if you account for these things.
How does that make it so less people play? If it’s supposedly super easy to jump in on alts, there should have been just as many people in a short season.
All I can say is my mop/wod my PvP guild died in the first season of legion, mirroring PvP partipation numbers quite effectively.
The numbers I saw was more like 50% more partipation from wod to legion… Again legion is better than this Garbo… I played more of it. Still there were some glaring issues that didn’t exist previously.
Longer seasons offer more opportunities for people to play, especially when PvE is on farm and inflation kicks in making mid-range cosmetics more accessible. This is the case with every expansion end season, they are typically the longest and content droughts lead people to try out PvP. Remember that you only needed to be above 1k to count towards the ladder.
What seasons are you comparing? There were Legion seasons in the middle that only had 150k~ on the ladder which is about half of the final WoD season, but they were 11-12 weeks long, less than half the length. The final WoD season had around 300k and the final Legion season had around 260k. The middle WoD season’s participation was around the same level as Legion s7.
I dunno… This season is pretty long and none of my PvE guild have any desire to step into PvP. Most pvers hate PvP with a passion lol
So unfortunately I can’t link the thread anymore after they decommissioned the old forums. Some guy pulled the numbers of r1s which is % of the population based. Pretty sure it was the last season of wod compared to the first couple seasons of legion. He showed that there was almost 2X less people playing in legion.
I didn’t mind legion, I might have played more than two seasons if people stuck around. Still I had a very active PvP guild in mop/wod and it existed before me in cata. The whole thing died by second season of legion.
Ion went on record claiming Legion random BG participation was really, really good in one of those boring QA interviews he used to do with his fluffer, Josh.
Keep in mind that this really good participation came while PVP rewards were absolutely useless. You got random drops of terrible ilvl gear with bad stats. The AP you got was minor compared to PVE. Your chance at legendaries was way lower than doing PVE. Legendaries didn’t even work in BGs either. Appearance rewards were slow and random.
So while SL might have good BG numbers too, the difference is people played Legion BGs because they were fun. People are suffering in SL BGs for gear.
Legion was also a fun expansion to play in general (minus the rocky start) while SL is absolute garbage. I’d wager that a decent % of people are in BG’s right now are hoping to forget what lies outside of them.
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This is a gear based game. If you remove the gear there is literally no point in playing. We are here to customize and create builds to fit our playstyles. It’s an RPG. Templates ruin the CORE aspect of this game, they can’t work and that is proven. If you like Templates then you don’t like WoW and RPG games.
PvP in this game is a 2 step process which makes RPG PvP infinitely better than boring games that don’t have gear progression.
- You attain powerful gear to be competitive
- You build skills around that powerful gear
You can’t eliminate step 1. If you don’t like step 1 then RPGs aren’t your type of game. It’s that simple. Know where you are, this game makes us log in because we want to become more powerful through gear progression. Then own it up in PvP. Again that is why RPG PvP is so unique and more fun then other boring PvP.
The best PvP in this game happened without Templates. The only way to achieve the best RPG PvP is to not have Templates. If you are a supporter of Templates you are Anti-WoW and RPG PvP. Now you should understand.
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and you seem to have forget 1 important thing, player versus player should not be based on who ever have the best gear, its like having a race with guy a and guy b, guy a have a f1 and guy b is using a bycicle, thats pretty much how sl pvp is atm
sl pvp is trash, bad and miserable when you are just trying to collect one stupid 197 set , its not fun to play and its no wonder why people are stopping to play it, video games are supposed to be fun, getting one shotted over and over again may be fun for you but its like playing gta with all cheats, you do it for a while and then move to something else because it gets boring
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Wrong, you are supposed to gear up to compete in RPG PvP. That is what makes RPG PvP better. Gear is supposed to provide counter play and win battles in PvP. If you don’t have the right gear you shouldn’t win. Not sure why anyone thinks RPG PvP is supposed to only be about skill. 
It isn’t and never will be! As I said it’s a 2 step process which makes RPG PvP more dynamic and fun.
I only play RPG (gear based games) PvP. The best RPG PvP game of all times was Diablo 2. So many super fun powerful builds. You could literally gear to counterplay the characters which makes it far more fun and dynamic PvP.
In any RPG PvP the most exciting part is gear progression and creating a fun build to suit your playstyle. Theorycrafting PvP builds keeps me up at night. It is as exciting as playing the game.
Guy B needs to get a stealth fighter then and blow up Guy A in his F1, which is why RPG PvP is better than boring PvP without gear progression. It’s up to Guy A to come up with a build and gear up to compete. That literally makes this games PvP better.
Sorry but this is really clear why Templates don’t work. If you don’t like gear advantages, gear progression then you aren’t into WoW or RPG PvP. Also RPG PvP is what I consider real PvP. Only the strong survive.
Look at it this way, if you are Thor and you lost your hammer you don’t go and challenge Thanos who has 2 infinity gems because you aren’t powerful enough yet to defeat him!! RPG PvP is the same thing!! You need to go to Nidavellir and get stormbreaker so you can compete on equal ground with Thanos first!! RPG PvP is better for this reason. It’s real PvP.
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because some people, like you i guess, think that having a gear disparity between 2 players is a good thing, currently gearing in sl is really boring and miserable based on that, sure i don’t mind grinding an honor set trough bgs wich is a thing i used to do and liked for so many xpacs but somehow someway, a dev decided that having a huge gear disparity was the way to go it and now well they lost another player who used to do random pvp but devs don’t care, people buy wow tokens so they can get boosts and i guess thats more important than having fun
there is a difference between rated pvp and the unrated pvp, your arguments can work for rated pvp but in random bgs, its just some bulls@#@#, bgs should be fun, its not fun to be in a team where you lose simply because the opponents have 40k hp+ and you die to a single final verdict, its not fun to be stuck in them and video game main goal is fun
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Lets be clear SL is a dumpsterfire, it’s an incomplete expansion that just can’t be fixed because there is too much wrong with it. The main issues with PvP in recent expansions is borrowed powers which obviously need to go away.
There should be gear gap between players and power progression since it is the most important part of an RPG PvP game. However it should be like TBC/Wrath where the game wasn’t messed up and it was far more enjoyable to actually gear up. There was also a PvP stat which SL doesn’t have.
Wrong, the Devs don’t even think there is a gear progression problem. Ion said in an interview that there isn’t more of a powergap now because he is completely unaware of the power creep from all the broken systems. They aren’t even aware of the problem. When Preach asked Ion what do you plan to do about the gear power gap of Mythic players doing 3-4 times the damage, Ion responded " that isn’t true it’s not different now and they must be bad players"
If Ion can’t even admit there is a gear power problem in PvE then PvP isn’t on the radar. So the Devs just don’t even know what is going on and the game won’t be fixed till they remove all borrowed power and go back to a talent tree type progression with gear.
Yea but if I die to a single final verdict I say to myself I just need to gear up. Then I get excited because I see how powerful someone can be. I want that power and it motivates to Min/Max something fun and make a build. My mentality is completely different because I love gear based games. I only play gear based games for this reason. It’s why I’m here.
Again lets be clear I feel ya on SL being trash, since it is. However you can’t ruin WoW with Templates either since we know they don’t work. I personally am excited for TBC since it’s the best PvP expansion with Wrath a close 2nd.
You have to look at real solutions to your problems though in an RPG PvP game. Borrowed power systems need to be removed, PvP stats need to exist, Gems should come standard on gear and not be grinded for. The PvP gear should be standard and not have a bunch of ranks. SL and recent expansions is the problem. Templates are never the answer.
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taking a statement that concern to pve and try to put in a pvp perspective is useless, he was not talking about pvp because ion don’t pvp and preach either
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It isn’t pointless because this is a PvE centered game. The power gap in PvP comes from PvE systems, PvP players have to farm stygia, get renown, torghast, world bosses/raids/dungeons to get Legendary plans, then get conduits etc.
Ion can’t see the power creep with these failed systems which tremendously effect PvP in negative ways. So my point is vitally important. Look I do feel sorry for PvP players because SL PvP will never be good. Unless they completely rework all these systems.
If you want PvP to be great we need Resil, and no crazy PvE system that requires farming. That is why old expansions like TBC thru Cata offered vastly better PvP. Some Arena players loved MoP.
However this game is too far off course now. Templates drove so many RPG PvP players away and they quit. Scaling was better but still terrible. At least both those failed systems are gone. Now it’s up to Blizzard to just design a great game again without all these systems.
Again you need to identify the problem then implement solutions that will work. Templates make this game unplayable because it isn’t RPG PvP anymore, it’s not a solution. The issues are these broken systems in Retail and the power creep they provide. Which obviously means it would be easier for PvP players to gear up with better changes.
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I think there is a middle ground between templates and the huge gear gap we are seeing today . They need to make it easier to grind out gear.
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My dude… I assure you he doesn’t. Anytime gearing is exactly how he says he wants it, he doesn’t like it lol… His self awareness is non existent. Save your energy and discuss with others lol…
Honestly they’re reintroducing wod gearing. It would be very simple to tighten the gaps.
Starter gear scales to 190 in PvP
Honor gear scales to 200
Conquest gear scales to 210
Progression but minimal gaps and you get to pick your stats.
Honestly this isn’t even stopping me from playing. The sole reason is rating locked gear. I have zero desire to try and get sweaty on an alt and push rating. Then I get bored of my main (can’t even offspec thanks to locked covenants) so I stop playing.
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Yeah, I’ve always liked the idea of templates in pvp. I didn’t play when it was in wow but I’d love to give it a try.