Can casual PvP count for something?

Random BG is closer to LFR or heroic dungeons, low risk low reward kind of content.

You should try rated match, it’s really not that much different and you’ll get teamed up with people that actually try, which would lead to a better gameplay experience in general.

We are basically going to be fodder for rated pvp players and raiders. You can acquire some crappy gear for random pvp content but you wont stand a chance against anyone in a higher gear tier. That’s all fine and dandy but I really can’t find a reason to go into that content anymore just to get my head stomped. I wish we could acquire the rated gear by doing a long grind, with rated players getting the gear much quicker, or populate the battlegrounds by gear score. Surely the higher tier pvp players wouldn’t mind that as I’m sure they only want to face people of their skill level and gear tier. I can’t see the population of casual pvpers being very strong in the current system.

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Just to highlight this one point of yours, you can afk-your-way to i460 just doing Assaults, CTAs, and camping the Crate in Nazj. I speak from experience-- it’s what I did!

Once you get i460 from those non-activities, you can then use that as a springboard into other things for better gear. I was finally able to solo 5-mask Visions for i470+465 gear, for example. With that slight bump, it’s then easier to get into higher keys (which I don’t do, but that path is there). And on and on.

I bring this up because I was surprised to hear SOOOO many people across the various guilds I’m in lamenting about how they were “stuck” in the i430-440 range and no way to advance. Most people HATE pvp in this game (with good reason), but all of the things I cited can be done with practically ZERO actual pvp. Joining a CTA group and having 5 of your group snipe 1-2 random players running around (which is what 80-90% of what CTA devolves in to) is hardly what I’d call pvp. Camping the Crate in Nazj is literally an all-or-nothing reward. If I’ve gotten that crate 500 times, maybe two of those resulted in an actual fight for the Crate. Every other time was an encounter so lopsided, no fighting ever takes place. If I go for it and there’s 60:1 Alli to Horde, you just leave and try the next one which will probably be 60:1 Horde to Alli. There’s never a FIGHT for it, Sharding being the most broken thing ever put in the game.

If that’s all you have to do for i460, don’t complain if you’re anything less. World PvP in BfA was the “welfare epics” way to gearing. I can only imagine how much better it would have been if I had bothered to couple it with running higher M+ keys.

Get some help.

Forget this game for awhile and focus on your personal issues.

It’s a real shame blizzard doesn’t see the value in having a ranked 1v1 arena system for people like you. Since it was rated you would ideally eventually be queuing into similar skilled players and it wouldn’t require you to have committed partners. That way with what time you do have to play you could steadily learn the arena meta at your own pace and turn that defeatism into some solid xp. As you que around your mmr a lot you might find other players around your skill you could add and move into 2s together with. It just seems like such an obvious game mode to have in.

Blizzard really doesn’t get how useful a tool a 1v1 bracket would be for getting newer players into arena and how fun it would be at higher mmr for veteran players.

The spec representation for BFA was so abysmal that statistically speaking it would almost be impossible for a rated 1v1 bracket to have a more bias spec representation than BFA 3v3s. So any argument it would be an unbalanced bracket is just null and void. At the end of BFA i had ~ 8 to 9 character I wanted to cap a week. I played with a lot of 0-1500xp players just for cap. It was such a roundabout way for me to cap constantly replacing people after they left anywhere between 1 game and a couple hours of games. If there was a 1v1 bracket, even if it took double the wins than it does in 2v2s to cap, then players in my situation, would spend substantially less time in group finder with this bracket and more time playing/progressing as would casual players with little time.

If blizzard really its trying to make this game friendly and accessible for new players then its time to remove some of the cat herding gates on content and allow people to do things at their own pace.

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Back then I won 50-70% of the time.

I win about 20% of the time now.

You are right. It feels horrible. I’ve basically given up on the thing I used to do the most.

It makes it easy for me to take long breaks from the game. I think my sub is only active for maybe half the time since MoP.

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I will admit that I’m actually geared enough to do contribute in most bgs…but I’m so bogged down by fire mage/destro lock spam that I feel 100% codependent on a healer just to get into a fight.

Its almost enough to make me swap back to ranged…

Id like to see the conquest rewards not be cut by 90% after your first win.

Sometimes I wanna q for random bgs, but 8 conquest per win is an insult.

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There are in BFA, where you could get heroic raid equivalent gear from random battlegrounds and world PVP. That seems to be going away in Shadowlands.

Yes, it is bad gear. A 15 ilvl difference, even with scaling, is significant. The 30 ilvl difference to mythic gear is overwhelming. By the end of a patch, you’re barely competitive in random battlegrounds and world PVP in heroic raid gear, and hopeless in normal raid gear.

You need to be meta in lower arena brackets almost as much as in higher brackets.

Maybe on Horde, due to Blizzard failing to maintain the faction balancing mechanisms that were effective in 8.1.

The best way to do that would be to scrap rated entirely and figure out a way to make random battlegrounds the PVP progression path. It would be very easy to do this through brackets, if Blizzard weren’t too pigheaded to try it.

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Its trash gear. I started 8.3 with 445 ilvl. Now I’m ending with about 475. That difference is HUGE. 200k hp worth of a difference + all the stats/corruption.

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So long as you finish your chores first ofc

That depends on your perspective. As a starting point it isn’t bad gear. You get ilvl 445 with no effort whatsoever. Whether you choose to improve on that is a choice. If you had a fresh toon and got 445 within 5-6 weeks of the start of 8.3, you would be more than sufficiently geared to go into heroic raids or mythic plus to progress further.

The whole premise of this original post is that doing raids, rated pvp or mythic + is somehow going to get you better ilvl gear in your vault. It will not. Your choices from the vault will be at the lowest ilvl of the content you have done. If you don’t put effort in and progress, you won’t get better gear. If the vault was being used now and included a bonus for doing battlegrounds, you’d at best get a choice of 445 gear, but more likely 425.

The only system in the game right now that actually allows you to get better gear than the content you’re running is casual pvp. You fill a bar to get 445s and can upgrade those 445s. Raiding and Mythic + doesn’t offer anything like this without moving to a higher difficulty.

So what’s the point of someone that isn’t a mythic raider, high key runner or supreme gladiator even participating in PvP?

That’s what is depressing me about this whole thing. It feels pointless if you’re not some crazy masochist who loves pain.

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You just need 460 and corruption to be able to compete.

I wish that were the case but I’m getting griefed left and right by said mythic raiders and high key runners. I don’t feel like I’m able to compete.

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Those type of players are an extreme minority of the player base, you are exaggerating how often you are going to run into someone fully mythic geared.

They are also slowing down how fast people gear up(especially compared to 8.3), so most people are going to be heroic raid geared with a couple of items from the Vault, not running around with full mythic gear.

I feel like i’ve been running into them a lot lately. I haven’t really been able to win a fight in open world PvP in ages. A “victory” for me is a successful escape with ice block + greater invis.

Because we are on the last tier of the expansion, 8 months into it. People that would normally be capped at heroic raiding gear had time to delve into mythic or get fully geared from the weekly chest.

Which means people like me who don’t get the weekly chest or steps into mythic are left in the dust, which brings me back to the original question; do I really have a place in PvP anymore?

I actually was getting my health issues in order, going to doctors and even had hopes of getting a job, but COVID-19 kind of put a halt on that.

The thing is, I really like the Mage class. I love the wizard fantasy and being a part of the arcane world. It’s just a tough class to play well and it feels like an extremely weak one in 1v1. Someone like me who does lone-wolf it a lot probably would be better off playing a demon hunter or something, but it’s just hard to thematically get into those classes. I’m just not a fan of what they’re about, even if mechanically they’re powerful and more fitting classes.

I’ve even gone so far as to look at solo-friendly melee classes that can look wizard-like with caster looking mogs available to them.

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My point is that the gap is not as big as you are making out to be, more so in Shadowlands. A lot of people doing mythic raids now are going to be stuck in heroic for a long time, maybe killing 1 or 2 mythic bosses by the end of the tier.