Adding the 1.12 PvP gear on release of the honor system in phase 2 is not a good idea. Even excluding the weapons, items such as rank 13 warrior shoulders or rank 12 warrior boots are incredibly powerful compared to any other available items at the same point in the timeline; we’re talking about arguably Naxx level gear being available before BWL is released and before the updated pre-raid blues are added to the drop tables in dungeons.
The argument claiming that there won’t be that many players with this gear doesn’t hold weight either; many players will get rank 12 or rank 13 and have access to a subset of these overpowered items. Access to the rank 14 weapons is not the only thing to consider here. Even the updated blue PvP items are very strong compared to available pre-raid gear at the same point in the proposed timeline, considering that the 1.10 updated loot tables won’t be added to dungeons until phase 5.
Additionally, this doesn’t even logically make sense with the other proposed content phases. I get the impression that Blizzard wants to emulate the actual release experience, thus why they are not releasing classic with the PvP system enabled from the start (even though I dislike this as a vanilla veteran, I understand the logic here), yet they want to give players the opportunity to get items that were impossible to obtain before patch 1.10 and even before AV or Warsong Gulch comes out? This is inconsistent and just asking for uncontrollable world PvP for the entirety of phase 2; players will have an incredible incentive to rank up to get this overpowered gear, yet they will have no way to farm honor outside of world PvP. I can only imagine what the forum posts will look like when less experienced vanilla players are getting camped by myself and a group of other players simply because we want the incredibly powerful PvP gear in phase 2, but can’t gain honor by any other method.
I feel that many of the people posting about this topic don’t actually have much, if any, experience with the original PvP system, or have any idea of what the impact of this will be on the player base. I think this argument is exposed and reinforced by the sheer number of players claiming that they prefer the original AV as opposed to the 1.12 version (good luck grinding reputation or honor with the original AV implementation); yet, simultaneously, these same players don’t have problem with releasing absolutely over-scaled PvP gear in phase two, when this updated gear wasn’t even available at the same time in retail vanilla.
All I ask of Blizzard is to be consistent in some manner. I understand that item stat change progression is difficult to incorporate into the timeline and also a difficult task to do in terms of data maintenance; however, please realize that releasing this gear in phase 2 will undoubtedly lead to a huge gear discrepancy between the top players and the rest of the player base, when this wasn’t actually the case in retail vanilla because this gear wasn’t nearly as powerful.
I personally believe that every other proposed facet of the classic release announcements have been exceptional and completely reasonable except for this PvP announcement, and I hope a testimony such as this can initiate a productive dialogue.