The PvP gear was updated to be “competitive” with Naxx ILVL in patch 1.11.
The information is freely available online.
Blizzard didn’t release the PvP sets with 10 more ILVL than MC before BWL even came out. Even after the Naxx buff (what we have in Classic) the ILVL of the PvP gear is lower than BWL Tier set, which says a lot about the intended power level of PvP gear. It was always supposed to be worse than raid gear - not much better which is what it will be like if people are R14 a month before BWL drops.
That’s great they made it competitive with Naxx gear after it became obsolete. That doesn’t change the fact it was some of the best gear in the game for BWL during BWL. So I’m not sure what point you think you’re making.
While BWL could surpass it with full sets, you could farm for that gear with Rank 14. It’s pre-raid gear. So it should be available pre raid BWL. Which would fit perfectly with an accelerated phasing in a fresh server. It will take about that long to get rank 14, so there’s no need to gate any ranks off the bat.
So what was the ILVL of the gear before it was buffed? My point is it should be that ILVL, not the current Naxx-patch ILVL which is the only ILVL the gear has ever been available at for any version of vanilla classic. Blizz isn’t going to do that though, and I’m not sure they even know what the stats were.
Well if we’re looking at trying to replicate vanilla gear progression, then rank 14, in it’s prebuffed state (no one is asking for Naxx stats here) should be available 14 weeks before BWL is brought online. Probably more like 20 weeks tho since people would need to be level 60 on average before the clock should start ticking.
From April 5, 2005, to July 12, 2005, is 98 days.
98÷7=1498 \div 7 = 1498÷7=14 weeks.
Since BWL should be brought online before 14 weeks, there is no argument to be made that ranks should have any time gating on them at all.
No, I doubt blizzard is looking to do that since they didn’t even do that for classic.
Bro you just need to accept that R14 gear is, at it core, pvp gear. Yes one can use it for raids. No, it’s not supposed to be part of the naturally raiding gear progression.