Haven’t played retail for a long time. I heard you need to pve or something to be competitive in arenas. Is it not just like 2-3 weeks of BGs for blue gear then arena for purples?
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From scratch without alts do ok ng preexisting content it will take from max level about 1-2 months to be at a severe disadvantage from everyone else. Theres no real catch up system in place asides from the extra malefic core each week. You’re looking at about endless weeks of straight mythic dungeons, raids, essence grinding (dailies in like every bfa zone), then once you get to the previously mentioned point at 470 ilvl you will be about 7-15 ilvls. behind many people and not to mention you will not have any corruptions, no sockets on your gear, and you may or may not have the ridiculous trinkets that invaded pvp. My advice? Play some battlegrounds while you level alts to shadowlands.
Source: currently living it with a 472 ilvl on my monk returning back in June and I’ve grinded hard to get there.
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Haha… my dear Erazealthria. Imagine playing vs. someone with 62% versatility when you have 18%. Now work backwards from how long it will take you to get a full 470+ main stat versa set with full sockets. That will give you a rough estimate of how long it will take to “start having fun” if you can call it that.
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i have no idea what those mean cause I never played this expansion yet lol. But it doesnt sound very nice…
Gotchya. Just saying BfA sucks and it will take like 4 months to gear up if you do it solely through PvP. 1-2 months if you have people to run you through +15 dungeons, the heroic raid, and 5 mask visions.
TLDR at bottom.
I actually just resubbed about a month ago (and then decided to let my sub expire, which it does in a few hours actually). Yes, you need to do a bunch of PVE
grindy stuff to be viable in PVP (large part of the reason why my sub is expiring).
Once you hit 120, a lot of player power in PVP comes from corruption effects on gear. Corruption effects are like wacky trinket-like effects that are randomly attached to gear (like warforging I think, although I don’t think I played much during the warforging era) and depending on which corruption you get/target, can be stacked to sometimes to do crazy amount of imbalanced damage. A large part of DPS in PVP comes from these effects now, and enough players have these effects even in random BGs that it can be frustrating for returning players.
But you can’t just go out and use these powerful RNG corruption items when you hit 120. That’s because they also give you +corruption on the items. Add up a lot of +corruption, and you suffer a lot of disadvantages (like taking damage from random things that spawn and attack you).
So how do you use the powerful +corruption items? You level up a cloak that you’re able to unlock at level 120 (after a moderately long questline). As you get more +levels on your cloak, you get more and more -corruption (corruption resistance) for your character. This allows you to equip the other powerful +corruption items (and more of them).
But how do you level up your cloak? Well you repeatedly do a short instanced (but soloable) PVE dungeon (“visions”). If you succeed in killing the boss there (not that hard to do), then you’re getting the stuff that upgrades your cloak.
But how do you get entry into this short PVE dungeon? Well you do timegated weekly quests to obtain currency that allows you to purchase a token that gives you entry to the cloak-upgrade-short-PVE-dungeon.
Parallel to this, you also have your special neck item (which doesn’t take a lot of effort to upgrade, thankfully) that you need to attach “essences” to in order to gain new abilities (some very powerful in PVP). How do you get essences? Well you can get them from random drops (I believe, but I don’t know much about this route), or… an NPC at your cloak-hub sells a select few essences that you have already unlocked for a currency called “echoes.” You can get echoes via many activities. An apparently common method if you want to get echoes via PVP is to tank your arena rating, then fight at the super low levels for 50 echoes per win. Can’t speak to the time-efficiency of this method. Oh and you need a lot (is it 2500 echoes) to buy one essence. You’ll need to target 4 echoes for your character + spec.
So in summary:
1) Grind timegated weekly quests to get vision currency so you can…
2) Do a short PVE instanced dungeon and kill a boss to upgrade your cloak, so you can…
3) Wear powerful corruption items that you acquire via RNG in I believe high-end PVE instanced content
In parallel,
0) Unlock the essences useful for you somehow (I was defeated by the grind before I got to this point)
1) Grind echoes through a variety of methods, so you can…
2) Buy 4x essences for your cloak???
Let me know if I missed anything, folks
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2 months in of doing 15s + capping and my warriors 467 
cant buy essences with echoes unless youve unlocked them, so this guys SOL till SL
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you got a long way to go sir
you have to get the legendary cloak
than you have to grind the rank on the cloak
then you have to grind the corruption resist on the cloak
then you have to farm the right essences
then you have to farm mythic 12+s and pray u get the right traits on your azerite gear
then you have to farm echoes so you can buy corruptions.
then if you really wanna look to max out your potential you gotta farm more mythic + and raids and hope you get some of those super OP trinkets that do insane damage. or gear like the bracers from mechagon that turn fire mages into insta kill machine gun gods.
lmfaoooooo you got a lot of “content” to do at least XD
Oh really? Haha oh boy I was further behind that I thought then. There are a select few that are available by default though. The rest are in red, but seems like you may be right that they need to be unlocked first, to be put on rotation at all (is that right?). Sigh…
yeah the essences arent on a rotation, its just so you can buy them if youve unlocked them on your main. if theyre in red you either already have r3 or you havent unlocked it
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Forgot about this. Good night sweet prince. I will wake you in Shadowlands.
man this sounds worse than classic gearing… wtf happened to PvP vendors?
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yea just wait until Shadowlands at this point. too much grindy, lame stuff in your way right now.
shadowlands is just as bad.
youre gonna have to grind conduits / soulbinds / covenants/ legendaries / etc.
its literally the same boring crap as BFA just wth new names
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im so used to being behind i dont even mind the grindy stuff. they just need to add a viable catch up mechanic
I second this advice. I leveled my first horde character (monk) when I resubbed last month and it was pretty fun leveling entirely through BGs. When I hit 120 is when I felt defeated because of the grind.
If I resub prior to SL (which I very well may because I have a bit more free time), it would be to level another horde character via BGs (probably hunter).
If you’re interested in this, I asked the community for advice about the leveling-via-BG route and posted the info here: Leveling Via BGs for Fun PVP
I can update my original post with the advice I found most useful.
it took 2 months from scratch. in that time i got a full pve set thats 475 worn ilvl with bis stats and fully corrupted with a maxed cloak and a 477 worn pvp set that was also fully bis stats and corruption and the only crossover between the 2 sets was the weapon. i also got every essence rank 3 in that time but with that being said if you dont atleast have a decent head start on essences i wouldnt even bother. we are 2 months or less from prepatch if i had to guess and a lot of essences are time gated BUT corruptions and cloak resist are going away once the prepatch hits. arena will still be open in prepatch but the ladder is disabled so you would be basically grinding for gear and essences to mess around with prepatch changes.
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It depends a LOT on whether you have friends to carry you or expect to do it all alone.
When you ding 120 you have to:
-Get cloak (takes one afternoon to do all the quests, there’s a lot of travelling and after you get cloak, you need to do some more to unlock visions of N’Zoth.
-Get essences. Depending on which ones are bis for druid, some take a couple of hours to get to rank 3, some take weeks if you need to get revered with a faction or it’s timegated ftom the start. You wanna check which essences are your bis, at least the main essence and then check wowhead to see how long it takes to get it to rank 3. (You can definitely use rank 2 for fun arenas, essences are not incredibly tied to your performance)
-You need to get geared. This means: completing a +14/+15 each week at least so you get a 475 piece of ear on weekly cache. The key alone will give you a 465 piece of loot so the more you can complete, the faster you’ll get good gear for arena. It also helps if you can run some Heroic Nya’lotha for more chances at good gear. There’s a trinket that’s bis for damage dealers (one for melee, one for ranged) at least.
Each m+15 will last about an 40 minbutes to 1 hour, but if you don’t have people to take you then you need to start forming groups with your own keys to level them up and getting your raider io rating up so you also get invites.
-You’ll also need to start doing horrific visions. In the beginning they’ll be hard to complete, just focus on the quest to level up your cloak (it will give you more corruption resistance, more corruption resistance while inside visions, a button to remove corruption effects and eventually a main stat proc too). Visions give you mementos will you then use to level your console and make visions easier. Once you have at least Gift of the titans, visions will be super easy to complete and you might wanna start running with masks for added mementos.
5 masks full clear will give you a 475 piece, and each time you repeat it gives you a -5 il piece (460-455…) 4 masks start at 470. Again, if you have friends to carry you, this becomes easier.
-Then you need to farm Echoes of Nya’Lotha which drop from every content. Arenas are a quick way to farm them, you’ll get around 50-60 usually for a win. Once you have decent enough pieces of gear 460+, you need to put corruptions which you buy with echoes, around 4k echoes each, so it’s a long farm to get full corruptions and you can buy Cores to get +3 corruption resistance for 2k echoes to level up cloak.
So yeah, it takes a whole lot of time to get decent gear for arenas lol
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I can speak about this because I just leveled to 120 recently. Once you hit max lvl you have to do dungeons to get the basic starter blues so you get enough iLvl to do heroic dungeons. It doesn’t take very long. Then you do the heroic dungeons until you have a high enough iLvl to do LFR stuff.
By that time you should be able to get some purples from PvP/world bosses/dailies/etc. You have an amulet and legendary to unlock and upgrade as well which just involves grinding questlines.
I went from all blues to purples in maybe… 4 nights? The next step up is mythic+ dungeons.
You basically are going to get showered in purple gear.