Assuming the gear it shows you in now is what you are wearing in PvP, and you are wearing both honor trinkets and not just the medallion + a PvE candle trinket (because you need that 2-set bonus from double pvp trinekts), you are also well behind on the gear curve because of your weapons. Rogue and every other melee class has an insane weight to their weapons, and using two crafted green pvp weapons just doesn’t cut it.
You may not have earned enough conquest to get any gear pieces, but you absolutely should be using your 9 free purple ribbons for crafting some non-set PvP armour pieces (weapon(s), jewelry if you can afford, belt, boots, bracers), and you need to do the warmode pvp world quests for your bloody tokens, bit of honor and scrap of conquest. You can get extremely strong nearly-conquest ilv gear with bloody tokens, could even just get both conquest daggers from it since the bloody token weekly cap is high enough. World Quests in warmode give like 100 bloody tokens each, and usually there’s a bonus warmode-only world quest that can award up to 600 bloody tokens. If you don’t earn much conquest though, buy the bloody token chest, legs, head and/or shoulders, and use your two charges of the titan machine to convert them into your 2-set.
With your current gear set up, you aren’t just going to struggle, you’re also going to get hardcore gear-checked by players who did their homework outside of BG’s and players who could get their free conquest weapons by farming up 2500 conquest early.
Chest enchant, leg enchant, and double weapon enchants pull you way ahead too once you get them on conquest armour pieces, and aren’t super expensive anymore for some low quality stuff.
Rogue is already hard, you don’t need to make it harder on yourself though by going into pvp without the gear you could have already.
My hot PvP take is that PvP gear should have such minimal difference in stats between them that only massive gaps in ilvl or extreme discrepancies in skill make it matter. Because it’s hard to tell people they need to L2P then turn around and go “oh you got gear checked. That guy did “homework” had bigger numbers. Sucks to suck.”
There is just simply nothing fun about seeing someone with 2 million more HP then you and knowing there is no amount of skill that will bridge the gap.
Gear checking should be a PvE thing.
People would still progress thru the gear levels because brain get good chemicals when see purple and because when you are playing at the highest levels of play even minor stat difference matter.
200% agree. I feel like WoW’s PvP system is dated, but for newer players starting out it’s super critical because things like breakpoints and class balance revolving around set pieces exist (outlaw getting a huge damage nerf and then putting some of the damage into the tier set for example).
And… I honestly hate it! It’s a checklist of little things that aren’t even Doing The PvP, and if you don’t do it, you either have to play week one of season and get really good at your class fast, or you fall behind a gear curve and then end up fighting meta comps that have had time to develop vs the wild west of week one.
PvP should be the game mode where you can jump in and play it on the spot. Have a stat loadout, have your talent loadout, jump in. Instead, it’s a game mode where you basically make no gold but you fall behind in gear fast because you need gold. And like you said, it’s hard to tell if you’re getting skill-checked, or gear-checked, because some very capable folks can absolutely slam while behind the gear curve on some classes.
But this is kind of a topic all on its own, and it’s still a huge recommendation I will always make to feel a smoother transition into PvP (that being, having a full set of pvp gear, and making sure to do all the free open world content to pick up the rest of your slots if you can’t grind for conquest very well.) It will at least level the playing field and make a difference against mirror match-ups and duels when you have 2m more hp and like 30% more damage with a tier set.
This is extremely valuable. My brother and I are new to this stuff, him being more experienced at it than I am. He made it sound like as long as I had my greens that bolstered I’d be fine.
Upgrading your pvp gear with valorstones and crests does not affect pvp ilv. Whatever ilv your pvp gear is at will remain at such, even if you convert it into a tier piece. If you can’t get conquest daggers, getting honor daggers would still be huge-- but crafting the daggers or bloody token daggers will be huuuge on you still.
Spot on. I think we agree. I get around most of this by avoiding the real sweaty forms of PvP and mostly only PvPing on a class I’m deeply familiar with. And a part of me recognizes how sad that is. But the curve being two fold: skill and gear. Makes the prospect of trying to learn another classes sound miserable. Do I suck as a Priest? Am I making mistakes or were there numbers at play and I did everything right but still failed? And such complexity can only really be cut thru with a lot of iteration (the law of big numbers) or some really good data scraping and analysis.
Overall the advice you gave was solid. The right answer is get that gear up because it will always help.
Rogue is fine. It just the rest of class getting more tanky each expansion. Most class can now heal while stun. If you do arena as Sub, you will need to line up CD to force trinket then kill on next go. You also need to good partner who can help you CC after kidney so you can get the kill. But First you will need max gear atleast 7-8 epic to do max dmg then do arena.
Last night I used my bloody tokens to get the daggers and then sprung to get them enchanted and it made a significant difference in terms of damage output… but still nothing compared to what the other team was doing. I’m guessing it’s still a gear thing?
It’s amazing the damage that’s put out by some of the classes and I feel like a terrible player doing only 1/3 of the damage they’re doing.
I don’t think a Rogue pairs well with a Resto Shammy either, or at least as of now I’m still not putting up enough damage to pressure the other team still.
Like you had mentioned, I’ve been playing WoW off and on since closed beta and PvP was always something you could easily jump into. This experience has been extremely frustrating as there’s no real guidance and I’m relying heavily on these forums and YTers.
Yeah that is problem. Other classes getting ever more defensive while not losing their offensive capabilities is a good way to skew combat.
The ever growing prevalence of health shields is becoming annoying. I attack a Priest, okay yeah makes sense, mage okay…yeah a shield makes sense but it probably shouldn’t shield them for 1m + damage. Hunters!? Hunter have health shields now?
And health shield are in part a response to anti-healing. But I think they shouldn’t be. The purpose anti-healing serves is to reduce the amount of effective HP in PvP.
Personally I enjoy PvP that is decisive. Spending 4 mins trying to kill someone just not fun. In a shooter it would be called “bullet sponge”. Not sure what to call it here.
Yup you need at least half gear to ge epics to start to do better with all three specs but especially Sub. Rogues really are the most gear reliant class in WoW by a mile.
Partly because of weak scaling but also partly because of PVP aura adjustments.
