Mercenary Mode Should Require 213 ilvl

Community General Discussion
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Poorly-geared horde are using mercenary mode to join the alliance for more honor per hour, creating a disproportionate amount of under-geared payers [sic] on the alliance side. A battleground with two ilvl 146 horde mercs is basically 8v10. I propose a very simple change to merc mode, that it require at least the PvP item level of the basic un-upgraded honor gear to get into the other side’s battlegrounds.

Of course, there are many other qualms people may have with PvP gearing and merc mode in general. This thread is not that.

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Lol it’s more the opposite for me. It’s trash Alliance players ruining my Horde teams, but I guess for the same reason I could support this.

But expect backlash if you restrict the things undergeared players can do.

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I mean, you are playing alliance in pvp, so what do you expect to happen?

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I tried to run some battlegrounds earlier and istg it felt like the rest of my team were fresh 60s in low gear. I just want my marks of honor for transmogs man

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Getting a disproportionate amount of ilvl 146 horde mercs doing 1/3 the damage of my holy priest, of course. Which is why I want change.

Good point, I’d like to make it clear: undergeared players would not be prohibited from joining their own side BGs, just mercing to the other side. This way, there could be a more equal proportion of under-geared players between sides. 9v9 perhaps, instead of 8v10.

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Alright, now you have a bunch of 145 alliance on your team

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A better change would be to scale undergeared players to a minimum ilvl, maybe 210?

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You are asking for better progression systems for all players in game.

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Don’t do random battlegrounds if you don’t want them to be random. Go do rated battlegrounds.

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Maybe instead of asking them to slap some bandaid on the symptom, they should look at the root issue and figure out what’s causing undergeared people wanting to use merc mode in pvp and fix that…

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Soon they will have to stop requiring many things, because any requirement will simply make it impossible to get enough players.

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baseline, normal random que should put players into two groups via hidden match making based on ilvl. everyone under 200 ilvl goes into one bracket, and everyone over 200 ilvl goes into the other. in the event a group ques with mixed ilvls put them both into the over 200 ilvl bracket.

and anyone in a que over 10 mins gets dropped into what ever needs a slot filled.

/imo

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I think adding artificial restrictions to casual pvp is a bad idea, either adding ilvl requirements to queue or sepperating people into ilvl brackets.

What would fix the frustration of having undergrared players in your bg, is for each gear slot to scale up to a minimum ilvl (say 210). This would let new players feel like they can somewhat help.

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Being paired with undergeared players is fine, but the problem is that one side can send their undergeared players to the other and the other cannot. This results in the alliance side having more undergeared players than the horde side and this is the problem.

My proposed solution is to require a very low item level minimum (213 PvP item level, the same as the full fresh honor set) to use mercenary mode. The 146 ilvl horde will have to play on their own side as the 146 ilvl alliance do.

I’m not opposed to low gear scaling up to some threshold, or gear not mattering in PvP at all. But that’s not what this thread is about, since I don’t think those are realistic goals with the direction the dev team is taking the game.

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Then you’re just asking for horde alts to take much longer to gear up to a standard that YOU deem okay?

Who are you?

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213 PvP item level is literally the most basic honor set. You get it with 10000 honor. My new hunter got honor cap at level 29. And you’re not prohibited from doing battlegrounds, just from mercing and giving the alliance your dead weight.

I am Wild, SUPERGNOME!! Who are you?

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If we can’t merc, horde takes much more time to get into bgs.

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Well that’s okay, you could merc after about two hours at 60. Or you could do some amount of battlegrounds while leveling and be ready to go instantly. Just in case you have not heard the changes to PvP gearing in 9.1.5, 213 PvP item level is the full set of 177 honor gear. This should be a very basic requirement to meet.

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They could also merc while leveling yet they don’t, why do you think they would do battlegrounds leveling, which is probably much slower and entirely dependant upon if you win or not. Leveling via threads of fate makes 100% more sense.

I’m not necessarily saying you’re wrong, hell I got 199 ilvl the day after I leveled to 60. But putting restrictions because you hate carrying in the most casual form of PvP? I ask again, who are you?

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Requiring the base level is probably too stiff. I do think it could be higher. I did a random BG the other day and my team was dead within 15 seconds. I gladly took the deserter debuff. We got trashed.

I don’t think scaling in pvp is a good answer personally for the other responses above. You have zero change in character power until you’re almost fully upgraded in honor gear. There is zero carrot on that stick for certain players.

1 Like