PvP Gearing in SL

These are great ideas really hate questing on my alts just to get a 187 conduit. I think honestly we can solve a ton of problems if blizzard just removed the honor cap and let people just spent how they want instead of budgeting and then going to the vendor it kind of interrupts the flow of playing the game.

28 Likes

A small note: Spoils of War right now is disabled once the player dies.

16 Likes

Any reason the new PTR item for catching up conduits rewards nothing for Rated Battle Ground players? Seems like we are forgetting a pretty big part of the PvP player base. Shouldnt the catch up mechanic be lower requirement also? Glad only really on rewards the top percentage of players or pushes people towards boosting. I think duelist or something would at least be a push in the right direction.

14 Likes

If I had to guess, it’s because there isn’t a seasonal achievement for RBGs like there is for the other game modes except for Hero which obviously goes out after the season is over. They could just make the requirement the season 3 duelist achievement and it would apply to both.

6 Likes

they always forget about RBGs

14 Likes

It looks like that item should say it requires “Elite”, not “Gladiator”.

This will be fixed in an upcoming build of the PTR.

Thanks!

Any thoughts on lowering the requirements as elite is pretty high for an average player? Currently the elite rank being the requirement will seem to just increase the gear disparity between the top players and literally everyone else seems like a rich getting richer type deal.

70 Likes

Gonna bump this post again as it seems people (including myself) feel they should really get a response from this.

31 Likes

Thanks for bumping it again.

I am really hoping for some type of response to any of our replies to the initial dev post above, but the current setup on the 9.2 PTR has me worried that we already know the answer to the question of the system being changed. As far as I’ve seen, the system is still the same with slightly less honor costs on honor gear, though still ridiculously high at over 65k honor required for it, still huge honor requirements for upgrading conquest, still a 15k honor cap and possibly losing the honor buff they implemented for this season.

No indication of any movement on lowering the bar of entry, the gap between honor and conquest is still the same and now this conduit catchup, especially if account-wide, will put an even bigger gap between lower rated players and higher rated players.

I know development for 9.2 has probably been in the works for a while and the gearing system was probably mapped out long ago, but really the 9.1.5 change showed that Blizzard can alter the PvP item level at any time without affecting anything else. They could easily scale the PvP item level of all honor gear to 10 below max and all conquest gear to max and pretty much solve the gear disparity, or get as close to solving it as you can get with this current system. If they could change the ilvls in 9.1.5 they could change them in 9.2 in a whole new season.

I really hope we get another response with some clarity on what the system should look like moving forward past SL s2. I feel like this issue is a really easy win for Blizzard if they listen to the overwhelming feedback on it. The PvP community seems really united on this, everywhere I look from the unrated random BG heroes to r1s want it changed. Even people that seem to enjoy the current system don’t seem like they’d mind if it changed. I guess we will just have to see what happens.

64 Likes

100% this if blizzard looks at this now they are saving themselves from losing tons of people who are basically sick of being ignored and will just quit and unsub

58 Likes

For 9.2:

PvE Gear Item Levels

Source iLvL
Raid Finder 239
Normal 252
Heroic 265
Mythic 278
M+15 262 End, 278 Vault

Rated Gear Item Levels

Rank iLvL PvP iLvL Rating Req.
Rank 1 Unranked 249 262
Rank 2 Combatant I 252 265 1,000
Rank 3 Combatant II 255 268 1,200
Rank 4 Challenger I 259 272 1,400
Rank 5 Challenger II 262 275 1,600
Rank 6 Rival I 265 278 1,800
Rank 7 Rival II 268 281 1,950
Rank 8 Duelist 272 285 2,100
Rank 9 Elite 275 285 2,400

Honor Gear Item Levels

Rank iLvL PvP iLvL Heroic Raid Delta Challenger II Delta Max Delta
1 203 239 26 36 46
2 210 242 23 33 43
3 216 246 19 29 39
4 223 249 16 26 36
5 229 252 13 23 33
6 236 255 10 20 30
7 242 259 6 16 26

The vast majority of PvP matches that take place are in Honor Battlegrounds. I play a DPS class in PvP usually. Even in full rank 7 Honor gear in 9.1.5, I am either blowing up Rank 1 people (some of whom who are clearly better players than me based on the rotations I see them using) while taking no damage at all or getting two shot by teams of conquest geared PvP players. Rarely do I find myself in evenly matched games.

This is enormously frustrating for people who are trying to gear up an alt, or play continuously on a fully honor geared character; especially once the season is even moderately underway and mains are geared. It is a miserable slog of an experience (Except for the Glads doing the stomping).

Based on the PTR iLvLs I’ve included above I have no reasonable expectation that it will be any different in 9.2.

The iLvl Deltas in the bottom 3-4 honor upgrade levels are still far too large.

There is also in my opinion no good reason why iLvL should not be capped at a maximum level inside of queued Honor based PvP content. If there was an honor level 8 it would be another +3 or +4 iLvL which would leave a nice cap of PvP iLvL 263 to stomp on the amatures and casuals in honor BGs. If they’re as good as their gear it shouldn’t bother them much.

21 Likes

I think they really do need to do something especially since they will just keep hemorrhaging players until they fix it.
It should really be a priority. I always wished we could be stacked in random bgs and feel what its like to be full geared to make it more of a skill based playing field.

21 Likes

I think its a pretty commonly known fact, that MoP PvP gearing was some of the best we’ve ever had. And, in MoP we had 2 levels of PvP gear. Honor, and Conquest.

Rated PvP was largely filled with people in full conquest gear, meaning that high rated PvP was more skill based and less gear based. Now, I have a full Rival I (1800) pvp set on my hunter, and when my MMR gets too high I get queued into 2100+ teams with Duelist gear and get strictly outgeared. That’s not fun.

That’s not even talking about grinding out your honor set for the first time.

Now, I’m not advocating for templates. I didn’t like them for the short time they were implemented, and I don’t want to see them return.
But, I do think that someone in full conquest gear should have a PvP advantage over someone in full Mythic Raid gear, just as I think the Mythic raid gear should outperform PvP gear in raid.

Part of the problem with this is Versatility being “The PvP Stat”. Because, there are specs in this game, like many tanks and WW monks, for whom Vers is their best PvE stat, therefore PvP gearing is a more than viable way of gearing for PvE.

I may be in the minority, but I would personally like to see PvP Power and/or Resilience come back as “The PvP Stat(s)”.

31 Likes

100% this. During MoP I remember putting stamina gems in my gear cause I was so well itemized and just wanted more health. Monk especially has been really well off for this expansion because of good itemized gear for my two specs tank/dps. The new tier set however for monk are basically the opposite of what will be good for tank/dps forcing me to suffer heavily by losing out on a huge percentage of vers to maintain the tier set bonuses

15 Likes

I’m surprised I didn’t see this anywhere on the PTR forums or fansites, but it looks like the devs nerfed honor costs for upgrading honor gear by quite a bit, almost 50% from launch values. Down from 7100~ to 3750 for a chest/helm/legs for example.

I don’t have any conquest gear to check yet, was there a similar nerf in honor required overall for conquest gear upgrades?

Seems to be a little lower also does the PVP trinket quest really only give you access to the one you choose? Seems kinda broken to lock us out of having more than one

The quest is weekly, so you can choose another one next week.

1 Like

Really wish that if we are Conquest capped the weekly quests give more honor or vice versa would be a nice QOL change for people trying to gear

1 Like

I play all BGs and have always found the whole 2 teams of 3 people in a box paradigm of PvP not much fun. The fact that all of PvP is balanced around this tiny little box for the revenue generated by esports is awful IMO.

I’d really like to see the balancing of honor BGs be entirely separate from whatever considerations are made for “comps” and whatnot that have nothing to do with a giant BG romp (which is super fun to me)

7 Likes

I dont think PvP should be balanced around non rated play or at least it should be the after thought.

That being said I think the new PvP trinkets are basically just everyone choosing resonator for the OP 40k bomb which seems to absolutely slap in a bad way its basically just Drestagoth 2.0. I think the others that ive tried so far have been pretty mediocre with the magic shield one being almost useless when someone can slap it off instantly and need to be correctly tuned to work in line more with the resonator trinket which is just required at this point. I think the heal absorb one is okay but seems to under perform in all the cases ive used it on my alt.

Both of the stun trinkets seem to be pretty terrible and really need to be brought in line with the other ones as it is looking like they wont be picked by anyone until the eventual nerf to resonator

Seems it was nerfed already but I still think they need to buff the other trinkets