Would say there’s a definite way to improve the PvP gearing experience as a whole going into 9.2, whilst the changes look healthy there is room for improvement yet.
Improving your gear is a very core RPG element to improve your character power and I wouldn’t want to see that vanish completely with something like templating (unless templating was introduced in a more controllable way such as having a point-based template where you can put points into whichever stats you want).
I’d personally think the following would be healthy.
Legendaries having a PvP Item Level attached to them
As Prosident hinted at in the post above, I do feel as though PvP players shouldn’t be forced into the wider game as much as they are to empower their legendaries, and likewise shouldn’t be actively punished by the absurd gold cost of them (whilst not having a natural way to acquire gold via PvP).
Having a PvP Item Level attached to them would be quite a healthy change.
Honor Cap
The Honor Cap right now is 15,000. However to fully upgrade a weapon you need more than a single cap of Honor. I don’t see why there is a need for a cap? Especially one that can’t even facilitate a full upgrade of an item.
Honor Gear
7 stages of upgrades for Honor gear is pretty absurd as they have such a low level of power per piece. I’d personally prefer to see fewer stages of Honor Gear, and to make them start at a higher item level and cap out 1 stage above base conquest gear). For example, 4 stages total. So for this season of content, it would be:
Stage 1: 210 / 223 PvP
Stage 2: 216 / 229 PvP
Stage 3: 220 / 233 PvP
Stage 4: 226 / 239 PvP
There’s also an opportunity to add crafted PvP items for professions which would be the stage below 203 / 226 PvP as the intro piece of gear.
Honor Gear Items
PvP players do not really have much of a way of gaining gold naturally. With this in mind, I feel that Honor Gear should Bind on Use. This allows players to dump their excess Honor into items and sell it on the Auction House. This will also provide a new source of catch up gear for players as well (There’s no way to get a starter weapon outside of world quests right now…)
Conquest Gear/Vendor
A huge Quality of Life improvement here would be for Conquest Gear on the Vendor to scale with your rank and be purchasable at the rank you are. I understand that there may be some coding implications with upgrading to your highest rank for that week, but the reward for being a higher ranked player is that you can upgrade it to a higher ceiling but still need absurd amounts of Honor to do this.
Would also like to see a way for the Vendor to have some additional benefits for players who do not need any gear from Conquest for pushing such as a way to add sockets to your item but require 1800/2100 rating to Purchase?
Additional Honor Vendor
There’s a bit of a gap with being able to obtain Conduits for PvP players as they need to engage with PvE systems to obtain higher rank conduits, This is also an issue for players just starting off their journey.
Would like to see if there’s an opportunity for an Honor Vendor that sells conduits? Preferably 1 stage above the new base rank (base rank being ilvl200) to give them an alternate path to obtaining conduits.
Would also be interesting to see an alternate path for Conduit upgrading such as an upgrading item that costs Honor (but have a ceiling tied at your rating level).
This would ultimately mean that to accelerate your Conduit progression you would need to engage with PvE systems as you do today, but having a pure PvP alternative I’d imagine would be a much-welcomed addition.