Thanks guys for all the feedback here as I've been tracking this thread for quite a while. With Battle for Azeroth we aren't ready to share information on what changes may be coming past what has been shared at BlizzCon.
PVP is something that has been actively discussed going forward into the new expansion, no idea on if any changes are going to be made but keep in mind we still have a whole Alpha and Beta cycle to go through so please keep the discussion up.
I think some of us were hoping hotfixes would be quickly rolled out to address the ilevel disparity between PvE and PvP gear during the current PvP season, not the next expansion.
Even if every PvP player had ilvl 980 Versa/Random Stats gear (or exclusive Double Value Versa gear, so it's less useful in PvE for more classes), the core of the issues would still remain and, as a result, few people would participate.
I Know this because in previous seasons in this very expansion, PvPers usually had the highest ilvl around, and participation was still low, and specifically lower than bloody WoD, where overall subs were at it's worst point in history.I don't remember the official WoW page Gladiator count for last season of Legion, but by going by
http://www.wow-stats.com/ach02.html
Gladiator Achieves for the entirity of Legion, 0.48% of observed active accounts (1M300k, by the site) is 6240 Legion Gladiator Achievments. This is EU+NA.
http://www.arenamate.net/arena-rbg-title-cutoffs/archive/warlords-s3
For only ONE Season, WoD had it's lowest Gladiator title at rank 1213 NA and 1490 EU, so 2703 total.
So in one season of WoD, you had half the Gladiators of the entire Legion expansion so far(which also reduced season length and threw out significantly more titles), while the active playerbase is significantly higher now than it was then.
Thus, assuming ilvl is the problem is a mistake, and thus, just upping the ilevel of the PvP gear will solve nothing.
People who are speaking about balance and class distribution miss the point.
It's all meaningless if there's no one playing.
I bet more people will do BGs once they provide Wakening essences, for instance. I wonder why.
This is a gear structured RPG with a "get more powerful" carrot-in-the-stick. But that "get more powerful" scenario is meaningless if, for instance, doing Mythic Bosses and Mythic+20 only made me stronger...
while doing World Quests.
This is basically what some people are asking for here.
"I Want appropriate ilvl rewards, without changing the root of the issue, which is, regardless of how high my ilvl is, it's a marginal upgrade at best and it will only help me when I'm killing some crap elite that I already kill with a GUNDAM OF THE LIGHT GIGANTIC ROBOT and barely make my character stronger in the particular area of the game I want to play."
As me and many others already said in this very thread, this is not a good enough incentive to get people into playing.
As for the "there is still alpha and beta", I was there in the beta forums, saying the PvP Would be a barren wasteland as all the bottom/medium PvP "serious" players would drop out and that you need a good part of the WoW playerbase to participate regularly in PvP for it to be enjoyable and active, and it fell on deaf ears.
Templates are only a good thing for the super casual and for the super e-sport enthusiast. You shouldn't be tailoring your game for either of them. Ever.