Greetings!
With The War Within on the horizon, there is an opportunity to apply some needed balancing changes for levellers PvP Battlegrounds and Arena Skirmishes.
The current issue:
The power gap between level 10 > 19, 20 > 29, 30 > 39 (so on) is far too large due to the level and stat squish of patch 9.1.5, and this is directly damaging both the free trial and legacy raid PvP experience.
Below is a link to the patch notes that covering the level changes:
Following are some examples, keep in mind that the power output still remains the same:
Level 20-22 became level 10
Level 43-44 became level 19
Level 45-47 became level 20
Level 76-79 became level 29
Level 80-81 became lv30
Level 98-99 became lv 39
And so on…
These power differences from both my own experience and of many both new and old players I have encountered can make PvP simply not fun or challenging during the levelling process, depending on what level your team, enemy team, and character is respectively. Especially since PvP gear is easily accessible with Mark of Honor, or raid quality gear with Warforging scaled to the respective level.
Currently when a lv10 enters a Battleground with lv10 acquired gear, their character level will increase to 19 while in the PvP instance, and their gear will remain lv10. This unfortunately does not do enough, as since the gear does not scale as well, the stats remain low, and secondary stat %’s get nuked.
Level 20 (keep in mind this is any new player tries WoW for free) has the stat power of 45-47 Vanilla pre-squish, and level 29 has the stat power of 2 expansions later 76-79 WotLK.
This is especially an issue in this bracket due to free trial level 20s being placed in the XP off bracket against 29 twinks, inevitably turning them away from the game before being able to experience what PvP is like before the increasing complexities of the max level PvP.
Or 30’s (level 80-81) who have access to the raids (now level requirement has changed to 30 for Vanilla, TBC and WotLK raids), this “legendary” gear that many legacy raiding guilds still collect, when used in PvP against level 98-99, again 2 expansions of power difference, get one shot by players who have run a few dungeons.
Now onto the fix:
Option 1:
Bring back gear scaling, but this time based on when items were acquired!
Meaning, a level 10 would scaled it’s level to 19, as well as all items would increase their power level by the equivalent of 9 levels. If the level 10 has an item acquired at level 7, that item would scale to a power level of if it was acquired at level 16, maintaining the 3 level difference.
This would directly fix the current issue of stat power difference, while still providing a strong advantage to higher level players with the added talent points.
This would solve the new player experience as well as solving the issue that currently legendary items acquired in legacy raids aren’t viable in XP off brackets, such as the example of the 30s bracket, with timeless items such as: Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros, Warglaives of Azinoth, and Shadowmourne. Bring them back to Retail PvP!
Option 2.1 (a partial fix):
Since gear scaling is a big choice to bring back into the game, perhaps a minor fix would be to create a new XP off bracket for levels: 10, 20, 30, 35 (Pandaria), 40, 50 and 60 - in which only characters on exactly those levels may enter. This would leave the separated XP off brackets 11-19, 21-29, 31-39 (excluding 35), 41-49, 51-59, in their own Queues as well.
Allowing the free trial experience to be fair, and legacy raiders to be able to PvP with their well earned items.
Option 2.2:
Make the PvP brackets span over 5 levels, 10-14, 15-19, 20-24, 25-29, 30-34, 35-39, etc.
In conclusion:
These changes would fix the current power differences which make the game unplayable in levelling PvP environments, a needed change that would leave these brackets fun and enjoyable for the foreseeable future. No further changes would be needed until the next squish, if and when that comes.
Thanks for reading, curious to hear peoples thoughts and testimonies.