This was the question asked during the recent Q&A re: PVP vendors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvG7VKwJb20
starts at 22:02
Let’s give feedback about this
Choice in the order that I upgrade my gear in. I generally want to replace the lowest ilvl first and this system robs me of that choice.
No honour gear equivalent. We used to have honour points that bought lesser gear, but was not time gated, it was great for fresh 120’s and alts and you could BG to get a decent set of gear right away.
While this next one is not necessarily a choice i feel i don’t have, I think it impacts the overall feeling of the lack of choice:
Transparency: the current UI for this gearing system is opaque, confusing and requires players to look up the information on the website to even understand what comes next. Two things are especially poorly communicated:
a) i can only see one example of what gear choices are there for this week and
b) I have no idea what comes next.
What do you think?
What choices do you feel you don’t have in the current system?
If true that season 2 conquest rewards will have a choice of 4 pieces with different stats on them, that is good. I will have to wait and see if there is consistent good design of pieces that have the two stats I want (e.g. haste and mastery), as opposed to what I call crap pieces that do not (e.g. vers and crit, or mastery and vers, etc.)
If true that season 2 conquest azerite items will have a choice of ALL available azerite traits to pick from, it still matters how many desired azerite traits are on each ring of any given piece. So again, how good will the design be? My guess is for any given piece there will be a mix of good, middling, and crap traits, and the player will just have to pick “the best of what’s pre-designed.”
He said conquest rewards are “now competing with the rest of the reward systems” and “before with vendors, stats like resilience and PvP power made items irrelevant for raiders and PvEers to use” (paraphrased). Why does he view that as a problem, other than because PvEers couldn’t PvP to get PvE gear? Yet without vendors, it’s perfectly fine to him that PvPers need to PvE to get BiS PvP gear? I’m not saying raiders shouldn’t get great gear for the effort they expend, but it shouldn’t give them such high gear power that they need no skill to smash conquest geared players in BGs. (A way I think they can improve on this issue is to tweak the “scaling magic” in BGs; but I am not sure they want to, which leaves things tougher for alts and/or those unable to keep up with the gear curve.)
Say, the choice is between gloves and pants and I have both and I need a trinket. I’m out of luck in this case.
If anything, given the amount of giveaways in PvE, I think it’s perfectly fine to allow faster gearing in PvP. It’s not like capping conquest takes less time than doing emissaries and world bosses. To compensate they can gate the item level jump on vendor to later in the season, so that people won’t start overgearing other content too soon.
First of all, this isn’t true. PvPers don’t have to pve for gear. If they do, that is their choice. Second of all, the barrier to entry in pve is so much more forgiving than pvp.
As far as I can tell, there is no barrier to either. You join a queue for a random dungeon or BG. You join a group of friends for raids or RBG’s. You get gear either way.
Getting geared in BfA is so easy. All you have to do is put in some effort. I have a friend who players a warlock with a 380 item level. All she does is daily emissary quests, warfronts, incursions and world bosses. This is the easiest content in the game.
The difference is, in PvP no one likes losing because of a gear advantage. In PvE, people don’t mind being carried.
I don’t have the choice of acquiring the piece I want or need. It’s that simple.
Ion’s reasoning was players typically purchased gear a particular order. The difference between then and now is back then PvP gear was actually different. It had stats and set bonus that were specific to PvP. That is no longer the case. Gear is gear and the is no distinction between PvP and PvE. So why does it matter in what order the is obtained when this doesn’t apply to any other method of gearing.
Are you saying there is no such things as friends in PvP or your own pace?
If it’s the latter, then I agree. You get one piece of gear each week in a preset order. Although, I would not call that a barrier. I call it a not fun.
It seems they looked at their data and saw that even with all the choices they offered (in the past I mean), a large percentage chose the same things. They then figured there was no real need for choices if everyone else followed some formula or pattern. This was their big mistake.
Choice, even if it is an illusion of choice, matters on a psychological level that they are seemingly unaware of. Take those choices away and only offer what fit the pattern and even those who followed said pattern will begin to feel resentful of it on at least a subconscious level.
Escalating resentment is bad for business I would assume.
Yea should be skill>gear. As it was in past expansions where everyone kinda got gear at the same rate and the catch up was good. Also where there was a cap to ilvl… No war/Titan or ilvl on rating.
Eh sorta? This was also only the first season, you’re remembering the middle and end of WOD when people we’re fresh gear jumping into PvP.
Even this second season, if you jump into a random bg with 290 greens, 300 azerite peices and no traits you’re really not going to be much better off than a newbie was in wod final season. Even with scaling.
Difference was that honor gear scaled decently back then, you could fill your empty slots because you chose what you got. Additionally the conquest catch up was very quick and smooth to where you were equal to old players very quickly.
Now you have to wade through an entire season of crap conquest gear (where you don’t even get full sets). Try and push rating with no gear instead of capping for equal gear in 2s no matter your rating.
Naw WOD was better in almost every way. Choice from vendors and quicker routes to true equality in gear making PvP actually skill>gear.
something i thought about with the current system vs a vendor is making a loot mistake. atm i get a quest that gives me options to choose from, what happens if i make a mistake a pick the wrong item?
with a vendor i could just return it and buy the item i wanted, or if i didn’t figure out that i bought the wrong piece for a couple days, i could save up and buy the right piece next instead of what i was originally going to buy next.
the quest does not offer me a refund option, nor do i have to choice to get another of that item for weeks if at all, making a simple mistake of choosing the wrong item or even misclicking the wrong item a mistake that hurts for weeks at a time whereas a vendor doesn’t have that issue at all.
Nice comment. It is very strange to me how seemingly unaware they are. Something that niggled at me after watching the video: Ion said they want to give people a sense of control over the rewards they get from conquest; however, there is a lot more to feeling a satisfactory sense of control than being presented with a “choice” of items that turn out to be less worthwhile than the week’s worth of work put in to reach the point of “choice.”
I feel like I have a lot less choices than the much better system in WoD. You could spend marks of honor and get a full set of decent pvp gear, this was great for alts.
Under the current system most of the gear from winning BGs and conquest is something you don’t need most of the time forcing players to spend more time outside of pvp to get the gear.
This, 100%. The old systems were clear. Do activity, get points, spend points on whatever it was you felt was most useful. The current systems of do activity, get random loot box or small pool of choices, AFTER the weekly reset or the meter fills removes the feeling of player agency , pacing and a lot of choice out of player hands.
Currency vendors are very simple and relatively easy to understand. They let you as the player pick what you think is important. They let you progress in a way that fits your own schedule (which may be longer than a week). For example, I may spend a week or two just raiding and nothing else because of life. Then once my guild has cleared as far as we will, we take a month off. That month would be when I grind a currency to get the other stuff. Now, I can’t really do that. I have to abide by the arbitrary schedule.