Honestly, I don’t think it is. I think there’s this expectation of fantasy in WoW that involves a progression of power. In PvE it works really well, but in PvP it falls apart. It’s been this way for 15 years, but it feels like maybe Blizzard keeps trying to make it work anyway? I mean, look at your own gear… you’re ilvl 442, which is really respectable for a new player; however, your hp pool is over 100 less than mine, at ilvl 471, which is only one tier up. That’s a significant difference, but there’s not much you can do about it… and you’ve clearly made an active effort to pursue gear!
I wrote up another post on this topic, if you’re interested. It’s a bit of a read, but you can see the second section here:
To mitigate the BG thing though, the best thing you can do for yourself is to run M+ to get the 475 azerite pieces. Try to complete a +15 every week for the titan residium. Try to queue with a few friends in BGs… even a geared team of two, DPS/Healer, working together in a BG can make a big difference to mitigate the folks who wander into a BG immediately upon hitting 120.
That’s not really how it played out, though. In fact, in those expansions, the problem was somewhat worse! People still went into BGs immediately upon hitting 120, in terrible gear, it just meant that if they AFK their way to currency, they will eventually get a lot of gear. This was a huge problem back then.
Right now, with Random BGs being relatively ineffective for gearing purposes, there is much less incentive to be AFK. For players who actually want to participate and play, you can gear pretty easily through PvE activities. It’s totally *not* ideal that the best way to gear for PvP is to PvE, but I feel like it’s better than how it used to be for people who actually play the game.
Personally, I’d prefer to have gear just not matter nearly as much at all in PvP and just let class balance and skill be the deciding factors. That’s my own preference though.