A gap of 30 iLVLs for 3 months then a Gap of 15 iLVLs for the remainder of the patch
Scaling/PVE Gear/Importance of secondary stats/Corruption make this season harder to quantify. But the 460 quest rewards couldn’t corrupt making them absolutely useless later in the season, the gap between a rated player with optimal gear/corruptions/Azerite and a pure Random BG player was probably the biggest gap to ever exist.
Shadowlands Season 1
(Sinful Combatant) Honor iLVL 184 for the first 7 weeks
A brief gap of 42 iLVLs with the caveat that high rated players will only have 226 for less than half their slots during this time period.
An eventual gap of 26 iLVLs
Shadowlands obviously isn’t an expansion catering to people that only play Random BGs. But I fail to see how this is a massive outlier compared to past expansions.
I accounted for completing the conquest cap in BFA.
Only other expansion where that’s relevant is possibly WoD, where you’d have to complete the battle ground dailies every single day for almost 2 months to purchase a single piece of conquest gear.
At best we can use that to up the average iLVL of a WoD player by 2 iLVLs in an expansion where the gap was already fairly small.
BGs will never offer gear comparative to rated content or even PvE. To even get gear equivalent of M+ 15s required you to be at a dumb level of arena rating to begin with.
And this is why that gearing system was so great for rated and unrated players alike. But when PVP gear can be used in PVE without penalty, it has to be gated behind a long grind and follow the same large ilvl gaps.
Which is also the same expansion where the PVP community become so hostile to the lead PVP dev (Brian Holinka) that he had to delete his twitter account and leave the World of Warcraft development team. (He’s since returned)
Maybe you should have been more vocal during that expansion when people where issuing death threats to the person who created the version of the game you enjoy.
THANK YOU! I’ve been wondering what the actual ilvls were, it’s been so long–was this the first season or the third?
People did Ashran for conquest, way faster, especially with premades.
People hated WoD PvP because of class tuning and design, not gear systems. But as a priest I loved every second of WoD’s class design, except for DK’s in season 1.
Then why do the rewards have to be segregated if they are so similar?
Rating allowing a higher conquest cap worked very well. Rated players got gear faster and there was light at the end of the tunnel for unrated players. All while keeping the ilvl disparity in check.
