Okay so here’s my idea, and I’m sure there will be some backlash for it from those that love the current state of the game but there needs to be some changes for the long term health of the game….
Make honor gear scale higher for the healing specs.
When you’re in a healing spec, honor gear should have a ilvl close to or equal to conquest gear.
In order to make conquest and bloody token gear still better, make it so that it can not be socketed or enchanted.
This would make more people try out healing and, ultimately, make more healers in the game.
Feel free to provide feedback on tweaks. I think this is a change that would be meaningful and easy to implement.
3 Likes
Just make it scale higher for everyone.
3 Likes
Yeah. That would work too. The barrier to entry for healers should be significantly lower, but making the honor gear scale better for everyone would achieve that too!
Well, since you said it.
Gear already doesn’t matter. I’m all for incentivizing heals, but I don’t think this would do much. 
I should add… by ‘doesn’t matter’ I mean that it doesn’t take long to get gear. The process is trivial. If the barrier of entry is a few hours of effort, I’m not sure this would change much.
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I think closing the ilvl gap between crafted/honor/conquest gear wouldn’t hurt, but it shouldn’t be applied only to one role over the others.
2 Likes
Well, this doesn’t work because at the beginning of a season everyone is wearing honor gear. Conquest healers vs everyone else in honor gear results in nobody dying ever.
You will have plenty of healers, for sure, because everything else will be useless.
Honor set should just be free.
It already is if you carry honor into the new season. Farming honor is only needed by new players and alts which are already behind everyone that has been playing.
Honor still used for gems, non-rated consumes, etc.
When they remove conq cap and give the boxes they should add an item to exchange honor for bloody tokens so you can just buy that set to get started.
Honor gear is completely useless at that point in the season.
You are better off not getting any of it and saving your honor for sockets to put in wpvp/conquest items.
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Not particularly opposed to honor geared healers having similar stats as conquest geared ones, more folks learning healing will have its pain points, but making it a smidge easier for a healer while they are gearing/possibly learning I can support.
The worry about honor gear this or bloody token that is kind of a non-issue because war crate farming a whole conquest set in a day or two exists. However, placebo effect, if near conquest geared ilev honor geared healers feel they are as effective as embellished, enchanted, socketed and gemed, tier set equipped conquest geared healers and that makes them queue more and have fun, good.
Gearing alts mid-late season is a pretty long, painful process unless you crate farm – which I don’t think is a fun way to gear. This would really help people pick up a healing spec after they’ve geared their main, or give healers a head start from the beginning.
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I gotcha. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to get more healers active or just looking at any possible solution. I just worry a bit that the more we trivialize gear that we also take away something that used to be part of the fun in PvP. I think blizz has completely butchered the process lately and has left it feeling like a chore.
Gearing in pvp use to be, “oh you cant seem to get wins today? No gear for you until a time when you can change that” to now… Can you fly to the 6 zones fast enough to not miss any war crates and gear insanely fast? Yes? Bam! Fully geared.
It always felt like a chore lol… Sometimes I disliked it more than others. Right now is not the worst iteration for sure.
I loved WOD gearing. Literally que double dps 2s. 180 conquest per win. Now 2s is terrible conquest. They honestly made the grind feel longer to me now unless I chose to do stuff I don’t wanna do.
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Didn’t for me. In wrath, it was part of the achievement. Getting your shoulders unlocked was something a lot of players looked forward to. Would agree that more often than not though it has been a chore for most players.
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All human behaviors are 100% based on hope. People will kill if you give them hope, spend all their money if you give them hope. They will call you a God for 2000 years if you just give them hope in the afterlife, not even in this life!
PVP in it’s current form provides 0 hope. You battle to get to level 80, get your greens and get 1 shotted in WPVP and camped in a BG. So you get some friends in greens attack someone, they ROFL at you and then one shot you and all your friends. But you still have hope… so you go get your bloody token/conquest gear and now you get 2 shotted in WPVP and camped in a BG (bc some of your team is in greens)…
There is no hope. The only hope offered by the game is to play 100 hours a week and get all the buffs and all the gear and enough people to do premades. The average consumer is OUT. I cannot for the life of me understand how a successful large corporation doesn’t understand that. It is literally built into our DNA. Since the beginning of time when some caveman was in the snow and thought… if walk south where it’s warmer we will have hope that only half of us die next winter instead of 75% of us. And then other people were living there so we killed them all… for hope.
Cap stat/dmg differential bw players at 25% green v purples and 10% purple vs purple and give your customers hope. The top players are still going to win 9/10 times but the average player has hope.
Keep in mind healers already get a small bonus with a different trinket set bonus to help them survive and faster queue times in some modes.
Not saying that more couldn’t be done to encourage and reward healers for playing, but I don’t think just straight up giving them better gear is the way to do that.
You can do 2-3 hours of crate farming and get a very good set of gear. That and just getting 1 bg win and you’ll already have more than half a set in less than 3-4 hours of playing. You could also casually do the weekly bloody coin quests for 3 weeks which take about an hour todo and have a very good set of gear with not much time investment.
While the issues of premades definitely need to be looked at, gearing really isn’t difficult atm. I think the process of how to gear could be more straightforward though.
healers are already overpowered in pvp
You are right this is a bad take. Gearing is not an issue
So what’s causing a lack of healers and long queue times? Wouldn’t an alt being able to be geared faster for healing allow more people to heal at any given point?
ALL alts should be easier to gear via catchup mechanics in general. The problem is there are no catchup mechanics for PvP gearing, meaning you have to put in the same amount of time to gear an alt as you do a main, and you have to spend the same amount of time to gear a character near the middle of a season as you do at the beginning. (Actually it takes MORE time to do)
If they actually had some catchup mechanics then you could gear out alts more easily. Has nothing to do with whether those alts are healers or not.