Season 4 PvP Update: Removing the Conquest Cap and Spoils of War

We’ve been hearing the feedback from the community to lift the Conquest Cap for Shadowlands Season 4. We’re happy to announce that we will be doing so with next week’s resets (Tuesday, August 16), but also want to offer some explanation on why we were initially hesitant to do so.

  • First, we understand the sentiment regarding how Valor is uncapped this season while Conquest remains capped. However, the two currencies are not exactly alike in design or purpose. For example, there is no Valor vendor where you can purchase the specific item that you want. While Conquest is used to acquire specific items at a vendor, Valor is used to upgrade items that have dropped randomly from the Great Vault or from running M+ dungeons.

  • Second, we know that once the Conquest cap is removed, many players will set out to acquire a full set of gear as quickly as possible, creating a significant power gap between themselves and any characters that are new to the season. We generally do not remove the cap until later in the season when we feel many players who have been playing all season have had the opportunity to acquire a full set of gear. This allows the competitive environment to remain closer during the early part of the season.

  • Finally, the Conquest cap serves to throttle gear acquisition to a rate comparable with the other main parts of the endgame, Raids and M+.

By lifting the cap early, we understand that some of the above issues may arise. But in this shortened and experimental final season of Shadowlands, we want to take an opportunity to be flexible and responsive to your feedback.

In addition to the Conquest cap removal, there are two more PvP changes that we want everybody to be aware of:

  1. The Spoils of War buff will be reactivated with next week’s reset, so players taking part in Battlegrounds and Arena will have their Conquest gains increased by 25% and Honor gains increased by 40%. This is planned to remain active for the rest of Season 4.
  2. For the Solo Shuffle Brawl, the minimum item level floor has been increased to 278 (is currently 252). This is already live.

Thank you for your feedback and we’ll see you on the battlefield!

114 Likes

Very nice pog!

26 Likes

HOT DANG, love it

5 Likes

Sounds amazing, thank you so much for all of this!

3 Likes

Hot dog. I guess I’m going to have no life farming conquest pieces next week

5 Likes

very nice now I will not lose to people with 295 ilevel who have spent all week in keys, ty warcraft devs

29 Likes

Awesome!! Going to grind arena hard next week!!

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  1. Conquest cap gone
  2. Spoils of War back soon
  3. Shuffle scaling buffed

Wow, this is fantastic news.

Yeah, I was considering not playing for a bit because I didn’t want to do keys on my main PvP chars.

8 Likes

This is insane, thanks guys

25 Likes

Good change!

4 Likes

Thank you!

How is getting one to two pieces per week comparable to PvE where you can get a full set on week 1? Many PvE’ers are fully geared already while PvP’ers have 3 or 4 pieces.

5 Likes

You can’t target keystone pieces. Like, you can play for an hour a week and be done with PvP stuff, but for PvE you can do 8 hours of keys for a week in a row without getting the 3-4 pieces you want.

There’s also the “we don’t want to make PvE players feel like they have to PvP” angle.

5 Likes

Will the boa conquest boxes be returning?

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I just wanted to point out, the item level scaling doesn’t work on all gear. From what I can tell it seems to only apply to basic honor gear (rank 1 or higher). That kind of defeats the purpose since the honor gear already starts at ilvl 265, and players are trying to do solo shuffles to get honor gear.

Fresh characters come in with pieces acquired during leveling (from shadowlands quests) and they will still have 30-40k hp because the scaling is not being applied to their greens/blues. There needs to be a fix for this problem.

8 Likes

Awesome changes!

Especially this ^

2 Likes

Wowie! This is an amazing change!

Thanks Blizzard! Best season ever!!!

1 Like

Time to bring back the survival hunter

1 Like

If you do 8 hours of PvP per day for a week on week 1, you’ll have 1 piece.
If you do 8 hours of keys per day for a week on week 1, I guarantee you will have many, many more pieces.

10 Likes

nice! now make all honor gear to a single ilvl, and all conquest to a single slightly higher ilvl

edit: also mm and aff are out of control in random bgs, idk the answer without making them useless in arena, but wow the damage they are both putting out

5 Likes

Someone who can link images needs to create a Drake meme around this sentence:
“creating a significant power gap between themselves and any characters that are new to the season.”

100K HP players vs 24K HP players…NO
90K HP players vs 24K HP players…OH yeah!

2 Likes