Separate PvP and PvE Gear

Community General Discussion
21

You were thinking of WoD. Don’t pretend otherwise.

Also don’t confuse the natural decline of WoW subs over time and the ebb and flow of new expansions and those ending as proof of PvE participation relative to the entire game population.

There is also nothing from Holinka’s quote to make you assume he is only speaking of that brief moment in time with regards to numbers, and there is no logical reason to assume PvE players would quit but PvP players wouldn’t to a significant enough degree that it would grossly skew the numbers.

In fact if you are just looking at sub counts it could be just as true that PvP players quit en masse for any number of reasons and the disproportionate number of PvE players stayed subbed yet still PvP participation was equal to PvE participation. There’s no real reason to believe this, but if we are making stuff up to fit our agenda I can do it just as easily.

Anyway here’s a graph I found. That period of time wasn’t the lowest participation ever and there’s certainly nothing at all to indicate whether the subs are of PvE or PvP players:

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22

I mean why do you think they had to make PvP gear unrewarding like it has been for two expansions? If pvers felt any need to PvP they complain endlessly (ie conflict and strife and the whole joke of a comp stomp fiasco).

You know when PvP gear was rewarding? When it was split. Know when PvP participation was at its best? Right. When it was split.

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23

i mean there was a similer system in pandaland too and many thought that was the best xpack for pvp as well. WoD suffered for a lot of reasons but i dont think pvp was one of them or at least a big one

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24

MoP was the slowest selling expansion of all time. It started at 10 million players, and fell to 7. It spiked only with WoD pre-sales. Look at your own graph…

You can’t. This game never had a “natural” decline of nearly 4 million before MoP.

No, you can’t make that assumption. Most pvp players view MoP favorably.

Do you notice that he does not reference total participation or point out how that moment in time compared to other expansions? No, he only references percentage. It’s a convenient way to gloss over the millions of lost subs.

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25

I don’t think that gear should be 100% transferable to each activity but I think that pvp gear should get you ~70% of the way there when doing pve for the first time, and vice versa. I also do believe that in my first time jumping into arena this season that there should definitely exist chase items in all aspects of the game that all-around completionists can aim for to maximize their player strength. I do not mind the rank 3 CnS and BotE essence grind and felt like doing them was actually a much needed refresher for me in this game. Blizz shouldn’t purposely put obvious power upgrades behind those activities for the purists, but the community should be the one to discover about these things on their own. And then that creates positive motivation to go after the chase items.

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Most MMOs that at one point had separate PVP/PVE gear abandoned that design for mostly the same reasons.

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27

Their justification was more than sufficient.

To address what you’ve written;

  1. Yes there are ways you can optimise for PvP more. However having shared gear brings you much closer than getting PvP gear from scratch.

  2. My 455 Gladiator’s Maledict disagrees with you.

  3. No, people who rank higher in PvP should be given better gear. Hey I can see you’re very good at PvP and you deserve better PvP gear than me.

Shadowlands is good in that it is reminiscent of the Vanilla PvP design where you could purchase gear based on your rank. Bonuses from the set could be useful in both types of content.

I’m stoked that they have brought meaning back to PvP but separation is not a good way forward.

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28

Would be nice if resilience and pvp set bonuses came back, so pvpers would actually have an incentive to pvp for gear.

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29

Even Heirlooms have a set bonus, will SL PVP sets?

30

Just to clear up a potential point of confusion, when I said…

By RBG I meant “rated bg”.

The developer quote that random, unrated BG’s are popular is easy to digest, because those are accessible activities that anyone can do, and they have always been popular because they are meaningless fun. it would be no surprise that they are as popular or moreso than LFR, because LFR is not rewarding.

The developer quote about 2’s being as popular as normal raids and 3’s being as popular as heroic is much harder to digest. It’s absolutely unbelievable without presenting some evidence, which he didn’t. Maybe it was true then, but I really, really doubt it.

There are ~5000 US 2’s teams between 2200 and 2906 according to PvPLeaderboard. Let’s be generous and say that represents only the top 25% of all ranked US 2’s teams. That would work out to 20k total teams, or ~40k 2’s players (yes I get you can have an extra guy or people on multiple teams, but let’s keep it simple).

Meanwhile, on warcraftlogs… Over 5000 unique Beast Mastery Hunters have killed Wrathion on Mythic in the US region alone. And 5000 is just the record limit warcraftlogs is willing to rank. And number 5000? He is the 54th percentile. So theres between 10-11k BM Hunters total who have killed Wrathion on Mythic.

That’s one spec of one class on Mythic that has as much representation as a quarter of all US 2’s players.

Is the napkin math bad? Yeah probably. But it’s probably not so terrible that you would realistically believe that 2’s representation is equivalent to Normal raiding or 3’s was equivalent to Heroic raiding.

As for the topic at hand, people will play any fun, accessible system with good rewards. If you make pvp only stats, it doesn’t stay accessible. And worse, theres no incentive for PvE’rs to do it because the gear is bad. But you could instead have gear in PvP that is also good for PvE, and players will think, damn, better fill up my conquest bar.

Certainly the ilvl for PvP gear should remain competitive, which they haven’t done a great job of in BFA, but bringing back a whole separate pvp only stat? I’ll agree to disagree with you.

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Believe this is completely false. The other major MMORPGs today are FFXIV and GW2. They both actually have standardized gear in PVP (and obviously not in PVE) today.

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32

This whole post is just conjecture. The only possibilities with Holinka’s post are:

A: He doesn’t know how to interpret his own data and was grossly mistaken.
B: He was lying about the data.
C: What he said is true.

I have zero reason to think A or B are true.

Regardless of the participation levels though the principle remains the same: “PvP” players should not be put at a disadvantage in their main form of content when competing against “PvE” players. I see no logical reason for anyone to argue against that notion, and it’s unequivocally the case right now.

This needs fixed and the only realistic and meaningful ways to do it are to separate PvP and PvE gear again, or to re-introduce templates. I’m fine with either. I just can’t stand the thought of PvE gear ruling PvP for another 2+ years.

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33

how about NO? If i earn gear it has to be useful in all content.

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34

It always was usable. It just wasn’t the BEST in all content.

The issue is this is still true for PvP gear. But only PvP gear. PvE gear is now the best in both PvP and PvE.

They fixed a problem for PvE players participating in side content they dabble in which created one for PvP players in their main form of content. Don’t you see the issue with that?

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35

The PvP gear and PvE gear wasn’t the reason why WoD was a dumpster fire in my opinion. I think the lack of content, empty garrison promises, Ashran, the start of the pruning, the 0 effort patches, and many other factors led to the downfall of WoD. The way the gear worked wasn’t really something that was widely complained about.

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36

A rogue stacking vers for PvP, then bringing that gear into PvE where crit may be considered best is vastly different than bringing a full set of resilience gear into PvE. Resilience and PvP power were 100% dead stats in PvE where now your stat priorities may just vary between the two environments.

Personally, I’m not just fine with gear being gear- I prefer it. It’s true that mythic+ will likely remain a more efficient route to gear than random BG’s but 1) you have to bear in mind that PvE content is simply more easy than PvP content in general and 2) you have to be careful how rewarding you make random battlegrounds since you can literally AFK somewhere and still win with some regularity.

Should I even bother asking you for a source? Why have you removed random BG’s and normal/heroics from the equation?

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37

Appreciate your input and thank you for being polite and providing well thought out reasoning. I agree with most of what you said however the fact remains PvP players are still getting the short end of the stick in their main form of content so that PvE players who want to sometimes mess around in PvP aren’t inconvenienced or put at a disadvantage. That just isn’t ok with me.

I would be fine with WoD gearing where there was no PvP only stat and just an item level advantage as well as a 2 piece PvP trinket bonus. This was fine and doesn’t create the large gap you mentioned between a player with full resilience and one without any. PvE players could still use their PvE gear and they wouldn’t get obliterated, and a full set of PvP gear could be farmed in a matter of days if they really wanted to dive into PvP in a more serious manner.

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38

I can definitely see your concern with pve gear outdoing pvp gear in pvp content, but I don’t like the idea of having a pvp stat. To be fair, I’m fairly casual with both, I probably do more random BG’s than I do dungeons, and I do not like the idea of farming out two sets of gear. I don’t want to have my pvp gear take up bags space or having to run to the bank every time I feel like queing for a battleground. With pvp stats on gear I would feel like I’m less useful and more of a burden on my teammates without said gear but I wouldn’t push myself to get that gear and pvp would just become something I’m too afraid to suck at to actually play. That said I get that less casual players would benefit from a more dedicated and powerful pvp gear.

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39

I’d be fine with that too, players in PvP gear having a small item level advantage in instanced PvP content only. But I’m okay without. PvE’ers entering PvP are confronted with the same disadvantages as PvP’ers entering PvE. They’re using stat priorities, covenants, soulbinds, conduits, etc. with PvE in mind despite those things not necessarily being best for PvP. The reverse is also true.

Again, yes, mythic+ will likely be a faster route to good gear than randoms but randoms are intended to offer equivalent rewards to heroic raids. Anything more than that, you’ll want to participate in rated PvP which is a reasonable ask.

As long as rewards offered for RBG/arena are more comparable to rewards offered for mythic+, I’ll be content with the system.

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This may be true (doubtful if you count lfr), but a majority of PvP takes place in the world or BG’s. These people are not all hardcore, like the arena ladder. The dude with 78k hp would be my evidence.

Believe it or not most people just play the game. They may quest, raid, M+, and BG in the same day :open_mouth: