It’s actually fine… three paragraphs of reasonable size more or less organizing his thoughts into logical groupings. Why is everybody so dismissive of reading these days? 
Either way, buckle in for another one I guess…
I think PvP vendors have been put on a pedestal and perhaps people are confusing it for the real issue. Yea, PvP vendors are nice because they let you choose your upgrade paths; however, they won’t address the issues that are currently present in PvP for BfA.
The bottom line is that this game, even after 15 years, is still trying to cram PvP down the same funnel as PvE. If you’ve done any kind of progression through PvE in this game, grindy BfA approach aside, it actually feels pretty good. You start off through questing and move into normal dungeons, progressing to heroic and then mythic. At this point you can move into Normal -> Heroic -> Mythic raids, and/or Mythic+ dungeons. It’s all very natural and makes sense. You can skip tiers when skill allows and, if you find a tier too hard, you can always drop down to the previous tier to beef up your stats.
PvP, on the other hand, is a giant mess. Blizzard tries to throw a similar item tier progression at you, but you’re not really following any progression path. You’re just fighting other people who may, or may not, have gotten better gear before you have. It’s much more hodgepodge and arbitrary. In past expansions you could slog through for currency and buy those upgrades in a more targeted approach, but these days you just fill a bar for a mediocre upgrade, then pray to RNJesus for a good drop after an arena or a useful upgrade in your weekly box.
To me, Legion started down a road of something really great in PvP. They drastically downplayed gear in favour of templates, which gave your character specific stat allocations that were standardized. Of course, because this is WoW and folks have a lot of expectations, it was a tentative foray and so it still gave bonuses for improving your item level and the template stat allocations themselves weren’t very good for some classes. Still though, I felt it was a step in the right direction… but they can do better.
So for me, instead of just going back to PvP vendors, I’d actually like to see them take the Legion system a step further. Perhaps something along the lines of the following…
- Provide a PvP vendor from which, for a reasonable amount of gold, a starting set of PvP gear can be purchased by a level capped player. This set would offer a base level of gear appropriate to any given class of a reasonably good stat allocation. This is also the base level transmog (ie, Normal Tier). This gear only functions in instanced PvP.
- When playing PvP activities, any gear that is not purchased from this vendor does not provide any bonus or function. This allows for those crazy OP trinkets that Blizzard likes to make (which are admittedly fun!) to be kept out of PvP.
- Playing in any PvP activities awards you <generic PvP currency> (GPC). Doesn’t matter if you World PvP, BG, RBG, or Arena, it’s all the same.
- Players can spend GPC to upgrade their base set to any other piece that is slightly improved. Each of these improved pieces offers stat allocation choices as well, so if your class favours one type of stat over another, you have the flexibility to choose. A full set of the improved tier over the full set of the base tier should not offer more than a 5% to 10% overall improvement to performance. Note that I said performance, not stats. This tier also offers the improved transmog (ie, Heroic Tier). Additionally, this gear functions anywhere, not just instanced PvP.
- Finally, players participating in rated PvP (either Arenas or RBGs) will acquire a different currency, <enhanced PvP currency> (EPC) in addition to the GPC they are awarded. This EPC can be used to purchase the enhanced tier of items. These items don’t offer any stat improvement at all; however, they do offer improved transmog (ie, Mythic Tier). Feel free to throw rating requirements on these if you feel you need to.
Anyway, if you made it this far, congrats! Overall, the general idea here is to keep PvP as a PvP activity. Allow for PvP progression, but downplay the power gain from gear. Allow players to complete solely on skill and class balance, but give incentives to play through gear customization and appearances. Mounts, pets, and toys can also be offered for the various tiers of currency as well. There are a lot of options available.
Enough of my rambling though… I’ve been talking about this topic on and off for the last 15 years lol. I’m not really expecting changes at this point.
