Bring them back for random BG’s, leave gearing for stats for rated.
As a casual player Legion was absolutely amazing to play alts in BG’s, I could ding 110 and jump into a random BG and not get absolutely destroyed by some geared pleb that missed all his interrupts on me and got heavily outplayed but lands one stun and finishes me in a few globals.
After leaving this dumpster fire of an expansion only to come back because of Shadowlands hype and jump into random bgs at 400ilvl it is just pointless. I have 200k HP up against 500-600k++ HP, and then I get smoked and check what happened and I see all these random traits and azerite things doing all the damage, not even any actual class abilities.
In my opinion templates were the single worst PvP system ever introduced to the game, the scaling we have now comes just in at 2nd place tho, please Blizzard never bring it back.
BG participation dropped by a huge margin over the course of legion and now with BfA it is continuing to drop, on the EU servers we are already at the point where the only people who take them seriously are the ones farming their honor ranks for cosmetics/mounts, mostly in premade grps.
there has to be incentive to BG’s other than cosmetics a.i. gear but when that gear doesn’t matter it loses all its meaning and you might as well delete the vendors from the game again.
BG’s and casual PvP in general were completely fine with the old system of Honor / Conquest gear to purchase at a vendor and it didn’t need changing.
Terrible because I couldn’t play my character how I wanted and this is an RPG. So there wasn’t any reason to play Legion. If you can’t customize no point in logging in.
I really liked templates because it meant that I could PvP on a multitude of alts without grinding my rear off to gear up. If you wanted to be effective you still had to gear up a little, but a fresh 120 wasn’t absolutely useless which made it much more reasonable to grind gear through BGs.
Templates as they were in Legion likely aren’t coming back though, which leaves us with an ilvl gap wider and deeper than the Grand Canyon and no reasonably quick way to try to close it. You’re stuck rolling dice in solo stuff for weeks or dragging yourself through the slog that is the M+ system, which is also RNG so have fun with all the weeks that your chest is scrapper fodder. All the non-raiding deterministic loot sources drop ilvls that are basically trash in BGs, so that’s not an option either.
If templates can’t exist, there should at least be a more reasonable way to gear characters such that you’re not just food for the insanely geared. I’m not asking to be on equal footing, just not to be two-shot.
It doesn’t take weeks to gear. I suppose it depends how long you play. I got a Druid alt to 444 ilvl 78 neck and decent essences within a week, just a couple hours each night.
I’ve been working on a warrior and the neck has been easy, but essences are taking a bit. Would probably be faster if I tanked heroics for echoes. Other slots have varied, with character ilvl now sitting at ~420 after a week, but things are slowing down… will see how it goes from here.
Being able to two-shot someone (or in some cases one-shot someone) in wpvp is never the answer, which is what came with templates. I was very often dead before I even knew I was being attacked. Absolute worst thing they ever introduced into the game was templates. One fan of knives took me from 100% immediately down to 23%. And you want this back?
I almost leveled every class during Mists and had reasonable PvP gear with most of them in every season.
doing that through BG’s was incredibly fast and even the time where you had bad gear after you just hit lvl 90 was fun to me, I never felt some sort of grief after being killed by someone with higher ilvl gear and on the counter side it felt amazing beating those people ( yes it was possible ).
but I guess there are always people who stick their head in the sand instead of getting motivated to grind out that gear but I don’t think the game should be designed around them.
I sat out most of MoP but I recall not having issues with gearing for PvP in that xpac. In fact I think BfA has been the only xpac in which gearing has really bothered me. I don’t mind grinding out gear if the grind is something I can reliably make progress on, and the PvP gear system in BfA does not match that description.
I wouldn’t mind gearing if I could get gear from the content I play. After I level to max I don’t PvE anymore, I spend an hour or two each night running random BG’s for fun. I don’t have extra time to grind out gear in dungeons and stuff that i do not enjoy, especially on alt after alt after alt. Now if I could get a currency or something while just playing my BG’s so after a few weeks of just playing BG’s I could gear a toon up that would be great.
As long as stat customization and gearing through pvp (and pvp gear being bis for pvp) comes in SL I’m all for templates on the randoms side. Maybe more so on scaling up so that fresh capped toons can jump into a bg.
Stat templates sucked for me because I got none of the stats I needed, while other classes were getting exactly what they needed and were gods in pvp throughout the expansion.
I don’t think somebody in cata gear deserves to be boosted up to where people who made half an effort are. I think there should be a minimum ilvl for queueing and probably 2 brackets.
@OP, I think you have a good point. The only people who defend a large gear disparity in casual BGs are the ones who are afraid. Because they prefer a style of play where their gear does most of the work. Note I am not talking about high tier arena players (the actually skilled) but about the kinds of players who want their twinks to play against levelers.
The problem for people who were getting a free gift of perfect stat templates in instanced pvp was that they weren’t also getting that big advantage over their opponents in wpvp. Those are the people who were demanding that stat templates be applied to all.
Like, for instance, your class had a great time in bgs. My spec was supposed to stack versatility and got 0 from the templates, thus was trash for the expansion. So you got to have fun at my expense.
You mean the people who are getting a free ride in pvp on their mythic gear?
There are no twinks. But there are definitely mythic raiders who do bgs to farm fresh 120’s.
The whole system was glitched. Players hit like raid bosses in wpvp. They tried to fix it at the end and made everyone do something like 30% less damage in wpvp which still didn’t fix the issue.
Doing dailies will be an absolute nightmare if they bring this back.
They have proven that they cannot competently design the system.
People are getting hung up on the inflexible stat allocations portion of templates or the fact that it inadvertently broke WPvP.
Feel free to correct me if I’m misrepresenting your suggestion OP, but I’m pretty sure he’s just asking for tighter scaling- which is something I’d like as well. It seems to me that most people who support the return of templates on this forum just want to be on an even field and to enjoy their alts in PvP. The term ‘template’ is often conflated with scaling.