State of the ladder: S2 participation is around a third of what it was in Season 1

PVP Arenas
41

No its not taht grinds are bad, its that blizzard has implemented a hard stop per week on the grind, meaning that you CANT grind through it, you are at the mercy of time.

The thing is, we never had these issues when the game had limitless grinds, when you could just get all your honor gear and or conquest gear in a single sitting if you really really wanted to. Because then the answer to “Im getting stomped by these over geared players” was always, well just keep grinding and eventually you will get outta it.
The saying “The quickest way out of hell is to go straight through it.” But now, we cant do that, we are stuck getting what blizzard allows per week.

As much as the grinds sucks, it was a lesser evil to waht we have now.

1 Like
42

You were never able to fully farm conquest gear in one sitting. Ever. Until the middle/end of a season when the catch-up allowed you to cap more.

Honor gear? Yes. But those two grinds aren’t what the main issue of the game is.

Renown
Torghast
Legendarys
Covenant campaign
Anima

Before that it was -

Azerite power
Azerite traits
And then corruptions & visions.

And before that -

Artifact power (which was the worst thing to happen to the game until LS4/5 when they implemented a catch up)
Artifact traits

And finally, before that? Nothing. No borrowed power. No countless grind to force you into playing. You were able to log into any brand new character and still be competitive. You didn’t have to farm on multiple characters endlessly. I remember being 2200 in 2s in blue/green enhance gear and playing resto. Skill was also significantly more important then.

The game is on a downhill slope and I don’t see it getting better any soon. My 2 months ends soon, and I already haven’t logged in since the second Tuesday of s2.

4 Likes
43

Yeah, what you listed are all things that are time gated.

Like i said all this would not be a problem if they just let us grind out all the gear with no time limit.

44

Honestly wouldn’t help me one bit. I would not be anymore incentived to play because I would still have to do it.

Tbc-wod. Log in, PvP, PvP some more. Log on an alt and rinse and repeat. Problem solved

5 Likes
45

Im talking in regards to gear discrepancies.

46

It still wouldn’t inspire me to play. It’s as much the length of the grind as the gating of it. Honestly it’s more the length of it for me. I legit played way more characters way longer tbc-wod for a reason. I didn’t start unsubbing for periods until legion when they started pushing this whole multiple forms of content on people.

I want to log in and PvP. That’s it.

2 Likes
47

I mean, both TBC and Wrath had exteamly long gear grind for honor so, you listed 2 exp that had those grinds you said you hate :stuck_out_tongue:

48

Eh but it was still less than now (fully upgraded honor gear is no small feat) and for much much better gear? All while conquest gear took 8-10 wins to cap for the week. I assure you it does not compare to now.

49

Thats my point though, is that we at least had a way to get it, we were not limited by the weekly cap.

Imagine if we could just keep grinidng out our conquest or honor gear to fully upgrade honor gear? Imagine if youcould grind out all the conquest gear with out a hard limit. we would not have this gear discrpency issue we are currently suffering from. since you would be able to make progress on your character contantly.

Vs what we currently have where, you have people in full rival or duelist gear, getting the same number of conquest items that new people are getting but are able to WAY out pace them becuase of their gear being just way better overall, thus putting them in the 1800+ breaket meaning all that conquest gear FUTERH puts them ahead. it just compounds the issues further in the system we have it.

50

WoD and MoP were the ideal pvp gearing systems, not tbc or wrath

they both had quick honor sets that put you within 1-2 difficulties of the BIS conquest set - and then everyone could get the BIS conquest set with just 10 wins per weeks and accelerators as the season progressed

yes that is BIS gear, not mediocre or worthless gear

it provided a fair playing field and rated and regular pvp was never more popular

super easy to make alts to deal with the blizzard balancing swings or just for variety

now there are absolutely redonk pve grinds to compete in pvp, plus powah4rating that guarantees more skill to also have better gear which makes the mid to late season even worse

the ONLY thing bliz seems to care about on pvp gearing, is that gear ownership power levels in pvp somewhat match similar percentages in raiding

there is no longer the slightest effort by bliz to create eventual fairplay for all players

the only fairplay you can achieve these days, on a casual basis, is below max level pvp (sub 60 bg in certain brackets)

this isn’t an issue for the top of the ladder, as anyone in the top half is already getting competitive pvp gear and is getting some fairplay to a degree. This is also why so many high rated players are so out of touch even discussing the gearing. They just aren’t affected and are loud on forums despite being a small minority of the pvp playerbase.

it would be difficult to design a system to more effectively chase out the bottom half of the ladder, especially once the season is 2 months old

then you come back to the good ole bg’s, the mainstay of pvp with 10x the participation of rated, where absolutely colossal gear gaps demotivate participation - 30-50 ilvl gaps, an entire content patch of power or more with a daunting megagrind of 10s of hours to even get to the bottom of the gap

the game is just made for monetization targets and whales and nobody else anymore

7 Likes
51

And i agree if we could get wod back? super, the issue im saying is right now we are not at that, and the easiest way to get close to that right now, is to remove the time gated cap we are dealing with right now.

I 100% agree with what you are saying.

1 Like
52

I was in the military during this time, in a lot of training. I was able to have 4 fully geared conquest toons and quite a few with honor and conquest mix.

The grind was also just pvp and only pve I did was professions

1 Like
53

Yeah the grind was long but it was not impossible or horrible.

54

Didn’t feel all that long, but I was purely able to pvp and only did pve if I wanted

1 Like
55

Either way, imo it was really not that bad of a grind, i think it was longer then, vs honor now, but it really was not that big of a deal to grind it.

56

Idk I don’t feel the same, because there was a lot of honor with Wintergrasp every few hours and once you bought the piece you were done.

1 Like
57

I kinda miss that because, again due to pvp power it was pretty viable in pvp, but did not really matter much in pve it was good, but not really that good, IE welfare epics.

In a way i feel like vers is basically just pvp power at this point with a new name.

58

No thank you. I enjoy the gearing system we have currently. I like feeling rewarded for my rating with power. It’s what most MMORPG’s do.

Such as? Most of what you need can be done by simply playing the game normally.

If you want 100% fair gameplay gear-wise, I’d suggest not playing an MMORPG.

59

this is an MMO and it had fairplay for a ton of years

6 Likes
60

All of my friends quit because it’s anti-fun to play on retail. Hybrids run out to one shot, then run in circles healing until Glad. If your class can’t one shot, it’s miserable to play against the classes can.