TL;DR: Azerite Essences have a huge timegate that discourages returning players from even trying PvP. Please consider setting all Azerite Essences to max rank in PvP.
With Shadowlands on the horizon, I’ve had a hankering to play some retail WoW. I’ve put a bit of time into getting my cloak ranks and powering through some M+ keys to try to catch up to everyone else. Still, even after dumping every night for a week into retail, I’m still upwards of a month away from not being hindered by gear in arena.
I understand a big part of an MMO is character building. However, I think the spirit of competition is just as important. Due to having such a steep curve for gear/cloak ranks/azerite powers, I would wager you are excluding a majority of the more casual/returning players from PvP altogether.
It has certainly discouraged me from even trying to come back to BfA. Nearly every person I’ve asked for tips on how to get back into the game has told me its better to just wait for Shadowlands as it’ll be far too much effort and time for little reward to do it now. I feel like this is a big problem with a simple fix.
P.S.: I would consider myself a pretty dedicated World of Warcraft player, having played in every expansion rather seriously. Yet, even for me, trying to understand the process of gearing up in BfA was DIZZYING.
It’s a little wild to be honest. The problem right now for PvP is that you absolutely NEED to PvE. And PvE A LOT. Before you can even step into competitive arenas, RBGs and such.
If you are dedicated, you certainly can be above average decent, and acquire good gear, cap cloak and get most essences to R3 AND be competitive at low to mid levels.
However:
You definitely are going to need a group of people willing to help you.
Min Maxing to Superior stat/corruption stacking is going to be almost out of reach, due to how Corruption resistance, vendor rotation and corruption acquisition works.
You MOST likely will burn yourself out badly by the time SL is ready to launch which is something to consider in a risk vs reward situation.
Edit:
With all that being said… it still is a good time to return to wow. There is much more to do than just trying to catch up with gearing to do end-game. IMO it’s worth it for many other reasons, Visions being one of them. You don’t need the best gear in the game to complete that and get it’s rewards.
Like a tourney realm que where get whatever piece of gear you want / whatever external power sources. Where the only excuse you have is the class you play / skill.
Its not going to replace the old 3v3s but coexsist with it.
Yeah I’ve been trying to get back into mistweaver and I’m not even going to TRY to do anything in competitive PvP until SL solely due to corruption madness. Which is disappointing cause I love PvPing as a mistweaver.
This was their objective with character templates in Legion I think. It ended up restricting people’s ability to customize their character and restricted variety and innovation.
I think there is a happy medium where they smooth out the curve of gear but still allow for customization with a robust system such as what they have with azerite powers and corruption.
This patch is overwhelmingly agreed to be among if not THE worse patch for PvP ever to go live. It’s just bad.
MW has actually been one of the main reasons this season has been a disaster. They were obscenely broken on a 20 sec Cocoon CD that pretty much dominated the entire AWC. Nerf already happened but the damage was already done. They are still stupid strong though.
The thing about templates, was it was templates. It was fixed.
If they allowed you to choose any gear you wanted, i feel like that would allow even more opportunity to customize and innovate as you have access to so many different possible builds. You could try full vers gear or full haste gear etc without having to grind for 60 pieces of high ilvl gear.
Like people used to use tendies because it was all they had, a limiting factor is really what gear you have in your bags. But that would all go away.
Im not saying replaced the current 3v3 or 2v2 system, but rather just add in addition
I really like this idea. You would still be required to get the properly itemized gear and the corruptions that you’d want to play with, however, the strength of all the items would be toned down to whatever item level is appropriate for the season.
get crucible to rank4 (okay you only need rank 3 but 4 is still doable) its just quest chains.
que for mechagon workshop Get rank 1 vision of perfection. learn it cue for mechagon workshop get rank2 plans. go grind out the mats for it on mechagon if you havent already been doing it. learn rank 2. que up for Mechagon workshop. rinse and repeat until you get the 4 items. averages around 12 runs but could be less if lucky or more if unlucky
keep doing visions. that will get you rank 2 and rank3 eventually after a few runs.
I want to know why corruption is not disabled for PvP. It has to be one of the dumbest design decisions ever.
The PvP community needs a much better representative on the dev team, assuming we have one in the first place. What’s happened for PvP in BFA is just plain embarrassing from a design standpoint.
This better get fixed for SL, or there is a really good chance I won’t buy the expansion. I do casual PvP, but I do quite a bit of it, and if it’s not there to fall back on and enjoy, forget it.
I rreally loved the legion pvp. I enjoyed havin those sick artifact appariences, the fact tja templates existed were deligthful to me, while playing knowing that none will oneshoot me with a laser bean, and put me 34 gushing wounds.
BfA PvP is designed by mythic raiders for mythic raiders. If you aren’t, you are a designated loser who is playing because you don’t realize it’s all about funneling more free stuff to raiders and other PvE elites.
This would make more sense if Ion actually did PvP. I believe he’s honor level 5, which isn’t even anything. I get what you’re saying, and I agree to an extent, but PvP was simply forgotten in BFA, but it doesn’t make the design decisions any less pathetic.
He’s a mythic raider in a guild where the raiders needed easy access to PvP wins to rank up the PvP essences that are bis in PvE to rank 4. Do you think letting 120 raiders crush leveling battlegrounds with party sync is some sort of accident? No. They’re still getting rank 4 essences on their alts with easy honor for farming graveyards in leveling brackets.