I noticed really early on in the expansion that the stat level squish seemed to only have been done so that they could very, very quickly ramp in ilvl in the expansion to give this artificial sense of progression.
During the beta, people had like 16k hp and were hitting for a few thousand damage at most. Blizzard pulled a literal bait and switch on the entire playerbase. It’s been a wholly awful experience, and one that I quit several months ago after seeing the writing on the wall.
It’s really a shame, too. They had this great opportunity with SL to take the game in more of a direction that classic WOW was encouraging at the time - slow, meaningful progression that consisted of small, incremental improvements, meaning every piece felt like a huge relief, but no one piece felt like an absolute necessity.
SL took all of that and just crapped all over it. The gearing system for PvP has been an utter disaster, the ilvl discrepancy is not only significant, but so much so that people have literally just said, “nah, I’d rather not even play instead.” My shaman is around ilvl 215ish (I think?) and has 1/3rd of the hp of everyone else at this point. The total gap in TBC from s1 to s4 gear was a difference in 2-3k hp for most classes, or about 20-25% of their total health pools.
The power creep has infested every progressive style of game that Blizzard has put out (really just being d3 and WoW), and it just feels extremely lazily done in both. “Screw it, just give everyone an extra 20% damage each patch, that’ll keep players engaged!” seems to be the normal train of thought for developmental design, now. Instead of depth in gearing and giving meaningful options, players are just given massive sweeping ilvl increases. Instead of having to choose between another 1% hit versus 1% crit, players are just given an arbitrary 5% damage increase per item.
I genuinely would love to see WoW go back to classic/TBC style itemization (minus haste, since it was so game-breakingly overpowered compared to almost every other stat), where a warrior could look at a piece of gear like the Crown of Destruction, or classes would have to personally value extra stam or spell power over int or spirit depending on what they were doing. Those choices are gone, now. Spirit is a dead stat, stam, int, agi and str are all arbitrarily determined by ilvl and don’t change outside of rare occasions, and stuff like crit, haste and mastery has become so watered down that meta builds basically just have you chasing a specific combination with a higher ilvl than what you already have. It’s very, very shallow.
I’d love to see WoW PvP return to a gearing system like TBC, where the offset pieces are the exact same for people doing Arena or BG’s, and having a tier higher from doing Arena, but a tier that isn’t such a huge upgrade so that the BG gear is just flat out non-competitive. I knew people who got Glad with s2 gear in s4, after s4 gear became significantly buffed with the armor pen and marginally more inflated stats. It’s nice to feel like you’re being rewarded for your Arena prowess by having stronger gear, sure, but it’s basically the modern equivalent of a 60 going ganking in Redridge at this point.