UPDATED!SL honor gear ilvl upgrades timegated

UPDATE!: the renown 7 timegate (week ~3) will unlock upgrades up to LFR ilvl (190), and the renown 22 timegate (week ~8) will unlock upgrades to ilvl 197 (3 ilvls below normal raid). Despite the Renown schedule going to week ~14 (renown 40), there are no more upgrades listed, meaning at the moment the ceiling for BG gearing will be hardcapped at 197 ilvl (nearly normal raid), a downgrade from BFA where after 13 weeks we had access to Heroic ivl gear through the 500 conquest weekly quest. Even conquest gear bought through BG-earned conquest, and rewarded through the “Great Vault”, is upgrade capped at 200 ilvl on the beta, unless you have arena rating.

Other info:
Honor gear will be upgrade capped at 171 ilvl until you reach “Renown Level 7” with your coventant faction. That’s heroic dungeon ilvl.
.Renown is apparently capped at 3 levels per week.

I cut the rest of the post but leave the links for reference.
Also this post is current as of info added in the 33rd post. anything before that might be outdated, so dont get confused by it.

Source on 171 ilvl upgrade cap:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/confirming-renown-locked-pvp-upgrades-in-sl/701216

Source on there being a second upgrade unlock at renown 22:

Renown 22 : Kyrian Campaign Chapter Opens: The Bell Tolls
Unrated PvP Item Level - Maximum item level increased
Renown 23 : Kyrian Mount - Phalynx of Purity, available for purchase from Renown Quartermaster

https://www.wowhead.com/guides/kyrian-covenant-renown-rewards-shadowlands

16 Likes

I remember when BGs were the best way to start gearing up for PVP.

Those were good days.

41 Likes

Big yikes. I wouldn’t like time gating conquest gear but I could at least acknowledge the argument. But time gating honor gear is beyond the pale.

Unless I’m hitting this renown level by the time I am 60, this is insane.

7 Likes

Honestly this will likely change. The only thing they need to really time-gate will be Conquest gear since it’s higher item level to start and they don’t want Raiders getting PvP gear as BiS to then Raid with. So they will Renown cap Conquest instead of Honor.

3 Likes

Then they should only be timegating the first few tiers of conquest gear and should make honor gear actually worth the time it would take to get and upgrade them. Right now it makes absolutely zero sense to get all the honor gear because of the amount of time and effort it would take compared to how little effort/time it takes to get gear that is better than the fully upgraded honor gear. I mean, how on earth does it make sense that you can go run some HEROIC dungeons and get the same ilvl, or run a freakin mythic0 and get BETTER gear than fully upgraded honor gear that takes 50x the amount of investment to get?

I personally dont think they need to timegate even the conquest gear in the first place though since it will already take a considerable amount of time and effort to get and upgrade that gear anyway, and PvErs can just do m+ to get as good or better gear to prepare for heroic/mythic raiding. For one, as soon as Mythic raiding is released, every single piece of PvP gear even the fully upgraded conquest gear, becomes a significant downgrade to them. And even before mythic is released, as soon as normal+heroic are released, PvP gear is useless to PVErs as well(that is, if they actually spent the significant amount of time and effort to fully upgrade the PvP gear to LFR equivalent ilvl). So I dont get the logic of not wanting PvErs to use PvP gear when theyll be able to get as good or better gear pretty damn quickly, I mean I dont even think its worth it or possible for them to have a full set of fully upgraded PvP gear before normal/heroic are released(at which point even the fully upgraded, highest possible piece of PvP gear becomes inferior and waste of time).

6 Likes

I’ve seen others say you get 3 renown levels per week. If so then rank 7 would only be 2 resets. The item level of the gear and cost of upgrade should be the complaint over this imo. The honor grind to even upgrade your gear that many times will likely take you much longer than 2 resets.

5 Likes

Unless they change/buff it before launch, the bg/honor gear will be irrelevant past those first 2 weeks of the expac anyway. Doesn’t it “max out” at M0 quality? Yeah…

By week 3 you will be much better geared just from PvE sources.

3 Likes

It’s not hard it’s not rocket science.

1.The best gear for PvP should be PvP gear.
2.The best gear for PvE should be PvE gear.

I think until we have a GM that will stand up for PvP and tell Ion listen this is not gonna work for PvP. Until this happens PVE players we’ll continue to be the Big Brother that slaps a little brother around all day long.

29 Likes

At this point I just hope that it’s just unfinished shenanigans, and they are planning to address PvP stuff in the last weeks before release. Seems like they’re done with the PvE systems mostly from their announcement message.

PvP stuff just seems unfinished, so it’s pointless to discuss at this point.

The last official PvP statement was about introducing the 20% trinket bonus. Any undocumented changes since then could be bugs for all we know.

3 Likes

Supposedly the current honor gear was initially going to be 100 iLvL, but at the last minute it got nerfed to iLvL 68?

Not sure what their reasoning behind that change was, since even 100 iLvL gear is meh at this late stage of the expansion.

I severely doubt theyve even so much as glanced at PvP yet. Conduits and Covenants seem like they still arent even close to being 100% fixed, or finished, or balanced yet and thats whats been these moron’s MAIN focus the entire beta. They just started to nerf all the covenants/conduits to the point where they barely have an impact because theyre too incompetent to have them actually be fun and impactful, and balance them at the same time. And that means classes/specs cant possibly be balanced, fixed, and ready for PvE either, since conduits/covenants play a role in that.

Which means I have absolutely zero doubts PvP is going to be a broken, unbalanced mess at launch and who knows when it will get fixed. Its clear this extra time is being used solely to make sure that things are MOSTLY solid and functioning well from a PvE aspect, and im guessing theyll make some small PvP adjustments in the 11th hour to make it seem like they didnt COMPLETELY ignore PvP, just mostly. After all, they couldnt possibly even begin to tune/balance classes/abilities for PvP when any data they have is corrupted by everyone using obscenely broken PvE trinkets on the Beta. Even if they disabled PvE trinkets right now, and spent most of their time focusing on balancing just PvP I still severely doubt theyd have PvP in a good spot in 3 weeks.

6 Likes

It might be that the vendor will be upgraded once the scourge event starts. That would be cool.

Why do people (not you Jd) only complain and not give actual feedbck.

3 Likes

It’s the cool thing to do.

https://media.giphy.com/media/Vgm2T5cnlV5dWpG40E/giphy.gif

2 Likes

It’s basically the bedrock foundation of this forum.

2 Likes

I know :sob:

2 Likes

Bingo… My realistic expectations are that PvP will get looked at next year “IF” they hire someone to do that since they are understaffed and this expansion isn’t ready.

People are asking for PvP fixes and scream why isn’t Blizzard listening. The question you should be asking is who is there to listen or work on PvP changes… The answer is NO ONE. This might not be what players want to hear but often the truth is difficult.

In WoWheads article on the latest quarterly report from Blizzard it is stated that “Blizzard Entertainment is reported to have the largest team ever working on ensuring Shadowlands meets player expectations”. In that case they certainly wouldn’t be understaffed.

The answer is all of the people who are working there.

That just isn’t true. Is that why there are videos on the mass exodus of Blizzard? Is that why they closed down their EU head quarters? If true then a lot of the top talent at Blizzard didn’t leave and join other companies and Mike Morhaime at Dreamhaven to rebuild his version of Blizzard again?

Not to mention they downsized and cut nearly 800 jobs at Blizzard before this. They are understaffed and overworked!! It has been reported for many months that people are wearing many hats at Blizzard as they try to get through these difficult times.

So I am going to need details on who they hired to replace all the people that left since there are NO OFFICIAL reports on that. On the other hand there are plenty of reports on everyone that left.

There are so many videos out and how the remaining staff is trying to peace it together so I’d suggest to start reading and watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqaMHeyUhl0&t

Who!!! Seriously what is their name? Who are these people you think magically have time to look at PvP? You are assuming they have staff but who are they? I like to deal with specifics not assumptions.

They are understaffed and Lore who was a part of the PvP community is way overworked wearing to many hats trying to help where he can which is why we hardly hear from him anymore.

Plenty of articles on job cuts but none on rehiring so did this staff magically appear? Where is the NEW funding to hire people at Blizzard? It didn’t happen. Below just a quick google search by the way.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-03-08-blizzard-cuts-more-than-200-us-jobs-as-part-of-activision-restructure

https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/12/18222096/blizzard-layoffs-february-2019

An unofficial random claim on WoW head that this is Blizzards largest team working on SL doesn’t have any actual evidence to support that. Don’t think you been following Blizzard news. Maybe follow Bellular and Preach and spend some time reading up on the company you follow.

1 Like

I’m glad I still haven’t bought Shadowlands. I’m sad tho, because I genuinely need to be able to relax, and WoW PvP used to be great for that.

It feels like Blizzard is breaking an unwritten contract: we pay them money so that we can spend time chilling out and having fun. But all these weird restrictions break that for lots of PvPers.

  • PvP Power and Defense from MoP.
  • PvP iLvl scaling and floor from WoD.
  • 4pc, glove, and WoD trinket set bonuses to keep PvE gear out of PvP.
  • All from vendors, so that all PvPers can compete on equal footing without having to PvE.
12 Likes