Thanks for this thread; in general it makes sense. I have one question and two comments.
Question: How exactly will Conquest progression be affected?
My question is, what happens to the regular progression of Conquest gear? Disfavored specs and new 120s cannot effectively compete in rated PVP, so for 8.0, Conquest’s Rewards gear was the only reasonable PVP gearing path, at least until the end of the patch when it started getting eclipsed by Warfront gear. It was nice to have this PVP gearing path in 8.0.
For 8.1, though, reports from the test server say that new characters start with the first 8.0 step, meaning that they will have to grind through full sets of 355 and 370 gear before getting to 8.1 relevant 385/400/415 gear. That’s a time prohibitive process, so some sort of acceleration is needed for the system to remain relevant for 8.1.
This is of particular concern to our guild because half of us are relatively new players who got characters to 120 only around when patch 8.1 was released; it would be good if the game could retain these new players by allowing them to feel like they can catch up rather than be forever hopelessly behind. Similar concerns also apply to alts of existing players to keep them interested.
Ideally, there would be a reduction in the amount of Conquest required for noncurrent gear. I’d suggest full Conquest cost for the most recent 9 pieces to be released, half the cost for the previous 9 pieces, a quarter the cost for the 9 pieces before that, etc. Thus, a new character could always get to the current piece by earning double the Conquest cost of the most recent set. This would be somewhat along the lines of how Azerite neck levels work, getting cheaper as they go out of date.
Alternatively, you could just let people go directly to the 385 set when season 2 starts, similar to how season 1 started with 355 pieces. This might feel a little unfair to the people who worked through season 1 to stay capped on Conquest, but it might be simpler to implement, and it would still be better than freezing new players and characters out of the Conquest system by requiring an excessive grind starting with 355s.
While we’re talking about the Conquest system, I’d suggest that the minimum ilvl for the weekly PVP cache be the same as whatever ilvl item was offered to the character for the Conquest’s Reward quest for that week, so that the cache doesn’t become obsolete after the first couple months of the season.
Comment 1: Warfront gearing is too good
For most of 8.0, players who did moderately challenging content - enough battlegrounds to cap Conquest, or Normal>Heroic raiding and maybe dabbling in Mythic without getting to 8/8 Mythic - were rewarded with a better overall gearing level than players who only did the “guaranteed win” content like Warfronts and Raid Finder. However, Warfront gear at Heroic raiding quality accumulated fast enough that, some time after the mid way point of the patch, the moderately challenging content of sub-2400 PVP and Heroic raiding no longer provided upgrades relative to accumulated Warfront gear. For a lot of people I know, the game started feeling kind of pointless at that point, which is a risk for subscription cancellation.
I’d suggest that the Darkshore Warfront progress more slowly in 8.1 than Arathi did in 8.0. I think it would be better if you limited the Darkshore Warfront gear to 385 until a couple months into the patch, before allowing it to increase to 400.
An alternative would be to improve the gearing path for moderately challenging content, especially toward the end of the patch when people start accumulating full sets of Warfront gear. For PVP gear, raising the minimum ilvl of PVP cache gear to match the character’s current Conquest’s Rewards ilvl, as suggested above, would probably do this, since that would provide a chance of getting upgrades in the form of forged or socketed items or for slots like trinkets and rings that might not be in the main progression. Perhaps there’s something similar you could do for heroic raiders to help fill their hard to fill slots at the end of the patch.
Comment 2: Mythic 10 gear is too easy to get
Mythic 10 gear, especially when you take into account the many opportunities to get warforged and titanforged gear, is equivalent to mythic raiding and max rated PVP gear. However, it appears to be much easier to get. I’ve noticed that in random battlegrounds, a substantial percentage of the characters - probably around 20% - are essentially fully equipped with 385 gear, and have been for a couple of months. Without exception, all of the characters I’ve inspected in this range are geared primarily from Mythic 10, not from Mythic raiding or 2400+ PVP.
With the top Mythic+ teams doing Mythic +22 or +23, it’s pretty clear that Mythic +10 is not at the same level of difficulty as mythic raiding or 2400+ PVP. I’d suggest that you either need to have a larger increment of difficulty with each mythic+ level, such that the best teams only get to +15 instead of +22 by the end of the season, or you need to make the progression in gear slower, such that +15 dungeons are required for max level gear instead of +10. Very few people get max level gear from raiding or PVP in the first few weeks of a patch; similarly few people should be getting max level gear from mythic+ at the same time.
Again, thanks for keeping us informed, and I hope you’ll address these issues, especially regarding the Conquest sequence.
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
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