Will the game ever become friendly to non-rated PvPers again?

Community General Discussion
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I was reluctant to return to the game for this reason but I figured I’d give it a shot to see how it goes. At the moment though I’m strongly just considering keeping my Warlock in Chromie Time because Shadowlands looks like an oppressive mess to a player like me.

As a player, I’m just not someone with a very competitive mindset. I’m also not that great at the game. Never at any point had many friends to play with. I’ve done heroic raiding when I could find a good guild, but otherwise I’ve largely just stuck with LFR, queued dungeons, and random battlegrounds. Random battlegrounds especially are probably the one thing I’ve consistently enjoyed throughout most expansions. They were always there to just queue up at any time of the day. No one could stand at the gate and say that no I’m not allowed to play with them. I could always go in, try to rack up some HKs, try to go for one of the various achievements or two. I enjoyed them, partially because even someone like me could get at least decent survivable gear from them.

But now, it seems like I’m basically paying 15 dollars a month to serve as a punching bag, and that doesn’t sound fun to me at all. Someone like me who doesn’t have the connections or confidence to join the higher level content is only allowed the most pathetic of gear. I’d just get stomped over and over again in those same random BGs where arena champions are running amok. What reason is there to pay monthly just to endure that? Been trying to find an answer to that question for a while now.

I have numerous suggestions to fix that issue; capped ilvls in random BGs, ilvl brackets for random BGs (and yes I’d wait 5 minutes more in a queue if it meant a good game), a return to the older way of gearing where I could eventually get close to an arena champion over time, a return of resilience, etc etc.

Of all those, the ilvl cap would work best I think. After all, you don’t queue for LFR and expect to fight a mythic boss. It should work the same for PvP.

I hope Blizz considers a change.

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If I had to guess, much, much more of the playerbase is like you - albeit not necessarily for precisely the same reasons - than these forums would have you believe.

I always thought it was unfortunate the way rated BGs were implemented. It had so much potential; and I will always insist that random BGs are the true inheritors of what battlegrounds were from vanilla WoW. Sadly, Blizz chose to view them as the training wheel LFR-esque version of PvP, and fell back on the facile argument of “there’s no way to quantify performance in a random setting”, or something like this, and dumped all of the attention in to rated BGs.

It would be nice if they tossed some kind of bone to the randoms, but it doesn’t fit the leitmotif Blizz’s developers have maintained the past few expansions.

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It’s really, really easy to fix the gearing and they’re too stubborn and prideful to do it.

Honor set, buy with honor.

Conquest set buy with conquest, maybe give a small amount 5-10 on a loss to encourage people to stay in the queue even on a loss streak.

That’s the bare minimum to fix pvp gearing, they can also do ilvl scaling if they want.

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They could have a system which rewards getting certain landmarks each week. So if you maintained getting maybe 3000 honor a week you’d upgrade the rating you can upgrade after maybe 3 weeks.

These numbers are just out of the blue, they can adjust as they see fit.

Atleast in BfA you could upgrade your PvP chest reward to heroic just for hitting conquest cap (could be easily done just through assaults/battle supplies drop and Battle for Nazjatar). Yes it would take 10 weeks but it would get there and could be done

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I have kinda lost my WoW pvp appetite over the years. I mean why bother grinding here when there are so many other pvp games that don’t ask you to grind and generally have you on relatively equal footing with your enemies?(like say Overwatch)

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Do it - because it is

PS I wish I had

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Not until they remove the mandatory do rated pvp even if you hate it just to be able to participate in random bgs without being 20k hp behind everyone else

9.1.5 is not changing anything at all for random bgers

Best bet is to wait if they trash their crap 9 tiers of conquest in 9.2 but highly doubt they will until 10.0

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Seems like an ilevel cap in randoms would do.

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Or just make it 1 honor and 1 conquest set like it was forever until bfa lol

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If I had to guess the low player count has more to do with you being in randoms with high rated people. Everything is likely pancaked right now because otherwise it’d take hours to find people.

Sadly the only people playing right now are highly ranked and the utter trash at the bottom. Everyone else bailed for TBC or bust. Shadowlands was THAT bad.

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They had the scaling. Not sure if that exists still. The best way for your wish to come true is if they re-implement the templates they had in Legion. Maybe with a vendor or something to choose the stats you get with the template.

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Honestly Shadowlands is the only expansion I have ever hated because of their PvP gearing system. I had fun in all other expansions that allowed someone like me to have gear, or put the game on an even footing somehow, even BfA. I never felt like a second-class citizen until now.

I was one of the few that liked templates and was sad to see them gone. I could try a number of classes in PvP and not feel like I’d have to take punches for months just to find out that I actually didn’t like the class.

It was a good system that just needed tweaks (like choosing your stats as you mention), not be scrapped entirely.

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I enjoyed being able to play alts in bgs with the templates too.

I’d like to see it implemented for just random group finder pvp, and let the ranked play continue as normal. Then casuals or people on alts could actually paticipate instead of being deleted.

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After reading your post, I’m gonna hit ya’ with some truth here.

Blizzard isn’t making the game for players like yourself anymore. They’re doubling down in the opposite direction, and have absolutely no plans of changing course.

You’re better off moving to a different MMORPG. It sucks but that’s just the best option I see for you. Blizzard doesn’t care and won’t even think of changing things until the playerbase is so low that they have no other option but to change things.

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For sure. Never knew a WW monk could be as fun as it was. But today there’s no way I’m leveling that knowing what awaits.

But yup I totally agree. Let the ranked folks have their brutal no-holds-barred fun, and let us have what should be the LFR of PvP.

I thought about this constantly in the months I was away. Feel like FFXIV would be better for a player like me. But the Warcraft universe has been a part of my life for decades, and it’s honestly tough to give that up. Especially whenever I pass by my living room and see the bookshelf that’s almost half Warcraft books.

I’m going to hold out hope that with the sweeping changes going on at Blizzard and with the game, that things will become better, but I know at this point it might be a fools hope.

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Wait for lost ark and give that a try in early 2022. Free to play pvp with gear equality

You might really like it

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I totally agree. They’re doubling down in 9.1.5 by adding more ranks to conquest gear, as though the problem with PvP participation has been that that the ilvl gap between the top and the bottom wasn’t great enough, as though the people on the bottom would become inspired to take up rated PvP and become glads if only their experience was horrible enough.

9.2 even more ranks of conquest gear?

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That’s depressing.

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Some of the game designers are brilliant. They’re fantastic at what they’re good at. But they’re not equally good at other things.

They think they understand how and why people play videogames but they don’t.

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Just seems to me, with what little I know (and trust me, it’s very little), they should just detune the impact of gear in PvP. Basically, if you’re sporting high iLevel gear, then you’ll probably put out 10%-20% more DPS than someone who’s not. That the actual impact of the gear is minimized.

This lets the “skill” folks still have an impact, it puts folks on a more even keel in terms of performance potential, and still gives rewards and upgrades.

And they can just do this in instanced PvP, not world PvP. World PvP, you can rock their socks off and camps all the live long day.

1 Like