Ok, back to discussing gear gaps and PvP.
To my eyes, PvP and PvE are vastly different game modes. You need completely different gear, completely different specs, completely different skill sets and mind sets to succeed in each. There is little to no crossover between raiding and battlegrounds/arenas, in terms of tactics and strategy. Basic skills like being aware of your surroundings translate nicely, but things like using Death Grip as an interrupt don’t translate nearly as well.
And that’s the way it should be. I support splitting PvE and PvP as far apart as possible, and keeping them as far apart as possible. If the developers need to go so far that they have to flat-out ban PvE gear in PvP and vice versa or have spells and various abilities do completely different things in each part of the game, so be it. They’re already leaning hard in this direction, why not just go all the way?
I support such a split, and I think the PvP/PvE divide in WoW needs to be much bigger than it currently is. Not should be, needs to be.
A perfect PvP game would have everyone on exactly the same level, with the only deciding factor being skill. I am more than mature enough to realize this isn’t possible within the confines of an MMO, and indeed shouldn’t be.
The major issue around gear is in its implementation. As it stands now, you are at a massive disadvantage if you don’t raid. It doesn’t matter if you just hit 80 or rock a 5s team at 2200 rating. No matter what category you fall into, you are automatically at a gear disadvantage to your raiding brethren.
This, to me, is wrong.
What I’d like to see is gearing up for PvP by actually doing PvP, and gearing up for PvE by actually doing PvE, with absolutely no crossover or compatibility between the two. We’ve been slowly moving in this direction for several years now, I think the process needs to be sped up.
If that means totally separate gear grinds? Fine by me. If that means you go from 264 epics in raid gear to 200 blues in PvP gear? Sounds perfectly fine to me. If you can’t use Shadowmourne in BGs? Sounds fair.
I don’t expect people to agree with that.
Cataclysm comes around…….. your in full wrathful arena gear for lvling to 85, cant do any 5mans though cause when you zone in your naked!
That’d just be silly.
~ Shunyata, Suramar.
I don’t see it that way. By allowing the gear to translate effectively from one area to another, there are all sorts of issues created.
Last expansion, it forced raiders to do PvP in order to get reasonable gear. This was unacceptable to many people, rightfully so. This expansion, hardcore PvPers are forced to raid seriously in order to get reasonable gear. This should be unacceptable to many people.
Obviously the gear doesn’t translate perfectly. Using PvP gear for raiding is an unattractive proposition, as PvP gear is, you know, designed for PvP. Resilience offers nothing for raiders, and all PvP gear lacks the offensive stats of their equal iLevel PvE brethren.
Likewise, PvE gear is unattractive for PvP, or rather is supposed to be.
The reality is far different.
PvP gear isn’t that great for PvE, to the point where, say, a 226 PvE epic can replace a 245 PvP epic. This part is a success.
However, PvE gear is still extremely attractive for PvPers of any caliber, mostly DPS classes. Consider the human mages that used dual Reign of the Dead (yes, the heroic and non-heroic versions stack). Consider the warriors who simply stacked PvE gear with armor pen on them.
I never said I was against gear grinds. I never said I wanted top end arena gear to be handed out like skittles at a parade.
What I advocate is creating a fairer environment. I want a world where gearing for PvP by doing PvP is a viable option, for every slot. I want a world where raiders don’t have an advantage over their fellow players by sheer merit that they raid.
Imagine it like this, if you will.
As a fresh 80, you come equipped with 200 blues in every single slot. You have a 2 minute PvP trinket with some resilience, a full set of resilience gear head to toe, and even a blue quality weapon with resilience. This is all gained by any method really, though my personal favorite are quests. There are a ton of “PvP” quests in Northrend, why don’t they award PvP gear?
Picture that polearm Onyxia drops. You know how you can click it to get a second polearm with completely different stats? Imagine if you could do the same to the blue quality gear you get from quests. Sure, the quest awards blue bracers designed to get you started on the road of PvE, but with a simple click it becomes a starter PvP piece instead.
Then, you have a series of quests you can do to score 213 PvP epics. Picture a quest like this:
- Take a flag in Arath Basin, then be victorious in that Arathi Basin. Awards Deadly Gladiator’s Thing of Something
A quest you can complete in ten to twenty minutes. Figuring in queue time, it’s very near to the same amount of time running a heroic would take to get the same level of reward. The quest not completing if you lose, then, would reflect wipes and bad PuGs, and even, to a lesser extent, RNG.
The whole time you’re doing that, you’re collecting honor that you can then spend on your 232 main pieces and 245/264 offpieces. This is what we currently have. It could take you hours to get a single piece, but if you’re willing to wait, simply doing WG and its quests can get you a lot of honor quite easily.
Once you’re kitted there, you move into the arenas. At low end arena ratings, you earn points, you pick up 251 main pieces and some 264 offpieces. You get some gear as early as 700 rating, then gear up and progress through the ranks. Once you start hovering around in roughly the 1400-1600 area, you can start getting the 264 main pieces and finish collecting the 264 offpieces.
This would be for every slot, however, not just some slots. It should be entirely possible to gear for PvP without having to do any PvE just to be on equal footing.
To recap, the gearing process would look something like this:
- 200 blues – ridiculously easy quests in Icecrown/Stormpeaks, etc.
- 213 epics – easy battleground quests, for example “capture a graveyard in AV!”
- 232 epics – large amounts of honor.
- 251 epics – low end arena.
- 264 epics – high end arena.
The last post on this subject garnered a lot of harsh criticism in addition to support.
The primary criticism was “it’s already easy enough to gear up! Suck it up princess.”
Let me be very, very clear here.
I am not suffering from poor gear, nor am I advocating that current PvP gear be any easier to obtain.
Before season 8 even started, I had two characters decked in furious and relentless gear. Both of these characters sported raid gear where PvP gear was not an option, both characters were wielding iLevel 251 weapons.
Accusing me of simply wanting easy epics is pointless, as I had either best in slot or second best in slot for nearly every piece of gear across two characters.
Now, of course, I can almost guarantee that I’m going to be accused of supporting welfare epics, despite my protestations to the contrary.
Arena season 8 has introduced a strange new paradigm for Blizzard, this expansion at least. Have you noticed how many items are locked behind arena rating? Nearly nothing is. Wrathful Gladiator main pieces are, as is the wrathful belt and boots.
But everything else is rating free, simply requiring honor and arena points to get. That’s it. Even relentless gladiator main pieces don’t come with an arena requirement attached, and there are finally Battlemaster trinkets available for honor.
It isn’t the system I’d like to see. Current gear should require some participation in high end PvP, putting at least some barriers on it. Then again, have you seen the honor prices for this so called welfare gear? I don’t think we’ve ever had to work so hard to get welfare gear.
Godspeed if you have more than one character to gear up.
I see the reasoning behind such a change, though. More gear available to more people means more people are going to be participating in PvP, and it levels the playing field pretty significantly. I concede that it’s a good move, but I still disagree with it.
Curiously, there are some gaping flaws in Blizzard’s new gearing ideas. Weapons below the level of the new Wrathful stuff are still missing, meaning players are going to have to run the new heroics as often as they can and pray for a Quel’Delar drop, or go raid.
There’s also the ever present problem that raiders can bring their stupid powerful raiding trinkets and weapons with them into arenas and battlegrounds. Faced an armor pen capped warrior with Bryntroll and Deathbringer’s Will yet? No? Well, just wait a few weeks, you’ll get to fight an armor pen capped warrior with the heroic version of both of those things soon enough.
Would it kill them to make smaller BG brackets? You wouldn’t take a level 71 toon into Halls of Stone but if you take him to AV you’ll get 1 shotted by just about any level 79.
So how about brackets like:
80
75-79
70-74
65-69
60-64
…and so on.
And then put quests in the BGs that you get stuff like PvP gear and exp.
As for separating gear completely, I don’t know. I’ve filled in a few weak PvE spots with some PvP gear in my day. The +hit trinket out of WG has been a popular one for some of my more chronic cases of being waaayyyyy below the hit cap.
Queue times are already pretty horrendous, decreasing the size of the brackets would only make things worse.
Of course, expanding the physical size of battlegroups would fix that (say, have only half the number of battlegroups, but they would be twice as big) or, better yet, simply eliminate the need for hit entirely from PvP.
No matter what level you are, all of your abilities have a 100% chance to hit any other player.
Being squished by high level players is all part of the fun, just without missing half your spells you’ll have a fighting chance.
Character Alice just dinged 80. Alice wants to PvP, but Alice needs PvP gear to PvP.
Character Nancy dinged 80 at the start of WotLK, and PvPed through all the seasons, “naturally” updating PvP gear. Nancy looks at Alice and says “Go away noob, and don’t return until you replace your crappy gear with current season gear, I’m not going to make a team with you until”. But Alice needs arena points and rating to buy current season gear!
Catch-22. PvP is extremely unfriendly to new players.
Especially so late into an expansion. The gear gap is so huge now as to be near insurmountable.
I just wish they would put a vendor into the game that sold previous season weapons for honor…honestly, it worked just fine in BC. I’m tired of being stuck with 232 weapons when people are running around with 251 crap…I don’t have time to raid because I’m CRAZY busy with more important things. So where does that leave me? Up shit creek.
I just don’t understand why weapons are the only think that one can’t get.
I’d even settle for 80k honor furious weapons. It’s something.
I find it so weird that if you are at the max level for a bracket, characters of the lowest level for the bracket cons grey to you. I think it would be tough to spread the PvP-population over even more brackets.
I’d like to see a system like the bolstering feature in Warhammer Online (WAR). When entering a battleground (called scenario in WAR) if you are below the middle level in the bracket, your base stats and spells/abilities are increased to match those of the middle level in the bracket.
Could this help even things out a bit, and people could feel useful in bgs at lower levels instead of just one-shoted?
Another way to get PvP gear, decent BoE PvP oriented gear that drops from enemy players killed in PvP?
Or award said gear at the end of a BG, letting players roll on them, similar to downing a boss but with more pieces.
Fury awarded gear to both the losing and winning teams for any fight, with the winning earning better and more loot, whereas the losers basically got a consolation prize.
We already somewhat have this with BG marks, so wouldn’t it conceivably be easy to award 213 epics in the same fashion?
Or simply allow players to purchase them with their BG marks?
WoW already has Tenacity for WG, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to have a similar effect for lowbies in various BGs.
Being overpowered by players with high-end pve weapons/trinkets = frustrating.
Also frustrating is the painful grind from full blues to a decent level of resilience and other pvp useful stats.
Your solution is very appealing to me.
The only problem with it is those people who just pvp for fun (like in bgs and low end arena) while pve-ing as a main activity. They will most likely have a lot of their pve gear to rely on. Not being able to use those will turn a lot of them off.
But besides that these are all common sense steps into turning wow-pvp into a better e-sport.
Sir,
I am massly underexperienced in PVP as I’ve never stuck with WoW long enough until recently, however I was wondering if you or any others could answer what changed in WoW history according to my observation. To me, PVP is replayability to the game, the reason for the PVE adventuring for glory and gear. I always thought, why have PVP gear when people can get PVE/Raid gear, and PVP was the point to show off skill, and gear. Instead the design is going the way you exclaim in, PVP and PVE are completely seperate.
However, I could be completely bias as for me and the Wife who tried raiding for the first time recently, we are bored and horrified by the experience. Leveling was fun, but then we just hit a brick wall. We got in a guild and did ICC 10man and it came off dry and lacking in something I can’t yet describe. Not to mention when I went to work one evening the wife was horrifed by guild behavior, and the apparent migration of harlets who have deemed it appropriate to talk about their sex lives 24/7 through vent. Friends have told me all Guilds are like this.
Not all guilds. But there seems to be a strong correlation between poor social behavior and progression speed.
Having any crossover between raiding and PvP only causes issues. I shouldn’t even need to make a case for this, you only have to look at previous years of WoW to see how harsh of an issue this has been every single expansion.
I’m a social beast, like quite a few humans. I treat raiding as a puzzle, but it isn’t a puzzle I want to solve with random strangers. I want to raid with friends, people I know, people I can joke with.
If you don’t really know anyone else in a guild, it’s probably never going to be fun unless beating the content in and of itself is the only thing that matters.
I highly doubt you’ll ever be able to get away from the sex talk though. People like sex, so of course they like to talk about it.
We need a WoW historian so I can pull these histories up.
Thanks for replying to the “newb” here, yeah, I can think of a few things that would make problems if all gear came from PVE and they brought it to PVP. It just seems awkward, but then again I was a big RPG guy, not MMORPG.
I know it’s not viable, but I would love to see a BG system that queues level 80′s in brackets based upon a PvP gearscore. There would really only need to be two brackets. Resilience and Stamina would count for a lot. Below a certain threshold, heavily weighted by the presence of PvP gear, you couldn’t move to the higher bracket.
Lower end PvP’ers would be up against similarly-geared players and the PvE stragglers. This would eliminate the PvE trespassers from the top end PvP content until they traded in those ICC rings and trinkets for gear appropriate for their environment. This would also allow casual PvP’ers to enjoy the content without getting roflstomped by the hardcores.
Also, by making the top end PvP gear available only to those who have moved up to the higher bracket, it would encourage newly-minted 80′s to gear up in a linear fashion. Start with your crafted ilvl 200 blues and upgrade to Furious gear as you accumulate Honor. Once you’re geared appropriately, you can move up to the next bracket and Relentless and Wrathful gear becomes available to you at the existing price structure.
Of course, Arena would be open to anyone. This is an area where skill can easily trump gear. Allow skilled players in the lower bracket to accumulate Arena Points and rating as they gear up. Then, when they graduate to the upper tier, that currency will be available to pick up their Wrathful gear as their rating allows.
It’s not a perfect system, but in my opinion, it’s better than what’s in place. It gives players motivation to gear up in a linear fashion rather than run around AV in blues for weeks, jumping straight from ilvl 200 gear to ilvl 264 gear. I dunno. What do you think?
First, we’d actually need crafted 200s that are meant for PvP. The current ones we have are crafted 187s that… well, you spend hundreds of gold on utter junk, basically.
There’d also need to be an “honor refund” mechanic put in place.
Your old PvP gear, say a 213 epic, you could go to an honor gear vendor and sell the epic to them for a large bundle of honor. You could then turn that honor around and purchase the next helm up.
Or, say the 213 helm cost you 30k honor to get. The next helm up the line costs 52k honor. Rather than grinding all 52k honor, you can “cash in” your old helm, giving you 30k honor credit towards the helm, so you’d only need 22k honor to get the upgrade.
Upgrading in a linear fashion right now is extremely hard to do due to the sheer amount of honor required to even attempt such a thing.
I’d especially like to see PvP weapons available without having to do the Arena. I would love to have a use for all those Battleground tokens too.
BGs are fun when:
Your team does not consist of at least 2 afkers, 1 bot and 1 green geared person.
The children and low IQ imbeciles resist the urge to congregate together, especially away from the objective (the road, mid, etc). I don’t blame them because they do get more honor.
People who do play by the objectives get rewarded rather than punished by boredom or less honor.
Pugs are not playing against premades. At least match premades against a group of people with better gear. If gear matching is possible in arena, it should be possible in BGs.
Make the BGs less of a leeching field and it would be so much more fun (win or loss). Make the BGs fair and competitive and less of a frustrating and repetitive grind.
I would like the legacy honor items, from the early brackets, act like heirloom items.
if you spend your honor on the gear in the 1x bracket, you throw it away, same all the way up.
Now what if that grew with you, to be iLevel 200 gear…
sure ppl that haven’t done the hard yards need to get the crafted stuff… but at least those that have enjoyed it on the way to 80, have something to show for it
Totally possible in an MMO. Guild Wars and to a lesser extent City of Heroes both come to mind. These are games with such a low cap on gear (or the equivalent) that pretty much any scrub can achieve the highest possible stats (if not the prettiest possible skins, and looking good in a battleground IS srs bsns!) The PvP part of these games becomes about skill choices, timing, communication. Not unlike an FPS.
But a lot of WoW PvPers would scoff at Guild Wars PvP because they ACTUALLY WANT their gear advantage. It’s not so much that they NEED it to dominate, but that they enjoy their extreme level of domination and don’t want to work to own at PvP, which they, of course, feel by rights they should already own by virtue of their PvE prowess. In other words, if most people actually wanted a fair fight, they wouldn’t be PvPing in WoW.
Funny you should say that. Pynsters (?) post reveals how people hate a gear advantage, unless it’s in their favour.
http://fieryweapons.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/dont-duel-twinks-really/
shame there was a twink lurking under the whites.
I think an easy fix is to let 80′s purchase decent gear (not great) with Battleground marks. Most people, if they are levelling a character they intend to PvP on, will play battlegrounds on the way up and have a stockpile at 80. Let them buy some useful 80 starting gear with it.
I disagree with your honor grind comments. Going by even relatively conservative estimates for most BG’s (non-holiday), you’re pulling in ~80 honor / minute, marks included . That means that one of the 50k honor pieces will take you about 10.5 hours of straight BG PvP to acquire.
Given that Wintergrasp is worth ~12k honor per week plus whatever you gain from participating, including marks, you can walk away with three relentless equivalent pieces from WG marks pretty quickly. The honor helps buy the rest of the pieces. Leaving you to grind only 18k for a set of gloves, then start on the larger pieces.
I would say you could count on attaining a piece of gear every 5-8 hours of PvP time (provided you aren’t playing 40+hrs/week straight pvp). Faster if you take advantage of more WGs and the holiday bonuses. Which is similar to the PvE grind present in the game right now.
Secondly, I agree with your assessment that spells should have a PvE and a PvP effect. I said as much in a blog post on my site last August (http://hordeofone.phreakre.com/blog/view/3). However, I disagree that the gear should be disallowed in both areas. The running trend is not that PvE gear destroys PvP gear in high end arena. The trend is that resilience is not useful enough as a stat to lure the high damage/healing throughput classes away from their awesome +ArP/+spelldmg stacking items. If resilience combo’d as both a +%dmg/healing dealt and -%dmg received stat (against players only), this would go a long way in making PvP gear more effective in PvP.
THe source on the ~80 honor/minute estimate was: http://forceinbalance.blogspot.com/2010/02/hpm-chart-non-holiday.html. The invisible tags ate the link.
All you PvPers forget about one thing. World PvP. So you want the total separation of PvP and PvE? It can’t happen, even though as a PvEr who was lucky to find a really friendly, “normal” (or maybe, abnormal, in a good sense) raiding guild with no weird undertones as mentioned above, I would support such move – IF AND ONLY IF your PvP gear would also be banned from being used in world PvP.
Even now the separation or gap that is there is acting to the disadvantage of PvErs, who have the misfortune to come across a bored/frustrated PvPer when they are flagged (forcibly in some places even on non-pvp realms). A purely PvE-equipped player with limited experience in PvP has little to no chance of defending him- or herself from even a moderately competent PvPer, and frankly speaking, I don’t understand why some of us are being put at a disadvantage. I’d rather see a total removal of any PvP gear and remaking of BG tokens/honor into an alternative (to raiding) way of getting exactly same gear we raiders collect from drops. Then, when we’re all on equal footing, let’s see who has more skill. Now, as it is, PvP is lost cause for me – it’s very hard to get into (also because of the catch-22 with gear described in comments), and it effectively is becoming too much of a game within a game.
Somehow, PvP became a ghetto. Similiarly to raiding. The endless QQing of PvPers got them their “better suited to needs” gear, at the same time excluding them from the game the PvErs are playing, and vice versa. Any crossover is increasingly hard to make… and since playstyle, skills and gear are getting so different, it’s quicklt becoming impossible to make any comparisons. I don’t really think this is good for the game. The death of world PvP and closures of underpopulated PvP realms were just a first warning. Can it be fixed? Probably, but not without major QQing… because to get the two sides together again you have to remove what divides them, and that is everyones’ beloved gear.