I think I saw another thread around here about normalizing pvp gear which I think is a good idea but would probably cause a lot of people to stop playing because lets face it... this is wow and people like to grind new shiny gear.

But I think there are new inventive ways to go around this barrier and have a close to normalized gear with still giving pvpers a bonus to pvping vs pve as well as further incentives to pvp.

I think blizzard has made a strong step in the right direction with the 496 item squish. A fresh 90 in green's wont be able to compete with anyone pvp or pve geared and that should be but it's fairly easy to play catch up through a combination of honor farming and farming LFR. But, even so in a arena/bgs a pve hero still gets beat up by a full pvp guy based on the ~30ish% worth of pvp power they get from items which if you want to get into competitive pvp is a little daunting and annoying with a bad player out gears you and wins based on his stat is higher than your stat.

A way to change this would be to add smaller bonus's to pvp gear. Normalize it for the most part. Anyone who goes into a bg/arena has the same level of gear but if you have pvp gear you get small bonus's. The glove pvp bonus's are a perfect example of something like this already in the game. From there on you could do stuff like add 10% mounted movement speed to boots in a bg/arena (no way close to a game breaker) that gets better per new season. Like the next seasons gear could be 13% faster and so on. And then a pvp weapon could cause you do do say 5% more damage building up to 10% by the end of the expansion which is a decent amount of extra damage but a lot easier to deal with than 30% plus. A helmet could give like 5% bonus healing received and a chest could do 5% less pvp damage taken and so on. And btw you know for a fact that a competitive pvper would very well grind for weeks to get the next season's sword that provided a 1% gain in damage and that's it. That way pvpers do have an advantage albeit a smaller one and skill shines through a lot more.

Also add more vanity items to pvp that make it worth it. Make the honor set look like dog shit/comparable to a boring dungeon set and that's it. Each season gets a new recolor of the boring honor set and only people who grinded out conquest points can get that seasons cool looking pvp gear and then once that season is over only people who earned enough to have it for that season can ever purchase it which makes it a unique badge of honor to have. Rather than getting the exact same thing as a pvper just a different color (which some people might even like better). It gives more prestige to having that gear to show off. Having a really awesome vanity set like the challenge mode gear that only you can get and not get a welfare version that looks the same the season after would be a pretty big incentive.

Oh and remove the blue crafted pvp gear. I'm pretty sure more people just use that to get into heroic dungeons/raise their ilv. You'd get a higher use out of doing that and getting better pve to do better in pvp than trying to kill people in pvp with ilv458 blues.

As far as titles go stop giving duelist/gladiator and then taking it away. Have like a Tyrannical Contender and so on that people get to keep with like "Legendary Tyrannical Gladiator" being the rank 1 title. This way people can earn a title and continually show off "hey in this season I was awesome" much in the same way that if you were a merciless gladiator and haven't even ranked since you can bet your ass that person still has that merciless gladiator title on.

And then they could add various rank based tabards. Like if you hit 2200 rating you get a tabard that acts as a hearth to a pvp vendor somewhere. Or other flavor items that don't really do anything but are really cool/fun to have like bloodied dancing steel and other thing.

Personally I think pvp should be more about player vs player rather than stats vs stats and there are ways to keep people interested and farming and grinding out stuff rather than just getting a higher pvp power. Games like league of legends has it kinda nice where a lv1 player can beat a lv20 if they're awesome and the lv20 is bad. The level difference is definitely a helpful thing to have but doesn't provide super crazy stats that make it hard for people to get started.