Why the PvP gear PvE gear discrepancy?

[Danur]

Blizzard sold us on the idea that by making resilience base across the board, and adding PvP power to PvP gear, it would create an environment where PvP gear would be ideal for PvP, BUT you could still participate in PvP wearing your raid gear without feeling like you're getting blown up.

This would work, were they to stick to the model of each season corresponding to each raid tier. But at the moment me sitting in nearly full Grevious gear, I find myself completely outgunned and getting blown up by a PvE geared hunter who has a good 12,000 more Agility than me, and a good 200,000 more HP than me.

I appreciate them making PvE gear nearly useless in Arena due to the item crunch, but why have 522ilvl PvP gear out at the same time as 560+ PvE gear??? Is this to discourage raiders from feeling compelled to farm PvP gear as a starter set? If so, was that REALLY a problem that needed fixing, at the cost of screwing over the entire rest of the game's balance?

[Coraulten]

Do you know what instanced pvp is?

[Aerofluff]

Instanced PvP isn't the issue. Especially with WoD coming, where everyone will be getting the same baseline gear in Arenas with Trial of the Gladiator, so that'll be more of a player skill than gear thing... as it should be. BG's are nice and all, but a great many people enjoy world PvP, it shouldn't be ignored.

One of the devs mentioned that the trinket set bonus, while it looks small, actually gives 30% effective health. So let's look at the baseline 72% Resilience...
(Rough estimates, I'm not perfectly number-crunching, but it's all fairly accurate):

72% Resilience means if I do 100,000 damage, I actually only do 28,000 damage.
If someone has 400,000 health, I must do "100,000" damage to them about 16 times...
If someone has 800,000 health, I must do "100,000" damage to them about 32 times.
Approximately, the 400k person has "1.6 Million" effective health.
Approximately, the 800k person has "3.2 Million" effective health.

So when you consider that high-end PvE gear is giving them insane amounts of Stamina (as evinced by the health pools you regularly see), and they're still getting the 72% Resilience bonus, they're coming out on top.

The only thing left to consider then is PvP Power:

Let's say a guy with 41% PvP Power does a 100k hit... That would register for 141k, but it's still subject to 72% Resil, so it actually hits for about ~38k.
So with all that Power, to kill a PvPer who has 450k HP, you'd have to hit them with that "100k + Power" attack about 12 times.
To kill somebody with 800k HP who still benefits from full 72% resil, that would take ~21 of those hits.

Keeping in mind that PvE gear still offers oodles of other stats in ridiculous quantities (just like the healthpools), so his "100k non-PvP Power" hits will probably still be bigger. (Like Danur mentioned, the PvE-geared Hunter with ~12k more Agility, for example.)

That boils down to, the PvE geared player has to hit the PvPer about half as many times to make a kill, as you do them. And I haven't even touched on how PvE gear also gains more Armor, which will affect melee damage. My own PvE set (which isn't like spectacular Heroic gear by any means, a serious raider would have more) has over 4k more Armor than my Grievous gear, which is... almost around 3% physical damage reduction.

So unless Blizzard makes a change to this somehow, expect nothing but PvE-geared people actually PvPing in the world.

[Danur]

Instanced PvP isn't the issue. Especially with WoD coming, where everyone will be getting the same baseline gear in Arenas with Trial of the Gladiator, so that'll be more of a player skill than gear thing... as it should be. BG's are nice and all, but a great many people enjoy world PvP, it shouldn't be ignored.

One of the devs mentioned that the trinket set bonus, while it looks small, actually gives 30% effective health. So let's look at the baseline 72% Resilience...
(Rough estimates, I'm not perfectly number-crunching, but it's all fairly accurate):

72% Resilience means if I do 100,000 damage, I actually only do 27,000 damage.
If someone has 400,000 health, I must do "100,000" damage to them about 16 times...
If someone has 800,000 health, I must do "100,000" damage to them about 32 times.
Approximately, the 400k person has "1.6 Million" effective health.
Approximately, the 800k person has "3.2 Million" effective health.

So when you consider that high-end PvE gear is giving them insane amounts of Stamina (as evinced by the health pools you regularly see), and they're still getting the 72% Resilience bonus, they're coming out on top.

The only thing left to consider then is PvP Power:

Let's say a guy with 41% PvP Power does a 100k hit... That would register for 141k, but it's still subject to 72% Resil, so it actually hits for about ~38k.
So with all that Power, to kill a PvPer who has 450k HP, you'd have to hit them with that "100k + Power" attack about 12 times.
To kill somebody with 800k HP who still benefits from full 72% resil, that would take ~21 of those hits.

Keeping in mind that PvE gear still offers oodles of other stats in ridiculous quantities (just like the healthpools), so his "100k non-PvP Power" hits will probably still be bigger. (Like Danur mentioned, the PvE-geared Hunter with ~12k more Agility, for example.)

That boils down to, the PvE geared player has to hit the PvPer about half as many times to make a kill, as you do them. And I haven't even touched on how PvE gear also gains more Armor, which will affect melee damage. My own PvE set (which isn't like spectacular Heroic gear by any means, a serious raider would have more) has over 4k more Armor than my Grievous gear, which is... almost around 3% physical damage reduction.

So unless Blizzard makes a change to this somehow, expect nothing but PvE-geared people actually PvPing in the world.

Thank you for breaking down the numbers for me. I actually thought PvP power worked a different way, in "ignoring" resilience, but what you said above makes more sense in the way the tooltip is worded.

- - - Updated - - -

I still don't understand how this problem came about. Is it that they just kept adding a lot of raid tiers during a single pvp season, which created the PvE gear stat inflation?

Also, on the topic of the same level gear, why does 496ilvl pve gear have more stam than 496ilvl pvp gear? Wasn't the argument always, that if PvPers had to kill a 1billion HP boss, they had to do a lot of damage, so when they pvp they would put a lot of stam on the gear to mitigate that burst? Why does someone punching a dragon need a ridiculous healthpool when they have 2-5 healers on them, and they shouldn't be standing in the bad?

[Starsinn]

You know what would be totally awesome? If all damage and healing was caculated from your pvp power ONLY. So a pvp geared player would do meaningful dps/heals while a raid geared player with 0 pvp power would literally do 0 damage or heals.

Just treat power the same as agil/str/int versus other players.

Example: pve chestplate
550 stamina
465 strength
500 crit

PVP chestplate
550 stamina
465 pvp power
500 crit

People will say "its too confusing for new players" because thats the hip excuse these days but its no more confusing than gear having different effectiveness in different zones. Pvp gear should be superior in pvp no matter if its in open world or i stanced.

EDIT: I know this also makes pvp gear total crap fo pve and thats fine.

[Danur]

You know what would be totally awesome? If all damage and healing was caculated from your pvp power ONLY. So a pvp geared player would do meaningful dps/heals while a raid geared player with 0 pvp power would literally do 0 damage or heals.

Just treat power the same as agil/str/int versus other players.

Example: pve chestplate
550 stamina
465 strength
500 crit

PVP chestplate
550 stamina
465 pvp power
500 crit

People will say "its too confusing for new players" because thats the hip excuse these days but its no more confusing than gear having different effectiveness in different zones. Pvp gear should be superior in pvp no matter if its in open world or i stanced.

EDIT: I know this also makes pvp gear total crap fo pve and thats fine.

See the way I thought it would work is, a pve geared player would do less damage, but they'd get more stats to help them at least survive. But the way it actually works is, they get far superior gear, that is only crunched in instanced pvp.

perhaps in the old days pve geared dps were "glass cannons" but now they are tank cannons.