PvP gear in BfA

[Mafic]

Have they said anything on how gear will impact PVP performance ? Is it gonna be the same Legion system ?

No.

Templates are no more so any gear you have and the secondary stats provided will be valid again. Trinkets work again.

What is left is that some abilities vie the class/spec aura may have different values for PVP.

[Sencha]

who knows. Gear mattered more in Legion than ever before, despite their claims otherwise.

So wrong it's depressing.

[Karry]

No.

Templates are no more so any gear you have and the secondary stats provided will be valid again. Trinkets work again.

What is left is that some abilities vie the class/spec aura may have different values for PVP.

Ah fucking sweet. I always hated not being able to use trinkets. It was one of the saving graces of WoD BG PvP for me. I just played casually on an off and being able to go on my Assassination Rogue and pop mastery trinkets with DFA-Envenom combos was good fun. Them removing stuff like this in legion really killed the PvP experience for me.

[Craaazyyy]

... no, really it is true.

We did this entire thing with math. Three times now. Twice before Legion kicked off (once during the Alpha and once during the Beta) and once again after.

The difference between trivially-obtained Honor gear (often mere hours of work and often without even having to actually PvP) and Conquest gear was 9.4%.

So, the WORST disparity you could have was 9.4%. It was often quite lower because getting that Honor gear would often also land you at least 2 Conquest pieces, sometimes 3.

In Legion, you gain 1% stats on your template per 10 iLevels above 800. I do not raid, do not do rated PvP, and barely log in at this point. All six of my toons are 948-952. People who actively raid are in the 980 range.

So, i'm 15% above someone who just dinged, who still has several days of work to do to unlock his Honor talents, and get his iLevel up.. because casual PvP doesn't reward shit.

So, as a complete casual who isn't even PvPing right now (because its so god-fucking-awful; and i used to do PvP as my primary end-game activity for the entire previous life of WoW)... im 15% above. Thats about 6% worse than it was possible to be in previous Xpacs.

Raiders are 18-20% above.

Gear doesn't matter less, it matters more.

The entire "gear doesn't matter as much" thing was a lie from minute one and it was proven both on their own forums and these forums with math.

And thats JUST the difference you get from iLevel - the flat % gain. Until the most recent patch made artifact catch-up trivial, people hitting the level cap had WEEKS of catching up to do at the very least. So for most of the xpac you were 9-10% behind in gear (and more later on), and trait-less, and PvP-talent-less..

The actual stat differential could be upwards of 30% with traits factored in. (Which, i will grant, is no longer the case, 14 months into the expansion).

It was worse than ever.

you have no idea what you talking about.. every two seasons they were making the baseline ilvl in instanced pvp higher.. so it wasnt always starting from 800 ilvl

the only major thing was always the amount of traits.. but eventually it stopped being a problem


these things aside i would love pvp gearing or gearing system in general be like it used to be back in the days.. with conquest points and pvp vendors.. perhaps even resilience, it was never a problem

[Mafic]

AFAIK, templates still exist, but stats from gear have 10% of its effect in pvp.

If you have +100 stamina from gear, it will give you +10 stamina in pvp.

That isn't a template that is a scaling down mechanic. You can change your gear sets or legendaries on PTR and have different stat values. I hope that helps!

- - - Updated - - -

Ah fucking sweet. I always hated not being able to use trinkets. It was one of the saving graces of WoD BG PvP for me. I just played casually on an off and being able to go on my Assassination Rogue and pop mastery trinkets with DFA-Envenom combos was good fun. Them removing stuff like this in legion really killed the PvP experience for me.

Trinkets will be usable again which means that PVP trinkets that drop can actually be used. It also opens up the option not only for offensive trinkets but defensive trinkets too.

[Garybear]

Uh generally just going from an honor weapon to a conquest weapon was about 16-20% dmg increase, JUST from getting the new weapon

[Kagthul]

Sorry for the guys who think they "Ran me off" or something. I had work over the weekend.

you have no idea what you talking about.. every two seasons they were making the baseline ilvl in instanced pvp higher.. so it wasnt always starting from 800 ilvl

You're conflating two things that arent about each other. See below. Quickly, though - the "Template" iLevel has been raised consistently. However, the % of bonus stats you get for being above a certain iLevel has -NEVER- changed. It still starts at 800. More thorough description below.

the only major thing was always the amount of traits.. but eventually it stopped being a problem

3/4 of the way through the expansion. Thats more of an admission to how fucked up it was than anything else.

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...t#post45608184

The base iLevel of PvP gear is 860 right now. You -can- get some 870 ("Gladiator") pieces from WQs and rarely from a box in a random BG. Which is totally RNG if you even get a piece of gear, and most times when you do it is 860 "Combatants" gear. You can only get 880 above a certain rating (fairly low, ~1500 IIRC), or from the vendor after obliterating EIGHT pieces of 870 gear.

A link to the thread this is from. Some of the numbers here are out of date (above); this was what obtained at the time. This isn't super relevant since the important parts are below (I.E. how the system actually works). Ive SLIGHTLY updated the below information to be more current, so if it reads differently than the linked thread, that's why.

Now.. templates. Dear god, the misinformation. This one isn't directly solely at any one person, because Blizzard makes the process completely opaque and doesn't document shit... but you're completely wrong in how it works.

Brief tutorial:

When you enter instanced PvP, your statistics are raised to a certain iLevel floor. This is BEFORE your template is applied. It was 800 at launch, then raised to 850 in 7.1, and 900 in 7.2. What this means is that your base stats (Int, Stam, et al) are factored as if every item in your slots is an iLevel 900 stat-stick.

THEN your Template is applied. This is why, when you see Blizzard's tuning numbers, Templates are expressed in percentages. (ex - "Intellect reduced to 73%") It is setting your base stats, determined when you zoned in at iLevel 900, to that percentage of the base. Stam tends to be over 100%, primary stats are usually severely cut (which in turn reduces AP/SP). The Template also applies a bunch of invisible auras that affect your spells and abilities (self-healing on a lot of abilities is cut by a blanket percentage, tanks take 25% more damage, period, etc)

AFTER your Template is applied, bonus stats from your Artifact Traits (the traits themselves, not merely having them - so a Trait that adds 3% stam, like a Blood Death Knight's "Meat Shield", for instance, applies now are applied, as well as any bonus stats from your Honor Talents.

THEN your bonus stam for traits is applied. The first 34 traits worth of bonus stam and the bonus Stamina (only) from the first skill on your new medallion are now granted gratis - but any traits anyone has above 34 still grant an additional .75% stam that a fresh 110 wont have. (At least up until the first point in Concordance of the Legionfall - Blizzard said there is now a "diminishing return" on stam gains from traits, but it is a solid .75% all the way up to the first point in Concordance, at the very least).

After all this, the bonus % gain from additional iLevels is added. This percentage bonus is calculated from iLevel 800. So, if you have iLevel 890, you have 9% bonus stats. And this is a blanket multiplier to all stats, including Stam.

All of the above is still 100% correct, as far as i can tell from crawling through forums, blue post, patch notes, and in-game testing.

And this isn't even factoring in the power differential granted by Artifact Traits themselves. A Blood DK, for instance, that has unlocked the new Medallion (Carrion Feast, Vampiric Aura, and Souldrinker) is heads and shoulders more powerful than one who hasn't. You cant even factor this in to some percentage-based evaluation - not that you need to, the raw mix is hard enough.

Too many people make an argument for the current system being better because they assume you already have a main and can push your AK high quick and kind of "catch up" sorta fast.

That's a huge mistake.

The above is now mostly irrelevant in 7.3.5 because of the new-new-new AK catchup. But it took 80% of the expansion to get here, so for MOST of the expansion, what is happening now wasnt happening, and Trait-catchup was worse than any Honor or Conquest grind in history.

The system needs to be judged from the perspective of someone just coming back to WoW (or just starting heaven forbid), and hitting 110, and seeing this pile of shit they have to wade through to be remotely viable, and saying "fuck it, ill just PvE".

If i was that guy, right now, i wouldn't PvP at all.

Im NOT that guy, and i barely PvP because there's no worthwhile rewards and no progression. The ladder has imploded, and the active competitive environment has stalled and shriveled. Random BG Queues are 3-5x as long as they were just last xpac.

It's real simple:

in WoD, you were 100% PvP-viable with six hours of not-even-PvPing, and could achieve absolute parity by winning 2 random BGs a day. If you came in late or were a fresh starter, the CQ catch up cap let you complete a set of gear in a day or two of "grinding" (if that was your thing).

In Legion, you hit 110 and are:
On average, about 9% behind in gear alone (just the iLevel bonus, as the average iLevel is around 885 right now)
About ~30% behind on stam
About ~30 hours of play (at least) from unlocking absolutely necessary Artifact Traits
About 10-30 hours (depending on what path you take - spamming BGs, Skirms, etc) of play from getting absolutely necessary Honor Talents.
And then, if you "just want to PvP" - your gearing process is a nightmare of RNG drops (RNG if they even happen, and then RNG that you dont get screwed by getting an item you already have) AND you have to be able to get to a high rating (1900+), something only about 14% of the population can even achieve (pyramidal ladder system, yay!) to get gear as good as Normal mode Raids, much less higher level content. And it's all RNG.

There's absolutely no comparison.

WoD's PvP (mechanically) was unbalanced and fairly weak, but they had finally nailed the gearing system 100%, only to throw the baby out with the bathwater and the bathtub right into the chipper shredder.

Oh, and other thing the Template system absolutely assfucks? World PvP. While wPvP was never super balanced... now it is absolute cancer. Because the Templates dont apply (cant have the poor Dragonslayers be out fighting a world boss and have the template kick in, oh noes!) and PvE gear all works - ive literally seen a Rogue one-shot an entire raid fighting a World boss in one global with the legendary cloak.

Yeah, that all stands.

Math, kids. Gear matters just as much, or more, than it did in previous xpacs. You have to spend MORE time to be PvP viable than in the past. The Template system and its accompanying systems were failures at every level.

[Deleted]

Sorry for the guys who think they "Ran me off" or something. I had work over the weekend.



You're conflating two things that arent about each other. See below. Quickly, though - the "Template" iLevel has been raised consistently. However, the % of bonus stats you get for being above a certain iLevel has -NEVER- changed. It still starts at 800. More thorough description below.



3/4 of the way through the expansion. Thats more of an admission to how fucked up it was than anything else.



A link to the thread this is from. Some of the numbers here are out of date (above); this was what obtained at the time. This isn't super relevant since the important parts are below (I.E. how the system actually works). Ive SLIGHTLY updated the below information to be more current, so if it reads differently than the linked thread, that's why.



All of the above is still 100% correct, as far as i can tell from crawling through forums, blue post, patch notes, and in-game testing.



The above is now mostly irrelevant in 7.3.5 because of the new-new-new AK catchup. But it took 80% of the expansion to get here, so for MOST of the expansion, what is happening now wasnt happening, and Trait-catchup was worse than any Honor or Conquest grind in history.



Yeah, that all stands.

Math, kids. Gear matters just as much, or more, than it did in previous xpacs. You have to spend MORE time to be PvP viable than in the past. The Template system and its accompanying systems were failures at every level.

It's funny how several people provided examples for how the current formula works, others came with concrete examples of same class characters at different gear levels and you still insist on "Gear mattered as much as the previous expansions".

I wonder if you have been playing the same game as the rest of us, as from your comments, doesn't seem like it.

[unstableone]

Maybe it has changed since I last paid attention but weapon item level didn't scale in bgs.

I routinely see people of my class/spec with 500k - 1 million hp less.

"gear not mattering in legion" is a misconception. it matters more than wod honor vs conquest.


bfa the differences seem like it will be like greens vs mythic gear but with some extremely odd and unreliable scaling tech.

gear rewards based on a pyramid will end up in a failure because they cant balance the classes.
it wont revive pvp even if people are willing to overlook the bad class design.
warmode seems like it will be mop pvp gear vs mythic raid gear instadeath.

[Prode]

Thread's been derailed quite a bit but there is no PvP gear on beta atm. At least the quest that gives gear doesn't work. You can get PvP gear from skirmish but it sucks hard. Tho seems even conquest gear isn't good at all. Rated PvP is disabled quite difficult to get conquest as well.

[MrCool]

You are exactly right, but let me correct you a bit here, it is simpler: 31% crit is computed from X crit rating. They scale the value of X, not the percent crit that this value translates to. And the formula for the translation is non-linear. So, the 790 DH has X crit rating = 31% crit. And the 975 whoever has 1.35 * X crit rating and this equals not 1.35 * 31% crit, but less than that, because of the non-linearity of translation.

The thing is, crit rating to crit% is linear
The flaw in your argument is that classes have baseline crit that do not come from crit rating.

[Xloudman]

... no, really it is true.

We did this entire thing with math. Three times now. Twice before Legion kicked off (once during the Alpha and once during the Beta) and once again after.

The difference between trivially-obtained Honor gear (often mere hours of work and often without even having to actually PvP) and Conquest gear was 9.4%.

So, the WORST disparity you could have was 9.4%. It was often quite lower because getting that Honor gear would often also land you at least 2 Conquest pieces, sometimes 3.

In Legion, you gain 1% stats on your template per 10 iLevels above 800. I do not raid, do not do rated PvP, and barely log in at this point. All six of my toons are 948-952. People who actively raid are in the 980 range.

So, i'm 15% above someone who just dinged, who still has several days of work to do to unlock his Honor talents, and get his iLevel up.. because casual PvP doesn't reward shit.

So, as a complete casual who isn't even PvPing right now (because its so god-fucking-awful; and i used to do PvP as my primary end-game activity for the entire previous life of WoW)... im 15% above. Thats about 6% worse than it was possible to be in previous Xpacs.

Raiders are 18-20% above.

Gear doesn't matter less, it matters more.

The entire "gear doesn't matter as much" thing was a lie from minute one and it was proven both on their own forums and these forums with math.

And thats JUST the difference you get from iLevel - the flat % gain. Until the most recent patch made artifact catch-up trivial, people hitting the level cap had WEEKS of catching up to do at the very least. So for most of the xpac you were 9-10% behind in gear (and more later on), and trait-less, and PvP-talent-less..

The actual stat differential could be upwards of 30% with traits factored in. (Which, i will grant, is no longer the case, 14 months into the expansion).

It was worse than ever.

The stat templates had a floor that you're automatically scaled up to just to prevent the discrepancies you're talking about, the major differences in stamina were the result of someone not having a filled out artifact. People who have not yet unlocked all of their honor talents are segregated into BGs with only people who have not yet gotten their honor talents. They can still get into BGs with prestiged people if they queue as part of a group where someone is above honor level 50.

[Mafic]

The stat templates had a floor that you're automatically scaled up to just to prevent the discrepancies you're talking about, the major differences in stamina were the result of someone not having a filled out artifact. People who have not yet unlocked all of their honor talents are segregated into BGs with only people who have not yet gotten their honor talents. They can still get into BGs with prestiged people if they queue as part of a group where someone is above honor level 50.

Blizz stopped increasing the floor midway through the Legion expansion which is why we started to see power creep from highly geared players + fully unlocked artifacts versus those players that did not have fully unlocked artifacts and low gear.

- - - Updated - - -

It's funny how several people provided examples for how the current formula works, others came with concrete examples of same class characters at different gear levels and you still insist on "Gear mattered as much as the previous expansions".

I wonder if you have been playing the same game as the rest of us, as from your comments, doesn't seem like it.

The math has been shown that gear mattered just as much in Legion as previous expansions. The problem is people refuse to do the math themselves. You should sit down and do the math yourself instead of relying on others who don't know how to do math.

[Kralljin]

Maybe it has changed since I last paid attention but weapon item level didn't scale in bgs.

I routinely see people of my class/spec with 500k - 1 million hp less.

If they don't have 75 traits, they have far less hp, every trait purchased means more Stamina (Altough i think it stops beyond the 75th one).
However, getting 75 is depending on your dedication just a few days, altough Argus obviously beats PvP by miles there.

[Mafic]

If they don't have 75 traits, they have far less hp, every trait purchased means more Stamina (Altough i think it stops beyond the 75th one).
However, getting 75 is depending on your dedication just a few days, altough Argus obviously beats PvP by miles there.

Correct and the relic ilevels of the weapon was immensely powerful for melee. Someone with high level relics versus someone without was like a night and day difference.

Legion was the most unfair PVP system ever devised. It was basically designed for PVE mythic raiders. :P

[Kralljin]

Correct and the relic ilevels of the weapon was immensely powerful for melee. Someone with high level relics versus someone without was like a night and day difference.

No, it's not.

At first, yeah because AP was pretty imbalanced and it basically an open race for "who farms as much as AP possible", PvP granted less AP compared to brainless M+ farm, catch up wasn't quite there as well.
But as of right now, getting 75 traits is by no means an issue if you're willing to do Arugs for a few days, do every WQ that grants AP and a few Invasion points, then you have 75 traits within days.

You don't get extra Stamina beyond the 75th trait.

The thing about Weapon Ilvl was just that the "reward structure" of Legion PvP sucked ass, you couldn't even buy relics via Echoes of Battle / Dominance, you got lucky and received high Ilvl ones via your weekly or you were out of luck.
And i'm pretty sure Weapon Ilvl is being normalized as well.

Most of these issues could've been solved if the reward system of Legion would've been halfway decent, but you don't get PvP gear that beats LFR until you're like on 2k+, the only thing worth doing PvP is the one weekly reward item and that's pretty pathetic too because it again requires a rather high rating to useful and is just one item per week per 2v2 / 3v3 / RBG.

Gearing yourself via random BG is a joke, LFR grants far better loot.

Legion was the most unfair PVP system ever devised. It was basically designed for PVE mythic raiders. :P

This is one massive hyperbolic statement and you know it.
Compared to the shitshow that was BC/WOTLK/Cata regarding PvE Gear in PvP, Legion PvP is far more balanced in that regard.

Rogues could like wear half PvE Gear in BC because Cloak and Cheat death gave them enough defensive, Glaives just to top things off.
Wotlk had the OP Caster trinkets (Dislodged foreign Object), Elemental Shaman wearing T9 4pc (20% Lvb damage) and obviously shit like Deathbringers Will and Shadowmourne.
Not even mentioning what those Dragon Soul items did to Cata PvP.

And that's just a few examples to mention.

Seriously, if you think those instances of the PvP System were better, then you've forgotten what happened during these times regarding PvE gear infesting PvP, especially in regards to the powerlevel difference they made to a full PvP geared player.