Templates officially gone ?

[Druitz]

The WoD system of ilvl going up in PvP was amazing IMO. Rewarded people for PvPing, made it so PVE players didn't easily outgear PvP players, made it so you couldn't easily gear in PvP and take that into PVE, and THEY HAD GEAR VENDORS. Doubt they'd ever bring it back now that they scrapped it, but even if they did I'm not sure how they could incorporate it with WPvP.

Wod system of pvp ilvl was super alt unfriendly. I can't describe how i hated it. In legion i can jump with fresh alt into arena or bg. In wod it was hell to fight geared players as fresh alt espesially in arenas.

Even when fighting 1400 stucked players it was very hard (but winable)

There will never be good gearing system in wow. Every single one have something people dislike.

Gear should play role in pvp but only in character customization so you can choose what stats you prefer but in terms of ilvl there should be little difference between best geared player and worst geared players so we can't talk about skill not gear

[ArkantosChampion]

But for some classes it more OP (Like druid with 2sets bonuses in Wotlk)

[Kagthul]

Wod system of pvp ilvl was super alt unfriendly. I can't describe how i hated it. In legion i can jump with fresh alt into arena or bg. In wod it was hell to fight geared players as fresh alt espesially in arenas.

Even when fighting 1400 stucked players it was very hard (but winable)

This wasn't a problem with the gearing system, this was a problem with you not understanding how to easily avoid this "problem". You could have full Honor gear + 2 Conquest pieces in six hours without even PvPing if you didn't want to (in WoD).

The -actual- gear system itself was great. PvP gear was best for PvP. The scaling iLevel meant that it wasn't worth trying to gear seriously for PvE by doing PvP, so the Dragonslayers could be happy. The actual stat difference between Honor and Conquest gear (with Honor being trivially obtainable via things like the Gladiator Sanctum, Ashran, etc) was only 9%.

[Druitz]

This wasn't a problem with the gearing system, this was a problem with you not understanding how to easily avoid this "problem". You could have full Honor gear + 2 Conquest pieces in six hours without even PvPing if you didn't want to (in WoD).

The -actual- gear system itself was great. PvP gear was best for PvP. The scaling iLevel meant that it wasn't worth trying to gear seriously for PvE by doing PvP, so the Dragonslayers could be happy. The actual stat difference between Honor and Conquest gear (with Honor being trivially obtainable via things like the Gladiator Sanctum, Ashran, etc) was only 9%.

The problem is with you not understanding what i mean...

In wod you need 6 hours as you say for full honor gear ofc its Trashran.
In legion i just need to get some traits and i can jump into areny instantly and destroy all that 1500 players in wod it was nightmare, people had 2x more hp and 2x more dmg.

Legion 2 hours vs wod 6 hours. And after that 6 hours playing arenas in wod i had like 75% conquest gear with conquest catch up.

But yea ashran is better if you can't pvp with huge disadvantage

[ilik2345]

did those 2 hours include the 10 or so hours required to get your first set of honor talents?

2+10 = 12... (and that is being optimistic) Also uhm, i'm assuming in your 2 hours you magically get 900ilvl as the difference between someone bellow 900 ilvl and at 960 is more then the old honor vs conquest you said was insurmountable.

In at the start of legion you had no catchup whatsoever on artifact power, you can't really be more alt unfriendly then that.

For BFA i'm guessing they'll make the same mistakes, though the horribly reduced honor talents seems to not suffer the same issue.

[Deleted]

So far i've seen nothing concrete but being a there is a dedicated pvp server for testing with zero templates i would imagine that they could well be adjusting things by coefficients finally. i.e Shadowstrike does X damage in PvE and Y damage in PvP, for every spell not just some. However thats a lot of work, so who knows.

One thing is for certain in my mind is that templates worked to a degree but ultimately were not good for the game, however they needed to happen just so we could see them fail. I was an advocate for them going into Legion, but now we've come out the other end i can see they were really bad for PvP as a whole.

Character progression matters funnily enough in a mmo, and taking that sense of becoming more powerful away from your char really diluted any sense of progression or will to actively participate in pvp due to the gear being wholey worse than pve gear and the reward system being so fucking random. And lets not forget about whooping that ass of ppl who were undergeared for whatever reason, late to the party, alts in random bgs, it was fun and also served as a right of passage. This is coming from someone who on average has at least 7 alts per expansion that i actively pvp on.

Legion i had 2 purely because there was no sense of achievement with the prestige system its just felt like a annoyance because it didnt have anywhere the same impact or feeling of fulfillment as going from shit gear to top tier pvp gear in terms of the power curve. I just created the feeling of "i cant play my class properly until i have x talents" where with gear you have everything at your disposal class wise so even tho you got your ass handed to you on occasion you could think about what you did and alot of the time if you played well next time you have geared the outcome will be different, again giving that feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction for you effort.

At the core of it, no one really wants a level playing field, you are always looking for that little 1up, its human nature, especially in wow pvp and all templates did was erode that feeling of power you gain by putting the effort into gearing your char overtime.

Like i started with, if certain abilities are doing too much damage they can be separably nerfed with separate coefficients to keep the lid on things. Like frost mage mastery would not have had to be changed from what it used to be in WotlK (frostburn) due to being able to 1 shot ppl so it could never be viable raid spec.

The question is whether they are going to go that far with the effort of separating every damage/healing spell for every class, they should, but its a tall order.

[ilik2345]

Character progression matters funnily enough in a mmo, and taking that sense of becoming more powerful away from your char really diluted any sense of progression or will to actively participate in pvp due to the gear being wholey worse than pve gear and the reward system being so fucking random. And lets not forget about whooping that ass of ppl who were undergeared for whatever reason, late to the party, alts in random bgs, it was fun and also served as a right of passage. This is coming from someone who on average has at least 7 alts per expansion that i actively pvp on.

Legion i had 2 purely because there was no sense of achievement with the prestige system its just felt like a annoyance because it didnt have anywhere the same impact or feeling of fulfillment as going from shit gear to top tier pvp gear in terms of the power curve. I just created the feeling of "i cant play my class properly until i have x talents" where with gear you have everything at your disposal class wise so even tho you got your ass handed to you on occasion you could think about what you did and alot of the time if you played well next time you have geared the outcome will be different, again giving that feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction for you effort.

I'll be up front, i'm ambivilant about gearing, i was always happiest when i had no more gear to collect :P

What i would like to point out is so far BFA does not fix the above, what we get instead is gear that matters more, but still no way to collect it in pvp.

From what i can tell the BFA gearing system is more or less identical to the current except instead of doing 4 rbgs or 10 arena etc and getting a random low ilvl item instantly that you can't use. You collect conquest! ooh, shiney, but wait... theres a weekly cap, you can't buy anything with it its, not a currency - when you get the weekly cap you are given a chest with said crappy low ilvl itemm you can't use in it.

While having gear matter more i'm sure rocks for those that raid mythic and like pvp (i get it, i used to raid, hell I loved rocking a mix of tier 6 and sunwell items back in TBC and virtually 1 shotting people in pvp) but i don't think its healthy for the pvp community. If we are to have gear matter in pvp, for the love of god we should be able to get gear in pvp as easily as any other source.

[Sosua]

it's a self defeating system where you are rewarded with better gear for PvP by not doing PvP.

You nailed it with that ^

[Stormain]

I hope the templates are gone soon, I played every expansion so far and my favourite era PvP-wise was tbc/wotlk.

[Deleted]

Resilience would be good i think.

[Sencha]

I really think templates had it merits, PvP was much more balanced than before and new characters didn't get slaughtered. On the other hand problem was we couldn't stack preferred stats.

In my opinion pvp should be about skill and not gear. I would like to see something similar to WoD mechanic for example all characters in pvp automatically get 300 ilvl and with full pvp gear get 310 ilvl. Very slight advantage but enough to make people get full pvp gear at least and of course there should be cosmetic armor for 2k+ rating.

Agree that pvp should be about skill and not gear.

Pvp gear should not even exist and rewards should be cosmetic only. People doing pvp just to get conquest gear before everyone else so that they can crush them are usually the bad casual players and I am happy they left the pvp scene in Legion.

[cLax0n]

You do realize that even before the Template system, Blizzards intention was that you could only choose between different rings / offset items, which all were limited to like choosing between two items on a single slot, because wearing full pvp gear was always the intention of the system.

Exactly this. If done correctly, Blizzard should make PvP gear the most ideal gear for PvP situations, and because of this, most players will be wearing a full set of PvP gear for all PvP situations, therefore they would have the same stats on their gear. Template or not, you would still have the same configuration of stats. Whether or not players had 8% more haste and 8% less crit didn't mean that much, and even if Blizzard removed the template system it won't make that big of a difference. People need to understand why they had that system in place to begin with.


Blizzard has tried many times to make PvP gear more favorable with resilience, PvP power, PvP items getting an iLvl boost, and then putting versatility stat on almost all PvP gear (versatility stat which is essentially PvP power). The mistake they made in Legion is that they wanted to make PvP accessible to non-pvp players, and the compromise was having templates based on iLvl. This is where the problem lies, like others mentioned before, iLvl was much easier to increase if you were mainly a PvE player.


The easy lazy fix for Blizzard is to just make PvP gear get iLvl boost in PvP situations (as they have done in previous expansions) and they can literally leave everything else the same as in Legion, so the best PvP gear will always be stronger than the best PvE gear. They can even go further and make PvE gear get an iLvl nerf (or limit the maximum iLvl a PvE attained gear can have, which they can do because they do that already in timewalking dungeons). On top of that, they can bring back class sets for PvP (which I know they removed class raiding tier sets for BFA) giving it another advantage over PvE items. All this coupled with War Mode would be great.

[Kagthul]

Agree that pvp should be about skill and not gear.

Pvp gear should not even exist and rewards should be cosmetic only. People doing pvp just to get conquest gear before everyone else so that they can crush them are usually the bad casual players and I am happy they left the pvp scene in Legion.

Except the PvP population shrank so much that its going to be so small and niche theyll spend even less developer hours on it. Your extremely selfish thinking is short-sighted in the extreme and self-defeating. Or, to use a coloqualism, youre cutting off your nose to spite your face. Let me know how thats been working out for you.

[Deleted]

Agree that pvp should be about skill and not gear.

Pvp gear should not even exist and rewards should be cosmetic only. People doing pvp just to get conquest gear before everyone else so that they can crush them are usually the bad casual players and I am happy they left the pvp scene in Legion.

This post right here is a shining example of exactly why templates didn't end up working at all and devastated the pvp population.

Firstly the people doing PvP to get conquest before everyone else are generally the serious arena players, as they want a full gear set so that they are outputting optimal damage/healing BEFORE they make a serious attempt at pushing rating. Now to begin with that was great for them, since they didn't have to do BGs for honor gear, for some that was a welcome change. They just jumped straight in with the templates and only ilvl mattered but virtually had no effect unless you were 50-100ilvls above, which was not achievable at the time.

Sounds good right?? Wrong; what it ended up doing is reducing the BG population quite significantly and increasing queue times for those BGs as well as significantly reducing the amount of more skillful players in the BGs itself making them even more of a shit show. The worse effect however was on Arena; this expansion has been, pvp wise, what i would call a burst damage cooldown based expansion. The net result of this is a very unforgiving and steep learning curve for those new to pvp, you can literally one shot anyone in 3s if you know what you are doing and your opponents don't react in time with their own cooldowns, which is the exact thing that templates were supposed to stop happening. You could argue that templates could have been adjusted, which they were to a certain extent, but it still did not prevent the same shit from happening. So why was this still occurring...............well the elephant in the room is cooldowns, but more on those later.

Now arena has always been fast paced and somewhat overwhelming for new players, but this expansion has been probably one of the most unforgiving in terms of low level arena play. The net result of this was a severe drop off in the lower end bracket (1500-2k) meaning increased queue times and often you ended up facing people with a much higher mmr than you once you broke the 2.2k barrier, as there were simply not enough people in the queues. Why were there not enough ppl, well the above and the shit rewards for the effort put in, gear that was sub par to pve gear so people simply just gave up playing since they were on a template so how could they possibly improve when gear didnt matter. Now you could say "git gud" but all but those but the dedicated to getting better no matter the losses tried, most just gave up.

I lost the desire to try for glad this season after about 3 weeks of playing at 2.2k mmr we started queuing into 2.4-2.6k teams as they were the only ones on the ladder. Our team didn't have the time to dedicate to getting better quickly, which is a massive jump in skill/synergy when you go from 2.2-2.4k when playing RMP. Now you could say we ceiling-ed out, but thats not the case since the way MMR works is the system best trys to match you to an equally rated team and you ceiling out at the current rating when your win/lose ratio gets to around 50%. But because of the lack of players queuing at that MMR due to the above the system does it best to find you a match, but because so few players are also playing at 2k, you mostly always get match to a 2.4+ team thus creating a negative win lose ratio. So instead of steadily creeping upto 2.4k and improving while we went, we would get to around 2.25k start meeting glad teams and get batted straight back down to 2.1-2.2k purgatory. In short below 2150 we had about 75% win ratio, above 2200 we had a 20% win ratio which is a hilarious skill delta for 50 rating.

So all we ended up with was a broken ladder, where the only players who got consistent fair games where those above 2.4ish and those at rank 1 level 2.8k upwards, everything else below was a shit show due to lack of population, the root cause of that being shit rewards and templates. The only thing templates made a littler fairer were Random BG's, which is hilariously ironic since they are the most toxic shit show in the pvp scene that hardly anyone takes seriously in the first place.

Rated BG's im not even gonna bother commenting on those, you only have to go try queue for one to see how bad that population is.

In the old system players gear faster than others due to skill and gear. Its an MMO people want a power curve and sense of building up their character. And yes, if i'm bored or waiting on teammates, it is fun going into random bgs and crushing people, who doesn't like doing that!?

Cooldowns are the root issue with why things are so out of whack in pvp, hence why we have had the GCD change coming into BFA. They see that as the lesser of two evils, since they have pruned so much already so taking away cooldowns will cause a riot. Its their way of slowing things down a little allowing the lesser skilled people more time to react. For me the GCD change was unnecessary, where they should have gone is to drastically reduce the power of cooldowns in pvp and shifted the damage into sustained damage, this would the effect of making the game far less bursty and allowing ppl time to react thus lowering the skill floor a little so more people find pvp accessible and forgiving. But most importantly make Arena far far less scripted, where if you dont know the script (what cooldowns to trade and when) you just lose.

[Kralljin]

this expansion has been, pvp wise, what i would call a burst damage cooldown based expansion.

That's been the case since Blizzard decided that almost every class needs an offensive CD, which in turn forced their hand to introduce defensive ones to counter those, along with healing cd's and so forth.

Ask yourself how many classes had *actual* damage cd's in BC? Not that many, a fraction, let alone defensive cd's.

Burst has been a problem at some point in every single expansion, Legion is no exception.

you can literally one shot anyone in 3s if you know what you are doing and your opponents don't react in time with their own cooldowns, which is the exact thing that templates were supposed to stop happening

No you cannot one shot people, a problem were the insane amount of "soft interrupts" that a few classes have.

You start to fake cast => get stunned
You start to cast again => get disoriented / silenced
You start to cast again => get knockbacked / gripped
You start to cast again => you actually get interrupted

You don't die instantly, it's just that as healer you're really in trouble once that chain starts going because you need to cast to keep yourself / team alive but some comps have so many ways to stop you from casting without even using actual interrupts.

If you want a taste how Legion would have looked like without templates, Open PvP is there and everyone knows that it was a shitfest.

it is fun going into random bgs and crushing people, who doesn't like doing that!?

Would basically be an excuse for every imbalance that exists in WoW.

"Who doesn't like doing 50% more damage than others?"
The other players perhaps?

[Deleted]

That's been the case since Blizzard decided that almost every class needs an offensive CD, which in turn forced their hand to introduce defensive ones to counter those, along with healing cd's and so forth.

Ask yourself how many classes had *actual* damage cd's in BC? Not that many, a fraction, let alone defensive cd's.

Burst has been a problem at some point in every single expansion, Legion is no exception.

Did i say it wasn't a problem? My point was templates were supposed to fix the issue and they didn't. Cooldowns are the issue like i mentioned in the bottom of my post.........

No you cannot one shot people, a problem were the insane amount of "soft interrupts" that a few classes have.

You start to fake cast => get stunned
You start to cast again => get disoriented / silenced
You start to cast again => get knockbacked / gripped
You start to cast again => you actually get interrupted

You don't die instantly, it's just that as healer you're really in trouble once that chain starts going because you need to cast to keep yourself / team alive but some comps have so many ways to stop you from casting without even using actual interrupts.

If you want a taste how Legion would have looked like without templates, Open PvP is there and everyone knows that it was a shitfest.

Ok fine bad use of terminology, no you cannot kill someone in one global cooldown, you can kill someone in 2-3 globals if you know what you are doing, and your opponents dont react in time with their cooldowns, happy?

I do agree that their are too many "soft interupts" currently but again, those can be played around depending on your comp

Would basically be an excuse for every imbalance that exists in WoW.

"Who doesn't like doing 50% more damage than others?"
The other players perhaps?

Errrrrr its not my fault that they don't gear their character, we are talking random bgs here, if they want that 50% extra damage, put the fucking effort in and go get it. Otherwise it just stinks of entitlement, but more importantly take away any sort of sense of achievement when you start being able to hold your own or start kicking other peoples asses. In every expac except legion i have had at least 7 alts and pvp'd on them all knowing this. You know why? Because i enjoyed the gearing process and building my characters power up was rewarding. In legion i had 2 alts and gave up on pvping on them, purely because i felt like, whats the point they are "technically" as geared as my main because of templates, so i'll just play that in arena.

But i suppose im a dinosaur in this age of instant gratification, where people have the attention span of a goldfish and don't want to work for anything and want just handed to them for free.

[Sencha]

Did i say it wasn't a problem? My point was templates were supposed to fix the issue and they didn't. Cooldowns are the issue like i mentioned in the bottom of my post.........




Ok fine bad use of terminology, no you cannot kill someone in one global cooldown, you can kill someone in 2-3 globals if you know what you are doing, and your opponents dont react in time with their cooldowns, happy?

I do agree that their are too many "soft interupts" currently but again, those can be played around depending on your comp


Errrrrr its not my fault that they don't gear their character, we are talking random bgs here, if they want that 50% extra damage, put the fucking effort in and go get it. Otherwise it just stinks of entitlement, but more importantly take away any sort of sense of achievement when you start being able to hold your own or start kicking other peoples asses. In every expac except legion i have had at least 7 alts and pvp'd on them all knowing this. You know why? Because i enjoyed the gearing process and building my characters power up was rewarding. In legion i had 2 alts and gave up on pvping on them, purely because i felt like, whats the point they are "technically" as geared as my main because of templates, so i'll just play that in arena.

But i suppose im a dinosaur in this age of instant gratification, where people have the attention span of a goldfish and don't want to work for anything and want just handed to them for free.

Agree with your post except the last part.

It sucks when you need x weeks to be at the same gear level of your opponents because they started gearing their character before you. It's just a question of time spent, skill doesn't even matter. You can't call this an 'effort', it's just a mandatory process you have to go through before you can finally be at par with your opponents.

So people who want pvp gear back are bad pvp players who can only shine when they do random bgs with their full conquest characters and hoping they will face fresh alts in the opposing side. But that's a good design right? So that everyone got a chance to be a hero in pvp, right?

[Deleted]

Agree with your post except the last part.

It sucks when you need x weeks to be at the same gear level of your opponents because they started gearing their character before you. It's just a question of time spent, skill doesn't even matter. You can't call this an 'effort', it's just a mandatory process you have to go through before you can finally be at par with your opponents.

So people who want pvp gear back are bad pvp players who can only shine when they do random bgs with their full conquest characters and hoping they will face fresh alts in the opposing side. But that's a good design right? So that everyone got a chance to be a hero in pvp, right?

You should probably read the longer post i made before the one you quoted for context and reasons i have covered in there why templates are bad for the game.

But again entitlement, its not my fault that you or anyone else doesn't have the time or effort to put in grinding out gear. I've been behind the power curved plenty of times, but you know what got me through.............? Skill not just time spent. Skill matters way fucking more than in all but the largest of gear gaps, put my arena team in honor gear against a full conquest geared team in WoD at 1800 and we would wipe the floor with them within 1min i could confidently say. It was one of the reasons going into legion i thought templates were a good idea, but now i have seen the effect on the ladder and the pvp playerbase as well as losing the feeling of gearing my character on a power curve, they are nothing but bad for the game.

But more's to the the point;

So people who want pvp gear back are bad pvp players who can only shine when they do random bgs with their full conquest characters and hoping they will face fresh alts in the opposing side. But that's a good design right? So that everyone got a chance to be a hero in pvp, right?

That my friend is one of the biggest fucking sweeping statements i think i've read on this forum regarding the PvP player base. I want gear back because i want sense of progression for my character, cause funnily enough WOW is a fucking MMO not League of Legends. But i'm a bad pvp player who can only shine in random bgs beacuse of the gear gap? Well 2 Glad titles 5 duelist and a few challengers say otherwise i'm afraid pal. The vast majority who understand the effect that templates have had on pvp as a whole is why they want them gone, they just dont work the way they are supposed to, they tried them out cause we asked for them, they failed and were far more damaging to the pvp population than anything so far bar trashran.

[Kralljin]

Did i say it wasn't a problem? My point was templates were supposed to fix the issue and they didn't. Cooldowns are the issue like i mentioned in the bottom of my post.........

It reigned in to a certain degree in my opinion.

If a spec is currently too squishy, you can buff HP, armor or Versatility, before they could do shit as your defense mostly relied on abilities, which the PvP team can't change due PvE.
Because Legion has shown a decent representation of multiple specs across Arena and RBG.

Templates were first and foremost to give the devs another tuning knob and level the playing field for undergeared players, both worked with varying degrees, thing is just that PvP representation dropped due other reasons.

Ok fine bad use of terminology, no you cannot kill someone in one global cooldown, you can kill someone in 2-3 globals if you know what you are doing, and your opponents dont react in time with their cooldowns, happy?

No because it's still wrong, you're not dying because there is too much damage happening, you die because your enemy stops every attempt at casting.

Errrrrr its not my fault that they don't gear their character, we are talking random bgs here, if they want that 50% extra damage, put the fucking effort in and go get it.

Good thing one of the most commonly raised critique points about WoW PvP was the fact that you had to suffer through the gearing phase until you had some chance of fighting back.
PvP is not fun if you just get your teeth bashed in until you suffered through it.

Secondly, i remember the BC times where everybody and their mother infested random bg's because S1/S2 Items were easier to grab than PvE Epics, therefore random bg's were flooded with green geared freshly dinged players, good times if you join a random bg and you know you lost solely because half of your team is horribly undergeared.

But i suppose im a dinosaur in this age of instant gratification, where people have the attention span of a goldfish and don't want to work for anything and want just handed to them for free.

No, it's just that some people have a different mindset when it comes to PvP, because i have no issues with slower reward structure, but i prefer an even playing field when it comes to PvP.

[Nuba]

If you want a taste how Legion would have looked like without templates, Open PvP is there and everyone knows that it was a shitfest.

once again, you're overthinking it like the colleague art students.
all you had to do to fix that was disable trinkets/legos in pvp and add resilience back.
no need to un-RPG wow to achieve that.