Bajheera Interview with Brian Holinka

[Stoy]

Bajheera Interview with Brian Holinka
Bajheera sat down with Brian Holinka to discuss Dragonflight

• PvP gear will be largely separate acquisition like it has in later Shadowlands patches, but Holinka says he is not upset if a few trinkets from PVE are competitive for PvP.
• The plan for Dragonflight is for the additional PvP item level to not work in the outdoor world. You will still be able to upgrade the PVE item level of PvP gear through conquest though.
• The trinket set bonus will stick around for PvP in Dragonflight.
• PvP set bonuses are not currently coming.
• Cross-faction will be available for rated PvP.
• Random battlegrounds will continue to have the faction divide.
• There will still be faction-specific end-of season rewards for the near future even with cross-faction.
• The class section of the new talent trees will be interesting for PvP. It might cause the player to choose between defensives or utility.
• Honor talents will remain similar to now going into Dragonflight.
• Rated solo queue could come later on in Dragonflight, but it would likely only allow you to queue by yourself.
• The team wants to add more battlegrounds and arenas, but nothing to announce at the moment.
• The team wants to add more incentive to do Warmode PvP at launch.
• They don't want to incentivize players grinding flight points in War Mode.
• The dragonflights are not covenants. They are separate factions that have no player power attached to them.

[Nerovar]

The plan for Dragonflight is for the additional PvP item level to not work in the outdoor world.

What's the point of this?

[Soisoisoi]

"The plan for Dragonflight is for the additional PvP item level to not work in the outdoor world. You will still be able to upgrade the PVE item level of PvP gear through conquest though."
Upgrades still being a thing can fuck off completely. Remove that shit before Alpha even goes live fgs.

e: The above quote doesn't quite do it justice and (clearly) has caused confusion.

Holinka in the video said:

• Our plan is to do two tiers of pvp ilvl: Honour + Conquest
• PvP ilvl to not work in the world
• upgrades are still gonna' exist
• you can upgrade your gear, and it will upgrade your PvE item level only.

Sauce: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1461191687?t=0h39m46s

So, effectively, you will PvP and get PvP gear. That's it. Done. Huzzah. If you then want to increase the ilvl for PvE/world content/WPvP, you can. This won't make a difference to PvP ilvl.

[Nerovar]

"The plan for Dragonflight is for the additional PvP item level to not work in the outdoor world. You will still be able to upgrade the PVE item level of PvP gear through conquest though."
Upgrades still being a thing can fuck off completely. Remove that shit before Alpha even goes live

Also true. The upgrade system is just dogshit for PvP.

[Buliwyf the Omen]

"The class section of the new talent trees will be interesting for PvP. It might cause the player to choose between defensives or utility"

Indirectly confirms that the Classes are pruned.

Well done Blizzard, since I highly doubt you add new options to the talent tree.

[RobertMugabe]

[*]Rated solo queue could come later on in Dragonflight, but it would likely only allow you to queue by yourself.

Well that's the entire point, isn't it? I want Solo Shuffle to have a rating (and thus the ability to upgrade the conquest gear) and ranks just like 2s and 3s. Of course it should be random and you should only be able to queue solo for it.

I am bit disappointed that we are not getting it at launch, but if it comes at all and it has the same rewards and all that like arena, then I am happy.

[wombinator04]

So PVP still an afterthought and will be shit again, at least they confirmed it.

[wowrefugee]

The team wants to add more battlegrounds and arenas, but nothing to announce at the moment.

I wish the devs would cut this bullshit out. This clearly means they aren't adding any.

We just need Ion to come out and say "it doesn't make sense story wise, since alliance and horde are working together" for this to be complete.

[Argorwal]

Upgrades can work for their PvE item level, but in PvP all honor gear should be the same item level and all conquest gear the same item level.

[Theangryone]

What's the point of this?

To make sure the pve players still have an edge and won’t get mad

[Soisoisoi]

@Nerovar @wombinator04

Looks like the quote is a bit misleading. See my edit above here.

[Rinnegan2]

this is great

[Starscream101]

Just make PvP gear like in WoD no raiting everyone can get the highest arena gear no hurdles for late comers to get the gear because of rating you will have way more people in pvp if you do it that way simple fix for the better health of the pvp game.

[Onikaroshi]

Just make PvP gear like in WoD no raiting everyone can get the highest arena gear no hurdles for late comers to get the gear because of rating you will have way more people in pvp if you do it that way simple fix for the better health of the pvp game.

That is what they're doing, MMO-Champ just paraphrasing bad as usual.

We're thinking of getting back to a system where all Conquest gear just scales up to that PvP item level ceiling regardless of your rating. Once its Conquest gear that's the best stuff for PvP period and then upgrading it and progressing through the ranks from Duelist, Gladiator, and so forth is raising the PvE item level to let you bring it into other high-end content if that's what you want to do. We think that it'll make for a better, more skill-oriented competitive experience on the PvP side.

The upgrading is ONLY for pve ilvl.

[LordVargK]

The team wants to add more incentive to do Warmode PvP at launch.

Ahem. Please don't?
WM was a terribly implemented and it's good that no real rewards are tied to it right now. At least no PvE rewards. If they once again get the idea to use the Alliance as cannonfodder they would have learned nothing from BfA. Tie PvP rewards to it and PvP rewards only.

[cocomen2]

but Holinka says he is not upset if a few trinkets from PVE are competitive for PvP.

Ofc, not he gonna suffer from it, Lmao. Is it so hard to SPLIT pve/pvp gear and add teamplates like in Legion, jesus, man.

[Walkerbo]

Bajheera; fuck that guy

[silverdragon234]

Fair enough reasons

[Razzako]

but Holinka says he is not upset if a few trinkets from PVE are competitive for PvP

man fuck off with this shit

[Tojara]

I don't think there's an instance where PvE trinkets would ever be used if they keep going with the set bonuses offered by trinkets, the only time in Shadowlands was what, at the beginning of the expansion when nobody had fucking gear? Why use PvE trinkets when you have bombs that do 33% of somebodies health, maledict, remove CC or make you virtually immune to CC and interrupts at the cost of one CC being 20% longer every 15 seconds? That footnote he added is virtually saying it's not a big deal if there's a PvE trinket that's good in PvP because the trade off is enormous to do such a thing and they always have the option to balance said trinket anyway.

Everything he said is an absolute win if you care about PvP at all. Your conquest goes to max available iLvL obtainable in PvP meaning you don't even really need to grind out honor. For reference that means the base conquest gear in the current patch is just automatically 285 as soon as you buy it, with no hoops or rating cutoffs to acquire. This means you'll never really be out geared and it's essentially the WoD fixed iLvLs but sort of better because WoD had very slight scaling (although very small).

I guess the only downside to this is doing outdoor content as a PvP player because your iLvL won't scale up, but I'm unsure if this is the case if you actively do world content while in warmode. Regardless, I think most people who PvP will take fixed iLvLs at the potential cost of slower world activities if it means an even playing field without hoops to jump through. I'm pretty sure even the lowest of low can manage to do world content in the base iLvL conquest gear that's available on the vendor in 9.2.

All that said the upgrade system above still exists and allows you to upgrade your PvP gear for PvE gear if you want. Meaning the above 'problem' is sort of erased anyway. It's a pretty good way to get PvE players into PvP, and makes people who are good at PvP actually have competitive PvE gear if they so choose. As long as the iLvL brackets are something similar to Shadowlands I take no issue with it.

The MMO paraphrasing is terrible but the way people consume information is equally terrible. Multiple posts in this thread complaining about issues that they literally fixed if they bothered to physically read the thing lol.