Does having gems in sockets matter in current pvp?

[fiestatastic]

Are there any good guides out there that have an understanding as to how gear currently works in bfa pvp? The stat template seems gone, but they mentioned that everyone was normalized in terms of ilvl power, so do we choose the set of gear that has the best stats regardless of ilvl? Are sockets turned off so that I should just make choices based solely on the stats that the piece of gear has?

[Aeula]

Sockets are not turned off, or at least the UI doesn't show them as such.

I'd imagine it works like it did before stat templates. Ilvl doesn't seem to be as 'normalized' as they say.

[DenniZ]

People are actually pvping in ICC Cata raid gear to get more gem slots since ilvl doesnt matter anymore. LOL! Blizzard has now officialy screwed up the pvp part of WoW.

[talmir]

Whut? I just got back into pvp after a looooong break from it. Does gear not actually matter any more? (apart from gems)

[DenniZ]

Nope. Welcome to the world of scalecraft. 2000 dmg on your screen could very well be 1700 dmg on the targets screen depending on his ilvl.

[Knolan]

It appears (thought it might have been fixed) that the gem slots work fully, while other stats are reduced/increased based on your stats and your enemies stats.

For instance, a skill (say, mortal strike) should do 5% of the enemy HP as damage. So if you hit someone with 100k HP that is 5k damage, but if you hit someone with 80k HP, then it is 4k. As your item level increase the percentage increases as well, but not as fast as it used to be.

[Mafic]

People are actually pvping in ICC Cata raid gear to get more gem slots since ilvl doesnt matter anymore. LOL! Blizzard has now officialy screwed up the pvp part of WoW.

True, but Blizz doesn't understand the point of gear progression in a MMORPG so this does not surprise me.

[barrsftw]

It depends what 'PvP' you're talking about. There's 0 evidence that gear scales at all in Rated PvP.