Nah man, i'm just quoting facts.
PvP participation fell 90% (both casual and rated - a little more than 90% on casual, even) in Legion.
That's abysmal failure defined.
When you implement a new idea, and it causes 90% of your players to quit that activity, thats failure. Full stop.
... thats straight from fucking Blizzard.
They outright state how many Gladiators there were, and that information is published (right here on the front page of this website).
Since the ladder is a p yramid, you can figure out exactly how many people were on the ladder any given season.
Math hard.
I mean, its almost like we went over this - and exactly how many people were on the ladder, and how many casuals even earned Prestige 2, much less 12 (which would equate to a single season of earning Conquest gear via BGs) like a dozen times.
I think the idea behind templates were good, however the way they locked us into stats you may not want for a specific build wasnt good.
If they wouldve let us perhaps choose what stats to focus on say a prio system I wouldve been more than fine with it.
I dont think its too bad now either, I just leveled up my first alt. Entered 3s as a 290 ilvl Hunter, I had around 75k hp in total. I dont recall ever being roflstomped by anything. As for now my Hunter (which have done a total of 5 dungeons) is 350, quite behind on HoA levels but thats on me for not doing anything on it
I always thought templates were a good thing.
got my first hero of the alliance in Legion, and templates made it easier when I wanted to play alts, the power difference was relatively minor
Not sure why people complained about templates so much, unless they're one of the people that suck at PVP and needed superior gear to stand a chance.
I'm not sure yet if it was the templates I wasn't feeling or if it was the gear model. Both of them together were really awful though.
Right now PVP in BGs feels good. Can't complain.
Exactly, stat template was great cause it made pvp more balanced than any other expansion. Problem with Legion was the reward system not game play.
Problem is I really don't think Blizzard cares much about pvp or they don't have the time to fix these problems. Because their main priority is raid and pve content. And yeah majority of the players just want to pwn lower geared people in bgs and they are the vocal ones.
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You got any facts to back that up?
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I would put most of the blame of the gear reward, which was the problem. PvP reward in Legion was worse than crap but they have tried to improve since then. Reward from M+ was so much better it made rated pvping obsolete.
Yeah, we did three or four complete teardowns of the entire system from Alpha - the last big changes about 14 months into Legion. Right down to the percentages.
No, i'm not going to go looking for months-old posts that are on like page 40 by now. You can do that if you're interested. Theyre still there.
The gist was:
In WoD, you could obtain via six hours of no-PvP (and even no-PvE if you were careful) a full set of Honor gear. Honor gear was 9.4% behind, stat-wise, from Conquest gear. Meaning that if you had 1000 stamina on a full set of Conquest gear, you had 940 stamina on the Honor gear. Honor gear was completely viable to start PvPing without being at a giant disadvantage. Also, in that system, even as the casual-est of casuals, you got the same Conquest gear everyone else did by about 1/3 of the way through the season.
In Legion, it was a complicated mess of what stacked with what and how, but the (simplest) version is:
Your base stats in PvP were calculated as if you were a certain iLevel. This went up as Legion progressed, but started at 800. This part isn't super relevant, though, since it applied to everyone equally. But basically, all your base stats (Int, etc) were calculated as if you were this iLevel.
THEN your template applied (when you saw "Agi set to 80%" or whatever, this is when this was applied)
Then talents applied.
Then PvP specific talents applied.
Then artifact traits applied (if you had any that modified your stats, like crit, mastery, stam, etc).
Then it applied the bonus stam for artifact traits (not specific traits, the .75% stam increase you got for every trait).
THEN it applied the bonus for iLevel, at the very end, which was calculated (for the entirety of Legion) from a floor of iLevel 800. So, a fresh 110 heading into BGs cold be facing off against people that were 950-970 pretty easily at the end of Legion (which was 17%) a more likely/realistic scenario was 10-ish%.
Add to that that in addition to having to increase your iLevel to not be outpowered, you ALSO had to unlock PvP talents depending on your class (some classes were viable with none, some needed every single unlock).... AND artifact traits (which didn't become easy to catch up on till the last 1/4 of the xpansion).... and it was a total shit-show from minute one.
It was a WORSE power disparity in 95% of cases than the previous system. The ONLY benefit it had was to absolutely-fresh 110s who had nothing but the gear they got while questing, because it boosted them to the base iLevel (800, 850, then 900) and then applied the template. And it artificially segregated them into a separate queue, as well.
They could still EASILY end up 12-17% behind in base stats, and 30-50% (for tank specs) behind in stam.
I dont think we're disagreeing here, except that i'd argue the problem still exists in BfA. PvP for non-rated players is unrewarding. Therefore, they wont play.I would put most of the blame of the gear reward, which was the problem. PvP reward in Legion was worse than crap but they have tried to improve since then. Reward from M+ was so much better it made rated pvping obsolete.
Legion PVP templates were great for PVE heroes and dragonslayers to jump right in and have fun. That is why Holnika designed the templates around what PVE players wanted for PVP and not want PVP players wanted for PVP.
Too bad 90% of PVP players stopped doing PVP in legion due to templates.
Except the removal of stat templates weren't 100% focused at being able to curb stomp people(RPG btw), but rather being able to focus certain stats, but that doesn't matter in BfA because ILVL = betterphilosophy and addition of RNG gearing for PvP, but ofc lets not forgt class design and class balance is garbage, and these so called class changes on the PTR are 95% balancing tuning, get class design down then balance.
Last edited by Kagiri; 2018-09-22 at 04:02 AM.