#1 - July 22, 2013, 3:38 a.m.
Making an edit for the ridiculous number of people - apparently including Lore - who don't understand that world PVP is not inherently unfair except where gear is concerned.
The same argument keeps popping up again and again and again where people say "world pvp is inherently unfair, so making gear fair isn't important". They are completely and utterly wrong. Each discrete pvp encounter in the world may be unfair, but that doesn't mean that world pvp in general is inherently unfair. These micro-level unfairnesses stem from a macro-level fairness. EVERY player has the ability to use the environment to their own benefit, and use the fact that their enemy is already engaged, and so on.
There are only 2 "inherent" unfairnesses in world pvp - gear and class.
Class is under constant rebalance and in a constant state of flux. Furthermore, where your own class is at a disadvantage against another class, it is also likely to be equally at an advantage against another.
Gear, then, is the singular disadvantage that is completely out of the player's control, without subjecting themselves to content they don't want to do. Without doing heroic pve content, a fully geared pvp player will never, ever be able to challenge a pve geared player at a MACRO level in world pvp. That is to say, if both players are equally aware of environment and use it to their advantage, and neither player has a remarkable class advantage, the pve player will win 100% of the time. This is an INHERENT unfairness, and it is also easily fixed.
Please stop trying to make arguments that because the environment makes discrete fights unfair, that the system is unfair on a whole, and that even if that were true, this is a good reason not to make a specific, easily fixable part of that unfairness, better.
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Outside of instances, why can't top tier PvP be equal ilvl to heroic gear?
For instance, in the current tier, what would have been the undesirable outcome if Tyrannical gear had been 540ilvl, but scaled to 496 inside raids as all gear does in PvP? Or, if the aim is that in WPvP PvE and PvP gear are relatively equally, why couldn't it be at an ilvl where the pvp power made up for the difference in ilevel - probably somewhere around 530?
If we had:
ilvl ~535 PvP top tier
ilvl 526 normal mode
ilvl 546 heroic
All gear scales to 496 in instanced pvp
PvP gear scales to 496 in PvE instances
You would have essentially the same scenario as right now, except world pvp would be tenable in PvP gear - not that PvP gear would be better, but that they would be equal. Oh, and PvPers would have a slightly easier time than they do now doing dailies and world bosses.
Is there a downside I am missing somewhere?
You don't gain any PvE progression advantage by farming PvP gear, you don't gain any PvP advantage by farming progression PvE gear, and both player sets are on reasonably even footing in a world based fight. The technology is already there to fix this problem as far as I can see, is there a particular challenge to implementing an ilvl lock on PvP gear in PvE instanced content? You already do it on the PTR for all gear in both directions.
