Best Of

Not many PvPers on IC, but there's a bunch of new info on Legion PvP.

Legion PvP

• There won't be gear with Resilience, PvP Power, dual item levels, or gear specifically made for PvP.
• The team doesn't want people to feel that they must have PvP gear to participate in PvP.
• When you enter a battleground or arena, the game will set your stats from your spec, not your gear. This means all of your stats will come from a template specific to your spec. If one spec isn't doing well in PvP, their spec's template can be tuned individually.
• PvP talents plus the spec stat templates will allow the team to tune balance in arenas and battlegrounds much better than they ever have been able to do before.
• PvP right now uses gear as a progression system. Once players get their full set of gear, many of them are done.
• PvP Talents try to take the place of the progression that came from gear.
• Trinkets, set bonuses, and enchants will not be active in PvP.
• Right now players stack enchants, set bonuses, and trinkets, lining them all up at once to do a lot of damage. Outside of when all of those are up, players don't feel like they are doing much damage. This should help to make sustained damage a bigger part of PvP.
• Once players reach the max PvP level, they can reset it to gain a Prestige level. This gives access to different cosmetic rewards.
• When a player reaches PvP level 10 (roughly 20% of the way there), they will have unlocked an option in every row.
• The CC break trinket has become very important in PvP, so adding it as a PvP talent will offset the loss of active trinkets. There will be some other options in that row that might be useful, such as reducing CC times by 20%.
• The team hasn't decided exactly what they are going to do with the Human racial. They could leave it alone and offer a different talent in that row to Humans. The racial plus the new options could be too good.
• As you get better gear, your stats are increased a smaller amount. For example, every 5 item levels may give you a 1% stat increase. This way gear still will increase your power, but it won't give you a huge advantage.
• There are plans for players to be able to get great gear from PvP, but it may not be as easy as it is today. It may be easier for high rated players to get better gear than more casual players.
• You won't have to raid to get the best gear for PvP.

Warlords PvP

• Spectator mode and the new player run tournaments have been exciting.
• The team was happy with how skirmishes worked out. It gave players who didn't have their arena partners online the opportunity to play some arenas, as well as other players that wanted a break from leveling or gearing up.

• Battleground strongboxes worked out well. Players were able to get different gear in a more unpredictable way.
  The Group Finder was a great addition. It allowed people to find others to play with.

• Ashran fell short of where the team and players would have liked to see it go. During the ramp up to Warlords, there were a lot of people excited about a new world PvP zone that had a large area and epic battles.

• The team didn't execute on that idea. They have tried to make changes based on player behavior and feedback, making mistakes along the way. They have done things like putting exclusive rewards in Ashran to make them feel special, which resulted in lots of negative feedback.
• The current state of Ashran can be fun for people that are interested in that type of experience. The people who don't want to do Ashran don't have to.
• They have learned a lot from the experience about rewards and driving players to fight each other. Hopefully next time the team tries something like Ashran they can execute better.
• The dual item level system worked, but it was ugly. Players had two item levels on their gear, with their item level increasing suddenly in combat, which means they couldn't see their states. PvE gear also hit the invisible item level ceiling. Players who didn't PvP full time still felt compelled to go and get PvP gear so that they could do PvP. It was a cool system, but it fell short in a lot of ways.
• MLG and ESL have shown interest in WoW.