Shadowlands Beta PvP Updates – Vendor Gear Changes
Blizzard announced in their last Shadowlands Development update that they would be making changes to the way that Conquest vendor gear works in Shadowlands. Today, they’ve laid out their current plan to address concerns players had about PvP gearing in Shadowlands.
The initial criticism of the gear was that the stats weren’t optimized for PvP, so the best gear for playing PvP would have to be obtained from other types of content. To remedy this, Blizzard is changing the stat distribution on PvP gear to always include Versatility. There will be three combinations (Versatility/Haste, Versatility/Mastery, and Versatility/Critical Strike), and two out of the three combinations will be available for every slot.
The post also notes that you won’t be able to get your optimal stats on every item solely through PvP, as with any type of content. However, they believe that these changes should result in the majority of a PvP player’s gear coming from PvP.
As we mentioned in last week’s Shadowlands Development Update , we’ve heard a lot of feedback from the PvP community that Conquest vendors in Shadowlands don’t offer enough of most players’ desired stats, leading to the sense that much of the best gear for PvP will have to be earned outside of PvP. We don’t want that to be the case.
Our current plan to address these concerns should become available in the Shadowlands Beta over the next couple of weeks.
First, we’re shifting the stat distributions on Conquest gear to always include Versatility. There should be two out of the three combinations (Versatility/Haste, Versatility/Mastery, Versatility/Crit) available for every slot. Secondly, we are adding a 2-piece set bonus, activated by equipping two PvP trinkets, such as crowd-control break (Medallion) or throughput (Battlemaster’s, Dominance, etc.) trinkets. This bonus will increase the damage and healing benefit of Versatility (but not the defensive benefit) while in Arenas, Battlegrounds, or War Mode.
The Conquest vendor will not offer perfect coverage of every stat combination, but neither does any other single source of gear in WoW. A player who favors Haste and Mastery cannot get a full set of Haste/Mastery gear from raiding alone, so if you’re someone who wants to be absolutely optimal, you’ll benefit from branching out across multiple types of content. Nonetheless, the result of these changes should be that a majority of the best gear for PvP now comes through the PvP system.
We look forward to your feedback on this, especially following your experiences testing the new itemization over the coming weeks.
