Honestly, expertise should be based on your valor, say everyone has a base 1800 expertise, and for every level of valor you gain 2% expertise per point of valor. At 100 valor you have a max of 2000 expertise. Every new expansion/patch upgrade you can raise the valor cap to increase expertise.

Now put nothing but PVE gear on all pvp vendors which can be bought with wz coms, and make them the same as the PVE vendors. So you can pvp to get your pve gear, as it is now, you can just pve and sometimes pvp to get the best gear in the game. Hell you dont really need to even do that now, just have to figure out which gear is the BIS (most times its not even the best pve gear) to get the best wz stats.

Its obvious you cant fix the bolster system in such a way that you reward pure pvpers the ability to have superior gear.

Can't do this:

1. PVE gear is tuned to fight stupid meat lump mobs with 1 million health and 10 different boring phases.

2. The PVE basement-dwellers would have a fit that someone could get similar gear by fighting people instead of spending hours on 16 person raids. They are already furious that we PvP'ers can melt them in over world PVP, despite all their so called effort.

Can't do this:

 

1. PVE gear is tuned to fight stupid meat lump mobs with 1 million health and 10 different boring phases.

 

2. The PVE basement-dwellers would have a fit that someone could get similar gear by fighting people instead of spending hours on 16 person raids. They are already furious that we PvP'ers can melt them in over world PVP, despite all their so called effort.

I would agree with you, EXCEPT, that now to get the best pvp gear in a wz, you have to add in PVE pieces. Also, as soon as anyone (PVErs as well) hits 55 they are instantly bolstered to near equal levels of conquerer geared pvpers.

Honestly, expertise should be based on your valor, say everyone has a base 1800 expertise, and for every level of valor you gain 2% expertise per point of valor. At 100 valor you have a max of 2000 expertise. Every new expansion/patch upgrade you can raise the valor cap to increase expertise.

Ugh, no no no. GTA Online does something similar: as your rank goes up so does your HP. A level 60 walking about teens is a super human, much less someone who's close to 100.

Bolster is fine as it is. There are just a handful of things that need to be tweaked and addressed and even then they're not major; people just blow up about them. We don't need to throw out the whole system over some minor balancing issues.

So basically, You want to make people who want to get into PVP go through hours of losses and frustration (Moreso than now.) to have any fun with the game.

Good plan! What could go wrong?

I miss the days of recruit gear.

I don't. Recruits going up against war heroes and you quickly saw a player say "**** it" to PVP and leave altogether.

I don't. Recruits going up against war heroes and you quickly saw a player say "**** it" to PVP and leave altogether.

Only a coward would leave. Or even worse, someone who wants everything given to them. I remember starting in recruit gear, and everyone was in battle master gear(And this was back when the PVP community was 10 times as big and collectively skilled). Yes, I got stomped, but I was still able to assist my team by playing more in a support capacity which is paramount when you're undergeared to maximize your effectiveness. After 3 weeks of heavy PVP, I was able to get all of my War Hero gear. And since I was undergeared for so many games, I was forced to pay more attention to what my opponent was doing, and how to counter them in numerous ways since I had to be smarter in many instances to win. So once I acquired all of my gear I absolutely melted faces across the board. That's because I combined my experience from being undergeard along with the extra power of my upgraded stats to be one of the above average PVPers on my server.

This game is the easiest when it comes to gearing your PVP toon. WoW is 100 times harder and longer, that's because you have to play so many games including a crap-load of arenas to get an optimized PVP set. Everyone who PVP's at one time or another was the guy getting pulverized because he was undergeared and eventually earned his gear. You're a cry baby, who gets his feelings hurt if he loses. Well so what, instead of crying about it use it as fuel to play harder and longer so when you do earn your gear you make every one of your opponents pay.

Only a coward would leave. Or even worse, someone who wants everything given to them. I remember starting in recruit gear, and everyone was in battle master gear(And this was back when the PVP community was 10 times as big and collectively skilled). Yes, I got stomped, but I was still able to assist my team by playing more in a support capacity which is paramount when you're undergeared to maximize your effectiveness. After 3 weeks of heavy PVP, I was able to get all of my War Hero gear. And since I was undergeared for so many games, I was forced to pay more attention to what my opponent was doing, and how to counter them in numerous ways since I had to be smarter in many instances to win. So once I acquired all of my gear I absolutely melted faces across the board. That's because I combined my experience from being undergeard along with the extra power of my upgraded stats to be one of the above average PVPers on my server.

 

This game is the easiest when it comes to gearing your PVP toon. WoW is 100 times harder and longer, that's because you have to play so many games including a crap-load of arenas to get an optimized PVP set. Everyone who PVP's at one time or another was the guy getting pulverized because he was undergeared and eventually earned his gear. You're a cry baby, who gets his feelings hurt if he loses. Well so what, instead of crying about it use it as fuel to play harder and longer so when you do earn your gear you make every one of your opponents pay.

Yeah, not a word of that is true.

First, let's get the big one out of the way: the PvP queues haven't slowed down one bit since bolster was introduced. If anything they've sped up. This is on Shadowlands which isn't even a PvP server. The only players who left PvP were the ones who got mad they couldn't steam roll fresh-50s anymore and they've been more than replaced with new players who can actually contribute to a match.

Bolster is killing PvP? Not even remotely. It's brought more new life to the community than anything else in the past two years.

Second, it's very nice that you liked being ground into hamburger for a few weeks before you could stand even a remote chance. Most people did not. Recruit armor was a living nightmare. The only reason to wear it was because it was just marginally better than PvE gear; the difference between exploding instantaneously and exploding instantaneously and twitching for a few seconds after. If you didn't have a guild to boost you, you had to spend days of loss after loss after loss to eek out a few commendations so you could buy mid tier so that you could actually contribute to a match. Then you were only about a month or two away to earning ranked gear and actually being somewhat a force to be reckoned with . . . and still lose three-fourths of your matches because most people you teamed with hadn't progressed as far as you had. God help you if you wanted to start a new character and start the process all over again.

Third, the game is FINALLY skill based. And don't even try to say it's not. The number one complaint about the game pre-bolster was that it was completely gear based. Now you really do actually have to learn your class abilities to contribute to a match. Before? Well first of all you can't learn your class when none of your abilities do any damage and you die in seconds. You maybe had a two or three week window where you were even with the general community (assuming your play window didn't overlap with a few top tier premades). After that, you could just press random keys while most players could just flail wildly like a hysterical child. The old system encouraged skill and learning the game? Don't make me laugh.

Only a coward would leave..

Or a new player who isn't having fun being facemelted. He is not going to queue for pvp again. One less player in the queue.

The reason Bolster exists at 55 is so fresh lvl 55s can actually play a constructive part in a match until they have full 2018 gear. I know some PvPers think that new 55s should have to suffer through several days of being massacred over and over as some sort of sadistic initiation to PvP but if you do think that ask yourself this question, would you want those fresh 55s on your team? If you take Bolster away the first thing most players would do would be to inspect everyone else's gear in a WZ and a lot of them would probably quit if they found more than 1 player with less than 2018 gear.

The problem with bolster is not that it exists but that it is too mathematically complicated and can be easily exploited, PvE gear should never be better in a WZ than PvP gear, just as PvP gear should not be as viable in Operations as PvE.

I believe Bolster can be improved and made to work much better, but I also suspect that my solution (see bellow) would require a lot of reprogramming so I doubt it will happen.

Anyway my solution is as follows

1. Remove Expertise from PvP gear and replace it with an item flag that marks the gear as PvP

2. Choose a base line gear set for PvP, right now I'd say the old Partisan gear stats would be about right.

3. When a player enters PvP (either a WZ or in Open World) the bolster system checks each piece of gear (including individual mods, enhancements):

• If the gear has a PvP flag on it Bolster leaves it alone
  
• If the gear hasn't got a PvP flag and has lower stats than Partisan it is Bolstered up to Partisan
  
• If the gear has no PvP flag and has higher stats than Partisan it is "Bolstered" down to Partisan
  

4. Remove Bolster Up (but leave Bolster Down) from Ranked WZ, if you don't have at least full Conqueror you have no place in Ranked PvP.