Rated PvP Gearing - Blue Tracker

#1 - Sept. 30, 2016, 5 p.m.

As we’d previously announced, our intention with gear rewarded from rated PvP in Patch 7.0.3 is for the chance to receive a Warforged/Titanforged piece of gear to increase as your rating increases. We’ve recently discovered a bug that is causing that system not to function. Currently, rated PvP is always rewarding item level 840 gear, regardless of rating. That is not our intent.

We’re currently working on a fix for this issue, and once it’s ready, we’ll apply it during weekly restarts. We want to correct it as quickly as possible, but don’t want to inadvertently punish players who have already collected their weekly bonus chests. We’re also implementing more rigorous testing procedures for future PvP seasons to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Realistically, we should have caught this bug during testing, but didn’t. That’s completely our fault, and we apologize. That said, we’re not really happy with the current model for PvP gearing anyway (even ignoring this issue), and we’re planning to make a couple of key changes for Patch 7.1.

For starters, instead of having rating increase the chance for a piece to roll Warforged or Titanforged, it will increase the minimum item level that a piece can be. So, as your rating increases, you will be guaranteed to earn higher item level gear, regardless of whether it Warforges or not. We’re also going to clearly tell you what the minimum item level you can receive is, to remove the guesswork.

Secondly, instead of basing gear off of your current rating, it will be based on the highest rating you earned in the previous week. This means you’ll always be rewarded for your best performance of the week, no matter when exactly that was.

Again, we apologize that we didn’t recognize and correct the issue with the current gearing system sooner, but are hopeful that the changes in Patch 7.1 will result in a better overall experience for everyone.