PvP changes and outstanding issues

I played Classic and SoM and I think I have a pretty decent background in the ranking system (did the r14 grind in Classic and have helped managed brackets), so I'd like to get my thoughts out there on the ranking system changes. Overall, I think the changes are mostly positive, but I'll outline why below:

Pros:

• For the sweatiest rankers, these changes won't impact them too much. There were going to be pushing the top bracket each week anyways. Now they might cap out earlier and go touch some grass.

• For more casual rankers or sweaty rankers who have real life come up, the ability to not derank and thus be able to mostly retain your place in the ranking system is a really nice change.

• Making brackets dependent on pre-set honor caps rather than intra-faction ranking each week is huge. No longer do people need to worry about people "breaking the bracket" and the general, and rightfully placed, paranoia around brackets breakers is gone.

• If you hit the top cap and you want to keep playing to help your pre-made/friends reach their caps, you're not limited anymore by the community trying to maintain a socially enforced cap. You just get to build-up marks for next week.

Outstanding Issues:

• I think 750k as the cap for top bracket is a bit high, but it is in the right ball park. I think 600-650k is probably the right number. The problem here is that this is VERY faction-balance dependent. When I ranked, we had 20-25 minute queues, so hitting 750k is much more time-intensive than when queues are less than 5 minutes or even instant. I think this cap should probably be adjusted so that it is more obtainable for the majority faction and thus giving a faction balance incentive for players to roll a character on the minority faction. However, often PvPing the day before honor reset was strongly discouraged as to not break the bracket and that isn't a concern now, so maybe being able to use that extra day to PvP will mean 750k is the right number. Personally, I think a bit lower would be the sweet spot.

• With regards to SoM2, I have concerns about how obtainable these caps will be in later phases of the game when the rewards diminish relative to raid gear and thus fewer people are ranking. Perhaps progressively lower the honor caps for each bracket in each phase could help address this. Grinding out r14 on Era seems sort of pointless in lots of ways outside of vanity, so I think the bracket caps there should probably reflect that as well.

• I do think they should gate r12-14 gear a bit in SoM2. I know some argue as late as AQ40, but I think gating it that long really does remove a lot of the incentive to rank. I think a BWL gate is fine. A ZG gate would perhaps be acceptable, but I think that might be a bit late. It's not about people "not running MC/BWL" as some naysayers suggest on this sub, because people including warriors will still be running even MC for QSR and OSG. Not to mention healers only really get the r14 mace and AV OH from ranking, so they still want some loot from MC and lots of loot from BWL. My argument is that it is more about not trivializing the MC content. At the same time, MC is mostly trivial content to begin with so I'm not sure how I feel about it "getting trivialized" a few weeks or a month early.

• Please give us a higher cap on marks (like 100). Trying to stock them up in your mailbox the day before reset, so that you can "mark bomb" after reset is just annoying.

Overall:

I think this is a BIG step in the right direction. I think my only outstanding question is what they are envisioning for the honor caps for each bracket? That would be really helpful information as well. Where do y'all think the honor caps for each bracket should be placed?