Why the HUGE ilvl jump from Honor to Conq?

With crafted at 450 and honor at 458, any one would expect to see Conquest at 466 and rated at 474. But no, they jumped Conquest up to 483? 25 ilvls? Why? I just spent the last few week slowly farming my 458s got a full set. All along i figured i was getting my butt handed to me because i was only wearing a few pieces of PvP and thought it would get much better with more pieces. Well it did , but not by much. Well i finally got my full set and grabbed a buddy and went to the arena. After getting our butt handed to us, we noticed that most all of the players were in nearly full Epics, not unheard of, i expected that, but going to the vendor to by my first epic Conquest item ( i always go for a trinkets ) i find that the item level isnt what i thought it was gong to be. IT was 483!!!??? It blew my mind. I knew i am not the best PvPer on the planet, but i am far far from the worst. I know in my heart we should have won a few of those matches since we never really had this much trouble at low rank, even at the start of our progress in season.

Now im checking things much, much closer, the gear is way out of wack. Were are unsure if we want to continue on with this season of pvp. To us with all the other problems pvp has seen and rankings have been skewed, this season is going to have a * beside it, and were not sure if we want to be apart of it.

We are hopeful that next season wont see the HUGE skew in gearing lvls and we can actually participate without being cannon fodder for 8 weeks before we get enough gear to compete with players of our skill bracket. Getting Pwned by a unskilled twink was bad enough at 19, 29, 39 ect .. but at 90 when things are supposed to be more equal is a shame.

BioWare did sorta the same thing, and that was all anyone was talking about for weeks. funny how we have not seen a word about this from a game with 9 million more players.

Same as the PvE philosophy now I guess. Don't want people "Catching up" too fast, because then people might spend their time playing the game or something.

It really translates to: Don't miss the beginning of an expansion, or fuck you.

IT has nothing to do with catching up. It will take the same time, well maybe slightly longer because of of the gear cliff. But it is brutal to have such a huge gear scale for new players. Im done with my reps now and PvE is going fine. So i have alot more free time in WoW to do other things. I choose to PvP with a buddy, we have been doing it since Wrath. And it has never been a issue before. We were always behind other players, but the scale was slight, and gear in a few cases would give a advantage at a certain point, but we would catch up progressively to players around our skill level rather quickly As our experience as a guide , its going to take probably 3 to 4 times as long to catch up with the gear cliff the way it is now. Just working thru Gear over skill players will take a while.

I think its a shame. I think as more and more players finish up their PVE goals and start to look to PvP they will discover this massive gear cliff and you will hear much more about it on the forums. I sent Lore a question about it for his PST show , i am hoping he wont just dismiss it and take the time to think about what it does to players starting mid way thru a PVP season. They should only have a 8 ilvl progression for fairness. This 25 ilvl is wrong in so many ways, if i wasnt being counted on for raids i would quit till 5.2 or next season stated or they fixed this travesty.

The reason for the gap is the change to honor and justice gear shortly after Mists launched. Honor was 464 and justice at 450 item level, and many players felt "forced" to gear up through PvP to meet the 460 requirement for raid finder quickly. They ended up increasing justice to 458 and lowering honor gear to the same, but buffing both PvP stats, power and resilience.

Whether that stat buff was enough to offset the item level difference is a different debate, but that's why the item level difference is what it is. It was only 19 at launch, which is about the typical difference between tier/season changes.