There is a renown reward for lvl 24, saying "Description: The maximum item level that Unrated PvP rewards can be upgraded to is increased." So if thats the last upgrade, it takes most likely 12 weeks for PvP Gear to be better than mythic +0 gear.
Definitely not a requirement bud, you can gear up the way you want through pve dungeons. PvP isn't forced however us pvp'ers DO pve as well to get the things we want from your end of the board. It's really not a big deal man.
Looks cool, will be interesting to try to optimize time efficiency of the gearing using combination of PvE and PvP. Especially with the M+ reward nerf (only 1 item per run), I will definitely not run more than 1 weekly except to maybe improve rio.
"Let loot be loot"
Note, upgrades are time-gated behind your renown level, and I bet the same goes for conquest having at least a hard or theoretical cap. So if you compare the two routes to gear, i.e. Mythic+ vs Raids vs PVP, they would be more equivalent give or take, with them being ranked more to less based on upgrade per time spent accordingly, Mythic+ > PvP > Raids on the frequency of item acquisition. If there is no hard cap on conquest, then it will definitely be the most deterministic way of gearing, but we can't judge if it is the shortest path, since we do not know the acquisition rate of conquest yet.
So whats going to happen to the current honor system?Are we going to lose progression?
https://shadowlands.wowhead.com/news=316172/pvp-vendor-and-item-upgrade-vendor-located-in-oribos-first-look#news-post-316172In this thread they said the Unrated Gear is ilvl 175 and the rated gear is ilvl 195.. and over here they are saying you start with ilvl 158 and you can upgrade it till ilvl 190 ? i'm a bit confused now.. ? So Honor gear you start with 158 and you can rank it up to 190? but your 'rated' gear (conquest) is still better then you full upgraded Unrated gear (honor)
Hard to say if the system is fine, because we don't know how and how much we'll earn this new honor currency.One VERY bad note though : while some of the previous expansion had blue gear+epic gear, and then one more epic gear per PvP season, Shadowlands Day 1 has already SIX stages of blue gear, and we can assume it'll be the same for conquest gear. Moreover, the honor gear ilevels go from 164 to 190, a whooping 26illevel just for a "beginner" gear. This is utterly disappointing : if farming honor points is hard, it will take us forever to get a full honor gear with maximum ilevel ; if farming is easy, it is all unecessary. I may add this : since only honor gear gives a full range of choice regarding stats, it would be pretty much mandatory for some class/specs to buy standard honor gear and to grind the 6 blue stage, plus all the stages with conquest points. For every piece of gear.As I said, I hope we'll earn a lot of honor currency...