Lore
We are planning to revisit PvP Power in Warlords. Our current thinking is that, instead of a flat percentage increase to your normal damage/healing in PvP (as it is currently), it'll be a bonus amount of your spec's primary stat (Strength, Agility, or Intellect).
Here's an example with some completely made-up numbers: lets say a piece of gear has 80 Strength and 30 PvP Power on it. In a PvP environment, that would total out to be 110 Strength. Meanwhile, an equivalent piece of PvE gear might only have 100 Strength on it. Again, those numbers are purely hypothetical, but hopefully it illustrates the idea.
That change accomplishes a couple of things for us. First, it lets us keep PvP and PvE item levels closer together, while still ensuring that PvP gear remains best for PvP and vice versa. It also "demystifies" PvP Power quite a bit; a percentage-based increase can be hard to really quantify without a lot of math, but raw stats are much easier to understand.
As to the name, we can talk about it, but part of why we chose the term "PvP Power" to begin with was that it makes it extremely obvious that the stat only functions inside PvP environments. We want to be sure that players who purchase PvP gear know that it's going to be less effective in PvE situations. I'll bring it up, though :)
We've discussed a similar idea (and may yet decide to go with something like it), but our concern with it is that it's still somewhat complicated for players to figure out. As I mentioned earlier, one of the issues we'd like to solve is how difficult it can be to figure out exactly what impact PvP Power is going to have on your effectiveness. "1 PvP Power = 1 Strength vs Players" is easy to get across and understand. "1 PvP Power = 2 Strength in Arenas and Battlegrounds, worthless in dungeons and raids, and 1 Strength in the open world," not so much.
One other thing I should mention based on some other comments in here is that, just like today, PvP Power will be active vs players in any context, not just inside PvP instances. So if you're comparing a PvE and PvP piece of the same item level -- for example, a piece of Conquest gear and a piece of Heroic raid gear -- it should work out something like this:
- The PvE item is stronger in PvE instances
- The PvP item is stronger in PvP instances
- The PvE item is slightly stronger vs creatures in the open world
- The PvP item is slightly stronger vs players in the open world
Once again, I need to be clear that this is all early development thinking and anything might change, but our hope is that whatever we end up doing makes things work something like that.