Ok. First off, The developer you are showing in the post is no longer active sadly. And I will go on to explain why PVP is truly dead. To start off it has nothing to do with an item modifications such as gems and or the recent awakening system as PVP's in most MMOs offer some sort of unfair advantage and players come back to try to out win them anyways.
If we take a jump back to 2014- When I believe the Shuyal and maybe Dragon Enclave came out I don't remember exactly. PVP was just fine with the people who would overpower others with Mystic items and players with legendary Hell I had terrible items back then and I enjoyed being in Rogue PVP with almost the worst stats haha.
Another view at your situation is that it is not the developer's fault of anything when it comes to PVP as PVP is generally just a player versus player lobby and therefore only has input from the players who are playing the so-called match. As I had responded to another gentleman in a post earlier this week I stated specifically if we want anything in this game to be brought back to how it was before we would need somewhat investments into the service and the engine that Spacetime Games uses which at this point in time would be harder slightly due to the fact that mobile gaming has not really gone off to what we in the past thought it would go to and every game studio started making their own versions of what spacetime Games have done. I feel that we as an entire community and even developers included should rebuild what we want when it comes to the Legend series and get the right stuff back and the wrong stuff out. This is more of a community problem. Not an item is better or whatever people would just throw off and claim because most of the people who have the good stuff in-game don't even PVP.