f13.net

Drysc posted new Arena Season 4 gear and requirements. (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5973993258&postId=59734678222&sid=1#0)

Season 4 gear will require personal and team ratings of anywhere from 1550 to 2200.

No more buying arena points.

So who will continue to play on 1500 teams?  Won't this pull down the ratings of everyone?  Or do I still completely misunderstand the ratings system?

Well, you'll see lots of scrubs with chest and legs.

EDIT: To answer your question, no. 1500 teams losing to just farm points simply inflates the point economy, dumping more points back into it.

If they are at rock bottom at 1440, and fight their way back to 1500, they're only taking points from other 1500 teams, so this really isn't affecting the teams in the middle. Ultimately, however, is that they're only INFLATING the point economy, albeit very slightly, rather then pulling down the ratings.

The fixes to stop point-selling seem solid.

The rating requirements on the Honor-bought gear are a bit annoying, simply because I wasn't really expecting it.  Slots like Boots and Belts have crafted gear for PvE at most levels (haven't kept up with SW25 drops) so it seems a bit unfair to be unable to outright buy those pieces with Honor (like you can with say, Boots of Blasting).

This change will basically bone my battlegroup, Bloodlust.

It's ridiculously hard to gain any kind of decent ranking there already.

Why would they do this?  If you're a highly rated team, you'll get a gear improvement... and if you're highly rated won't this make you even harder to beat?  So... the disparity between the haves and have-nots gets even larger. 

Seems that the higher ranked teams need some type of handicapping system, not gear that makes them even harder to dethrone. 

Exactly. From what I've heard around the water coolers, Bloodlust is one of the harder battlegroups to get a high ranking. I could be wrong about that, but it's what I've heard from people who play on different servers for pvp. Essentially, they have told me an 1850 rating team on Bloodlust could easily be a 2000+ team on another battlegroup.

All this chage will do is fuck over everyone who isn't already at the top. There won't be a reset button at all because the top teams will have all the best S3 gear, and then will be the only ones getting the rating to get the S4 gear. On a really competative battlegroup, this would just make it pointless to arena because you'll NEVER hit the low end of the requirements.

I have a solution: Frequent server wipes!

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/index.xml (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/index.xml)

Well played.

I don't like arena, and now I like it even less.

I thought it was a great way to give people who like to duel somewhere to do that, but now arena has become the focus of pvp.

I want to see more battlegrounds with different pvp objectives.  Arena is too artificial - it ensures a focus on certain classes with certain specs.

If players really want to see how skilled they really are, they should play naked arena.

I don't like the change, but not because of any potential arena balancing.


I don't like it because its entirely motivated by the "People who aren't raiding might be getting purples, oh noes!", or the "You have to EARN ur epicz!" lines of thinking. It started with S3 and shoulder ratings. Since shoulder items were "prestige" slots  :roll: . Now it's virtually the entire set. The same way Tier sets are only for those who can do 25 mans, now the Arena sets will only be for those who can achieve the statistically improbable upper ratings.

It's done to appease some ego's and e-peens. Now having a full suit of season 4 "will mean something".  :oh_i_see:

They've more or less come full circle with their PvP reward system. Before it was a giant grind where it was only statistically possible for a tiny percent of the players to have the top rewards, or even the average ones. Then we had a window of open rewards (still with grind), with the top most percent receiving them faster (much faster) then everyone else.  Now it's been replaced with a different kind of 'grind' with the same probability (or lack there of) of anyone not in the top percentiles of seeing anything from the system.



The side effect, is it will bone certain specs that rely on the Arena awards to keep pace. The upgrade path for things like Balance Druids or Ret Paladins (less so with paladins now I suppose) is significantly more 'narrow' if you don't have access to the Tier sets.

It's also done (wrongly) so that you can't Half-ass collect arena points then wtfpwn PvE content.  The s3 stuff is on par with T6 for DPS classes with a few minor tweaks.  They didn't want to invalidate the progression curve there with easily obtained pvp points. (And they ARE easily obtained.. too easy, really.)

It's just a symptom of a much larger problem, infrequent "global" resets with a crazy power curve.  Each season or tier of gear "has" to be better than the previous one, so it will trivialize something along the way.  With no level cap raise for 2 years, that means that as you approach the end of that curve, things get stupid, as we've seen here.

  Fuck, I already 3-shot mobs I see guys in green/ blue mixes struggling with and I'm not what you'd call "uber geared."

Combine this with the arena-focus Xanth mentioned and WoW's finally showing some serious flaws it's competitors should be able to exploit if they're paying attention.

Highlighted for lulz  :wink:

True 'nuff.

Well, I would say the major difference is that in the old Grand Marshal system, victory wasn't rewarded - figuring out the most efficient means to farm honor, and then doing that, 24/7, was.  Very often this meant running from anything that even looked like it might be a difficult fight, because it was more efficient to flee and go back to pwning noobs 15 minutes later than it was to potentially have to fight for longer than 15 minutes.

At least with the Arena system, especially since they're making point/ranking selling harder, the rewards actually come from being victorious, not figuring out how to game the system and then doing it all the time.

I'd agree, if Victory in Arena wasn't limited to the few chosen Class/Specs for each season.


I hate when game play is exclusionary, let alone by design.

I don't know...that just seems like the nature of combat, particularly in games, to me.  Tactics are developed, refined, become very strong for a while, then a counter is found, and so on.  'Bad' specs and combinations often simply need a new tactic to be developed to make them effective.  This isn't always the case, but time is needed to determine if it is or not.

Worse yet, perhaps, is nerfing 'overpowered' tactics before they've had a chance to be fully explored in the way that only the fullness of time can do.  Even worse than that is when they nerf a tactic 'late' - meaning, after the counters have been discovered.  This is something their slow patch pace occasionally causes.  I can't recall any very specific examples off-hand because I don't pay that much attention, but I do recall thinking that some nerfs have essentially come to things that once seemed like they needed nerfing, but no longer did when the nerfs finally came.  Only by waiting a considerable amount of time before acting to ensure that the tactic has been fully explored (or explored to a reasonably full degree) should any changes be made, and even then it is important to make sure not to make changes if new developments involving the tactic arise between the decision to make the change and the implementation.

One prime example (in the MMOG field) of tactics being learned in the fullness of time (although this concerns PvE rather than PvP, the idea is the same) is back in EQ.  The Enchanter.  Early on in EQ, the vast majority of players thought enchanters sucked.  It took a few months for the general populace to really grasp the idea of mezzing and how powerful crowd control was in the game.  But a more 'pvp' oriented example comes from arcade/console fighting games, in which many tactics that are initially considered broken and/or unbeatable are eventually countered.

And in the end, well, it's not possible to design a system of combat in which every possible combination of classes and/or talents is equally effective.  No matter what strategy or tactic you're using, if you want to maximize your effectiveness - and that's really what victory, in any situation, is about.  Maximizing your effectiveness through every means available to you.  - you will need to gear and specialize your character properly.  Are Protection Warriors underrepresented in the Arena?  Absolutely - and I see no problem with that, because if they want to maximize their effectiveness FOR arena, they need to either devise some tactic in which protection is useful (rare and highly unlikely) or switch to a talent spec that is effective.  On the other hand, I do see a problem if an entire class, regardless of how it specs or what choice of tactic and teammates, simply has no effective place.  That seems to be what they're trying to eliminate, however, so it's understandable if they're not there yet.

All that aside, however, the lack of a perfect absolute balance in which every class and spec is equally effective in any potential makeup of team shouldn't prevent us from establishing competitions in which victory is rewarded.  If it is your intention to compete at the highest levels, then adjusting your character's talents and possibly even class should not be out of the question.  If it is not your intention to compete at the highest levels, well...the previous season's gear is there at much more attainable ranking requirements.  This is much like the difference between a person who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on obtaining the best equipment for their sport, or building their Magic deck, to the person who is not interested or competitive enough to take it that far.  The latter does not really need access to the best golf clubs, or the rare cards that are vital for their ideal deck.  In the same way, if you're not so dedicated to victory in the arena, then season four gear is and, in my opinion, should be, understandably out of your league.  It is 'pro gear'.

I think WoW is too much of a PvE game to be really viable as competitive PvP medium. In PvP power comes from mobility, control of a battle field, raw damage, raw healing and survivability. Class weaknesses and strengths have to be designed around these fundamental principles and not around some rigid party system revolving around best way to Tank&Spank foozles.

Brief search into statistics suggests that three classes dominate wow PvP by wide margin - warriors, rogues and druids. From what I remember about WoW these are classes with best mobility and survivability.

That problem, in my opinion, isn't that Protection warriors are gimp, it's that respeccing from a PvE build to a PvP one every time you've got to switch roles is unfeasable unless you're rolling in obscene amounts of gold.  I am a bit confused about the rest of the argument; are you claiming that the only difference between a good talent build and a bad one is that no one has discovered the "counter" for a good build yet, or what?

As to this arena change, I'm kind of divided...

On the one hand, it does sound like the elitist, "they deserve more because they're HARDKORE, but you can still pay a sub fee for the privilege of basking in their presence" kind of bullshit that drives me berserk.

On the other hand, I don't have any arena points on any of my characters, so I sport nothing more l33t than S1 gear anyway, yet I'm still sharing the BGs with people decked out in top tier arena gear.  In theory, this might be a boon to me (and other casuals in the same boat), making it harder for my opponents to outgear me by as much.

EDIT: "PvE to PvP" not "PvE to PvE" -_-

SirBruce/omnibus incoming!


The only reason that Arena gear is even an issue is because pre-BC, PvE gear dominated even the HWL gear in PvP.  That's why we have Resil and the new Stam weighting, so PvEers aren't able to rofl-stomp PvPers right out of their raid.  The problem became though, that T6-equiv. gear, even if it's not itemized for PvE, it still pretty good for it if you're still in Kara.

As an example, my S3 stuff (as a Disc Priest), even with most of it sporting PvP enchants/gems is only a few points shy of my T4 in raw healing/regen (not to mention it has a boatload more Stam).  PvE-gemmed/enchanted and it's no contest.

I don't want PvP to be the one-stop shop for everyone's gearing needs (just like I didn't like PvE being the only option for getting viable gear pre-BC).  If this makes things "fair" between both progression paths, I'm happy.


1700 (which is everything short of MH Weapon and Shoulders) is not statically high, probably the top 25-40% of arena players for most Battlegroups. (I'm hesitant to say 35-50% since I don't remember if that rating got you a title last season.)  1800 for last season's main-hand is just under top-10%.


It's not. (http://vhairi.blogspot.com/2008/04/us-stats-april-2008.html)  If you're not a Hunter, you can easily find a bracket/combo where you'll be successful at for your skill level.  Hell, want to be a tank in the Arenas?  Roll a Discipline Priest :drill:.

Even if you're only excluding one class, it's still exclusionary.

It particularly rankles those of us who DO play Hunters.. to the point I've begun looking at other games.   You're going to exclude the class I enjoy playing because you can't wrap your mind around making it work? Fine, I'll find a game that doesn't.*  I can't be alone on this, and since Hunters are THE most played class it's a silly thing for Blizzard to do.

* It shouldn't be THAT fucking hard, either. At it's core, an archer class is a ranged damage dealer that deals "Physical" type damage instead of "magic" type.  For SOME fucking reason this seems to elude most designers and they think "Some kind of 'rogue/ warrior at range' hybrid"  instead of "oh! Mage/ necromancer/ warlock/ whatever with arrows..."

Mm, no.  I perhaps stated that too strongly.  Certainly, there are going to be many talent builds that are wholly ineffective, especially if you count completely off the wall talent builds.  However, a few of those which are not now considered good probably have strategies and tactics that have yet to be discovered that will make them viable, and perhaps even quite potent.  If I remember correctly, in arena season 1, druids weren't considered very useful, which is entirely opposite to what the charts show us now.  As far as respeccing often is concerned...I don't know.  I don't really see a hell of a lot of point in the current cost of it, but the current amount of money it costs isn't really that much, not when viewed in comparison to how easy money is to obtain now.  Within an hour or less I can earn over 100 gold with dailies, which can cover two respecs and have some left over, so there's no serious issue with respeccing twice a day if you want to, and in a realistic sense, it should never be necessary to respec more than two or three times a week.  So while I'd like to see the costs removed, and for that matter, the option to 'respec' your gear (for pvp and tier sets, that have individual sets for certain specs) I don't have a major problem with the current system.

I think Sinij has a point on WoW perhaps simply not being viable for a serious competitive pvp medium.  I do, however, think it can make a comfortable middle-ground.  It will probably never reach the level of balance that Starcraft has, for example, but I think it can reach a level that is 'fair enough' for most people, even though there will always be copious amounts of complaining.

It seems to me that this will only make win trading worse. Part of the underlying reason for win trading is a shortage of low-ranked teams injecting points into the system; the fewer teams that exist at lower end, the fewer points there can be at the higher end, due to the "theoretical" zero-sum nature of the system. Recreating and farming 1500 point teams helps to artificially inflate the system, and it seems that this may be necessary for a lot of people now comfortably on 2K ratings who will slip to 1700ish ratings (or something) when there are fewer low-end teams trying due to the disparities in the system.

Also this seems like another situation where late entrants will have no good means to catch up once the season is under way, except through win trading.

It's not so much that "Hunters are excluded" it's that, more so than other classes, they're simply hard to play well.  You can see that to a certain extent in the spike of times at 2300+ that use Hunters versus everyone else.  Great Hunters get great results, everything below that gets shafted relative to their skill level.  Anecdotally, Hunter/Priest was very dangerous when I played it, but I was just f'ing beat after playing our games.  (Compared to Priest/Rogue which was pure easy-mode even with a relatively less skilled/geared/experienced partner.)

Hunter is just a class that's mechanically broken but at the same time attracts a lot of retards.  That's not the Arena system's fault any more than it's the raids' fault though.

Haven't druids had some significant changes to their class since then?

Arena water was probably the big one for druids.

I don't PvP so apologies for the stupid questions.  If they put the oldest season gear on the honor system each season does that mean you have to farm all that honor over again to replace a S1 chest with an S2 or does it not work like that?  And about how much grinding would it take to get a full set of the old stuff?

And if I did ever get into PvP would it make more sense to farm this honor while I'm level 60, I'm kind of worried that going into a 70 battleground this long after everyone else would mean I was just a speedbump.

The cost of the whole S2 set from honour will most likely be identical to the cost of the current honour S1 set.

So yes, be prepared to regrind a LOT for upgrades.

PvP Gear:

Old High Warlord/Grand Marshal: Honored with Thrallmar/Honor Hold, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, Sha'tar, Keepers of Time
Season X-2: Honor vendor.
Season X-1: Arena vendor. Reduced point costs (~15%) and reduced or no rating requirements.
Season X: Arena vendor.  Full price and rating requirements.

As for how much: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pQhoPrK7VYhhL75rYewXWBg (http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pQhoPrK7VYhhL75rYewXWBg) should be pretty accurate.

I personally dislike this idea. My guild has maybe two people who regularly pvp competitively, for everyone else arena and BG gear are simply an alternate way to advance their character (we don't raid and ogri'la style stuff is a joke); our 5v5 team (which is 'whoever is on at the moment, sometimes in greens, sometimes with no healer, almost always pve spec') will never break 1700, therefore missing out on most of season4 completely, including BG gear. Yay!

Also, not all arena sets/pieces are equally useful for pve and pvp. Just my characters (along with guildies who gave input on arena gear) who've arena'd enough to get at least one item have a huge disparity when it comes to using arena/vindicator gear in pve (the s3 weapon is good for almost any class, though):
- Shaman: Enhancement and Elemental are very well-itemized (sometimes better than equivalent pve gear, which would be tier5/6), Restoration is 50% good (around tier5 level for season3), the other 50% is overloaded with stamina and spellcrit with no mp5, making it useless even when compared to kara-level stuff.
- Warlock: Pretty bad; yeah, lots of stamina, but LOW spell damage; warlocks don't need insane amounts of stamina for pve btw, ditto with spell penetration (vital for arena, 95% useless for pve). Frozen Shadoweave (entry-level stuff any tailor can get) is better than season 3 chest / shoulders and boots, same with Spellstrike (which is BOE to begin with). I assume the same is true for shadowpriests and mages.
- Warrior: Shield is money for prot spec (season2 that is, prot warriors don't get to 1850, they just... don't), rest of the pieces are very good for dps warriors if gemmed for pure str / attack power / crit; I don't play my warrior that much, but I'd say season3 is a bit better than tier4. Weapons are as good as their tier6 equivalents.
- Holy priest (guildie): Arena gear has ZERO spirit, and only two pieces have mp5 (which is worse than spirit post 2.4). It does have a decent amount of raw +heal, but tier4 stuff still wins. Badge gear blows it out of the water, no contest. The only time my priest guildie puts on her arena gear is when we're doing a 'random damage' fight like the third boss in hMGT.
- Feral druid (guildie): Very good for dps and tanking alike. Too bad feral droods are useless in arena, eh?
- Hunter (guildie): The gear is very good (not as dps-oriented as badge gear though), the weapon is good for *marksman* hunters, way too slow for beastmaster (BM is the superior pve spec).

Edit: I've been in the 1800s [that's about 1830, followed by a repeated roflstomp back into the 1700s by a 5/5 s3 team... no weapons for you!!] on my warlock, but I stopped playing him... and a pve-geared resto shaman isn't anywhere near as easy to get a high rating with, ditto with the other big PVPer in my guild [feral druid].


-- Z.

I'm a Prot Paladin (and I refuse to respec for battlegrounds); even in full S1 I'm going to be nothing but a speedbump.  A better speedbump, mind you; I can already tell a difference between full blue PVE gear with 0 resilience and 3 pieces of Gladiator's with (I think) 115-ish resilience.  I hold no illusions that I'm suddenly going to be dangerous to anyone, but I do enjoy making the other team work harder before my eventual and unavoidable death...

I haven't figured out how long a *complete* set will take (it's too depressing), but the basic 5-piece Gladiator's head/chest/legs/gloves/shoulder set is about 55000 honor.  As a non-DPSer, I don't get tons of honor for kills, so I average maybe 300 points a BG--Alterac can take 10 minutes and net almost 600 honor, but a shitty Warsong can take almost an hour and give <50.  At that rate it'll take 40-50 hours for just those five pieces (assuming I only do the minimum number of warsongs needed).

233k as the absolute worst case.  More likely though, you'll be Honored with a few places and can bring that down to as low as 168k.

Prot paladins have their niche, and are better than prot warriors in pvp by fucking MILES.  Throw your last 15-20 points into Holy instead of ret then focus on stam, resil and +healing gear instead of PvE stats like Def, Parry, Dodge, etc. (but get some good +block like that trinket)  Get enough +heal and you have awesome +spelldam, which relates right back to Concecrate, SoR/V and Holy shield damage.  Due to the +heal on your gear you can do the usual pally healing thing, but then tank multiple melee fighters at once and kill them in conc/ holy shield while they can't do jack to you. *

Spellcasters will still fuck you up hard, but they're pally-banes in general.

*Except for goddamn stunlock; but fuck, stunlock kills everyone. It's a stupid mechanic.


I was ranting more about the designers than any particular system. It's THEIR fault that the class is so fundamentally harder to play well.  It really shouldn't be any more or less difficult to play than any other class, and so should be represented equally as well.  Blizz seems to agree, from statements about class representation, but they don't seem to want to fix it prior to getting out the new x-pack and perhaps addressing it there.

I quote you twice in two days. Stalker alert!

My take: Blizz is focused on pushing out the xpack, as you mentioned. For the 12-18 months following that launch, they'll be "fixing" all the things that will break after players figure out how to exploit their 10 extra talent points and the new tiers of talents. (This will apply to all classes, not just hunters). Making hunters easier to play well isn't going to be higher on their to-do list than making sure they don't suddenly become OP in arenas.

233k is the absolute worst case if you're not willing to lose 10 games a week in the arena.  Don't waste your honor points on the pvp set when you're just going to replace those with vastly superior arena gear in a few weeks.  Buy your boots, rings, etc.
---
It's not exclusionary at all.  There is absolutely no class that can't break 2k in any bracket.  You have to respec if you're remotely serious about arena, so what does it matter if you need to change your main spec to some other tree?  Hell, I'm pretty sure there are verified examples of every single spec save protadin/prot warrior hitting 2k, although finding a 2k+ feral druid, balance druid, or fury warrior would take some serious searching given that they have extremely strong alternative specs.
---
Protadins are better than prot warriors in PVP, but that's not saying match.  Don't bother 'optimizing' for prot pvp...because that's retarded.  You're hurting yourself in PVE where you are kinda viable so that your time spent PVPing hurts less.  Why?  Your role hasn't changed: You're still pretending to be a holy paladin so the other team gets confused and wastes time on you instead of someone that matters, such as an actual holy paladin.

One of my fondest PVP memories is watching a protadin charge a tower in EOTS, bubble, and everyone just ignored him.  We stared at him, waited 12 seconds, and blew him up in less than 10.

Edit: Protadins can win vs melee DPS in a 1v1 fight IF there is no outside interference.  1v1 with other melee DPS, it's a simple matter of who runs out of health first and that's a fight a protadin can win between bubble, heals, etc etc.

The way I play WoW is definitely sub-optimal, but it's what I enjoy.

I don't mind healing people, but I hate playing healer.  So, no Holy spec, no +healing gear.  Plus, my wife is spec'd mostly Holy, and I let her heal when we duo. (I do have 10 points into Holy for the uninterruptible healing talent, though)

I don't like the Ret tree or waving around a two-hander.  No points there at all.

I don't want to raid and actually don't really like tanking instances for people either, but I really like the holy-warrior-with-shield schtick.  So, Prot spec and +spelldamage it is for me :)

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line I deluded myself into thinking I needed a bunch of +def stuff which turns out not to be necessary for my play style, and now I'm stuck replacing it with a more generalized set of gear.  The PvP stuff seems to fill the bill well, but it's taken me six weeks to accumulate the honor for three pieces--that should give you an idea how slowly I work.

I must admit, having seen T6 prot warriors carrying the flag in EOTS and WSG, they do have a niche in PvP; albeit a narrow one.

I find I have my most of my limited success by charging into a pack of horde on the road, firing up consecrate/holy shield, and then doing everything in my power to distract them from the fact they were actually going to go somewhere and do something useful while they kill me instead.  I usually don't bubble at all, unless it'll give me one more good consecrate in a pack of clothies.  This often allows the people coming along behind me to catch them while they're bunched up and preoccupied.

I still die every single time, but it racks up some surprisingly good damage numbers.  Although not so much with the kill numbers.

Why would they announce this just before AoC comes out? It's going to piss off a lot of casual PVPers.

I do that as a healadin from time to time too.  I only do it when we are way ahead in score, but the other side could possibly come back.  At that point it is all about efficient use of time.  Sometimes I can make the other side be inefficient more than make my side efficient.

For some reason, Horde typically plays smart right up until a paladin dares to attack a group solo on the road in the middle of nowhere.  Then they seem to get stupid and take 30 seconds or more killing me.

I've often done this for more than a minute and end it with a hearty laugh as the final score window pops up in our faces.

The bad part?  This seems to work 3x better on alliance players.

I think the problem with this change is that it doesn't address the fact that any dick can dump a team and reset his personal rating.  This allows S3, and potentially now S4 if there remains no further changes, geared dudes to just delete their team and start over with a personal rating of 1500.  So if you're just starting out an alt on a new team in rep reward blues, you're totally ass raped by teams doing this for whatever reason - most likely to sell personal rating.

I don't know how to fix that, as I think it's important for people to be able to change teams if they want without too much penalty.  Some people feel that personal rating should be more permanent, but I don't know if that's the right answer either.  My only thought would be to change the matchmaking system to take an average of the item level of gear that people are wearing and apply that to how it weighs who gets to fight who.  That way if some cock bag in season four wants to sell rating he has to do it against teams that are more equally geared.  Of course then you'd have to figure out a way to prevent fags from queuing in greens, then switching to purples once the they accept the queue.

I've seen a LOT of assholes running around in greens and blues with season three shoulders (the current piece that requires a really high rating.)  I think this change will slow this down a bit, because now people are forced to tank their personal rating in order to make money.  But the thing is, after they get all their shit, wtf do they care?

Ok.  You get raped by a Gladiator reroll team.  They gain rating.  They also rape some other people.  They gain rating.  Now they're out of your range and thus no longer your problem.

I grinded out 40 or 50 matches last week with a new partner to see how it went (fairly well; he'll actually be in a PVP spec next time we run).  We hit 2-3 teams where they just so dramatically out-geared us we never stood a chance.  A few times, we took down much better geared teams.  When we lost, it was mostly due to the other team being just plain better.  Sometimes it was that they chose a better comp, oftentimes they were just better players.

Gladiator rerolls are just not as big a factor as so many people seem to think.Age of Conan lets Captain Catass kill you and take your honor points.  Enjoy your grind.

Some battlegroups are claiming the frequency of meeting a much more well geared team is substantially higher than that.  Beside the point though.  Isn't the point of the rating system that outgeared people never meet in 'sport' pvp?  And those fags in blues and greens with season 3 shoulders deserve them, right?

To be honest, it doesn't really bother me that much.  I'm pretty confident in my ability to grind my dudes past the point where it's an issue.  I know that on the other end of it is my team with fully geared guys stomping the shit out of teams with one totally undergeared guy - thus leading to my advantage in mid to higher brackets.

But I still think it should be as fair as possible - and I didn't see you disagree with that.  I think that gladiator rerolls are a bigger factor than you assert in really low brackets.  In some battlegroups, it's a way bigger factor, and mine is one of them.  I think that if it continues, it will snowball, as fewer and fewer people find a fair chance to start new teams they just stop queuing altogether - opting instead to wait until they complete the honor farming of regular bg's - oh look it just got harder to do that too.  And with all due respect, I think you're overselling your case based on a very limited sample.  "lol suck it up noob - it only happened to me a couple times last week" doesn't really address what is obviously an issue.

Let's back up and think this through logically.  You are asserting that the population of really good players that are making new teams is, at any given point in time, so large it actually ruins the game for the population of players that are nowhere jear as good as they are(whether that be gear, comp, or simple skill).  Do you actually believe that most players are playing at a 2k+ level and that only a small minority are scrubbin' it up in the lower brackets(Which let's arbitrarily define as...below 1700)?

Once again I am reminded that WoW tries so hard to emulate Guild Wars pvp when Guild Wars' focus was actually pvp and fails hard.

These guys are artificially inflating the amount of points a guy who doesn't deserve it gets every week, while at the same time stomping the shit out of your alt team and preventing YOU from advancing.  You say they just do it to you a couple times, and then they move on to a higher bracket and your dealings with them are done.  But that's not accurate.  They're doing it over and over, every week.  These are the guys who are online every day.  So while there might actually be a higher percentage of regular people who are in the right bracket who played games during the week, most of them were casual, and not online every day.  But the catass guys are.  I've personally gotten them two or even three times in a row.  And who can blame them, really.  Whether they're doing it too much for you, or not, I don't really give a fuck.  They're doing it too much for me.  So I came here to the intarwebs to file my protest.  You can look the other way if that suits you.

:star: :star:

Age of Conan lets Captain Catass kill you and take your honor points.  Enjoy your grind.
[/quote]

I was just thinking about this.  What's to stop me from rolling-up a noob on my wife's account and having it wtfpwn me on a regular basis so I can 'bank' blood money without fear of losing it.  Then when i need it, I kill the alt spend what I need and get killed to bank it again.

This seems like the stupidest idea ever now that I've actually paid attention to it.

iirc, blood money is only obtainable within the border kingdoms, which are higher-level zones.

I've lost track of recent changes though.

Paypal me $50 and I'll let you kill my Grand Master Champion of Cimmeria for your epic title and feats. Plus ca change.

People used to Trade Kills for RPs in DaoC and Win Trading/Queue dodging  is rampant in the WoW Arena system.

I have no doubt people will find a way to farm Blood Coins off each other.


People suck  :heartbreak:

In the case of Conan, blame the devs. Hm, let's create a system where we give the people who win more abilities with which to win more. What could possibly go wrong!

This is different to WOW how?


The AoC system seems set for rampant abuse too, I'd agree.

Better players get better gear so that they can wtfpwn noobs even more easily and the gear disparity continues making it ever harder for freshly minted 70s to be anything but fodder.

What's wrong with this picture?

How about this - Blizzard gives everyone one pvp purple/month just because they pay Blizzard a subscription fee. 

Or how about naked arenas.

Or how about less disparity in gear.

S4 Changes = /cancel my 2 accounts

I'm sick of farming honor. I hate the arena because the game wasn't balanced around such small combat in mind. Lastly in WoW you are defined by your gear. Those who have it will pwn those who don't 9 times out of 10.

All they're doing is pushing casuals out of PVP, and with the stupid changes to premades that make them sit in 60 minute ques they've killed off BG's except for the retarded PUG fights.

I don't care if AOC/WAR isn't a significant upgrade, its just time to move on and quit giving them my money.

Making pvp work in a gear-based environment = hard.  

If they're going to award prizes for pvp, they should have done it in world-based pvp where they could have some small effect be the result of large scale battles.  Arenas are artificial constructs to begin with and favor only a small subset of the playerbase.  Rewarding the hardcore with the ability to wtfpwn players they likely could have already beaten is just adding insult to injury.  

Stick to PvE Blizzard.  You do that better than anyone in the industry.  PvP... not so much.  

Every time a new season comes out, they put the gear from two seasons back on the honor vendor.  Now every Tom, Dick, and Harry can just /afk their way to Tier 5 epics.  This season, about half of the new Season 4 stuff (Equivalent in item level to what people are getting from Sunwell) requires you maintain an Arena rating to buy it.

The difference between seasons is not as big as people seem to think.  The biggest difference is going from 0 resilience to some resilience, which you can get just buy doing one day's worth of dailies and buying the blue rep set.  The difference between a warrior's season 4 set and a warrior's season 3 set is 37 stamina(370 health for non-tauren), 28 strength(4 DPS), and 28 critical strike rating(About 1.2% critical strike rating).  That's nothing.  That health?  Maybe one hit.  4 DPS?  Drop in the bucket.
Do you really want to spend your days beating up on PUGs that never stand a chance?  If the queue times and competition bother you that much, just queue as a 5-man group and you can enter the PUG queue.

Arenas should be a way for the hardcore to go somplace and whack epeens against eachother.  Blizzard has blown it by making them considerably more meaningful.  BG's and world pvp should be the most important aspect in an MMO if they're really aiming to involve the largest percentage of the playerbase.   Let's hope other game makers have discovered this as well.

He may or he may not. The changes to premade queueing have emptied out the queue of everyone who was hoping to roll pug's, leaving only the premades who actually want to play other premades. These are few and far between enough that they have to wait an hour for their turn in the queue. Sucks for them, good for pug players.

There's definately a solid core of premaders who would genuinely jump at the opportunity for 10v10 and 25v25 ranked BGs. Premade vs Premade is horrible for honour farming, but great for fun in my experience.

If Blizzard cared about "gear parity", they'd make full s4 arena gear including BG pieces default for everyone in the arena and give the option to switch out other armor pieces as needed; arena and BG points could then be used to buy the 'privilege' of using that equipment outside arenas. It's silly to talk about "skill-based pvp" when you have someone in full s1 fighting someone in full s3 (or s2 fighting someone in s4).

Yes, there is a huge gear disparity between s1 and s3 (s2->s3 or s3->s4 is the wrong comparison, s1 is 'entry level', s2 will be 'entry level' after s4). Sticking with warriors, they get (just from the 5/5 set + weapons, comparing sets via wowhead, AP on war edges was converted to str)
+1131 armor
+73 str
+87 sta
+7 hit rating
+57 crit rating
+11 resil (this in itself isn't a huge difference, I agree)
+350 ArP
+15.6 weapon DPS; s3 mace has ~70 more top end damage, which scales

That is for warriors who grind ~160k honor for full season1 and weapon, along with every single BG accessory (and are wishing to shell out for the same enchants and BT gems the 5/5 s3 player likely did) and 60 badges for dory's embrace. Not really an 'entry level' player... and the difference in armor and armor penetration matters a lot, as arena teams tend to be physical damage-heavy.

Let's compare a warrior who enters pvp with the 5/5 savage plate set, using the arechron's gift 2h mace from nagrand rep, and random level70 blue instance accessories to the aforementioned warrior in full season3:
+2685 armor
+107 str
+177 sta
+115 crit
-6 hit
+56 resil
+350 ArP
+40.9 weapon dps (for reference, the blue 2h mace has 93.3 dps)
aaand I'm too lazy to look up appropriate blue necklaces/bracers/belt/boots/rings/trinkets/capes/ranged weapons, but all those slots have a similar itemlevel difference, so double those numbers above (except armor and ArP) for good measure. :P

Also, arena gear is NOT good for pve for a lot of classes. How often do you see holy priests in s3 instead of [properly gemmed/enchanted] teir4? How about warlocks switching out frozen shadoweave for s3?


-- Z.
(to preempt the inevitable "omg ur a scrub" flames: I played on a 1800+ rated 5v5 team, as an affliction warlock with 200ish resilience and 500+ ping. I'm not deluded enough to think I'm gladiator material, but I can hold my own in pvp...)

This was by far one of the best changes Blizzard has made.  The idiotic practice of creating pre-mades just to roll over PUGs was just playing the system.  To complain about that really puts you in class of person I dislike.  Seriously.  The former practice came down to running out to the nodes and flags as fast as possible and ending the game quickly to get your goodies.  I joined a server pre-made once and was just sickened by what was happening.  It was ridiculous.

If you feel that getting honor and marks is so slow that you have to do something like this.  Quit.  

Would I prefer playing pre-mades against pre-mades?  Hell yes, but that is just not usually feasible.  The shear number of PUGs compared to pre-mades should tell you something about that.  I like the freedom of just jumping into a match whenever I want instantly.  I absolutely don't want to join and then look up to see that the other side is a premade and every single person on your side has already sat down and gone afk.

No we don't want to spend our days rolling PUG's. My comment reflects that we sit in ques of up to 70 minutes just waiting for a dam match. After two weeks of that, our guild said fuck it and we no longer bother with BG's period.

they discovered the opposite (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/1719), you know.

Zetor, I understand S1 is introductory, but S2 is still obtainable by most anyone.  They can be had by just getting your points each week.  You can fully outfit yourself in S2 regardless.

I think the point being made is that there is no block to anyone doing that and the along the way they will pick up a lot of the s3 pieces because the requirement is 1500....the starting score.

It really only comes down to only being really really difficult to get those very last few pieces and those are just a tad bit better than the season below it.

I keep hearing, "Oh noes, I'll never be able to compete because I can't get top season gear."  From what I can see, and from what I've done, that just isn't true.  I pvp casually and have never even come cloes to 1850 for arenas and I'll be fully equipped in everything but the shoulders, pants, and weapon...if I'm remembering right.  The rest is s3 gear with the misc. BG stuff.

Yes, people starting out with scrub pvp gear will get....scrubbed.  They will still gain their points and make their way towards better days.  Yes, even equity from the start would help show player skill better, but you just aren't going to get that.   There has to be rewards or you will not get anyone to participate.

I do like the idea I saw here of having arenas automatically outfit all in the best and the rewards would be for everywhere else.  That could be a good compromise.

Well, I was looking at it from the "person trying to get into pvp" angle. The blue pvp set is not much to begin with, so everyone will have to grind BGs for honor, only to find out that they can't even use their honor to buy the accessories because they need a 1600 rating for that too! So they go into arenas [in blues still] and get completely obliterated by everyone who's been farming arena points since the start of s1 and enters season4 with 3/5 s3, 1/5 s4 (at least). They get knocked down to 1300ish rating and have to spend the next few months scrounging enough arena points together to make themselves at least semi-competitive (unless they spend a lot of hours grinding BGs, which will still put them under the 'gear average' of the 1500-1600 bracket... full of the aforementioned 'farming arena points since s1, but not really competitive' people)

Incrementally, there isn't a huge earth-shaking difference between s3 and s4 stats [except for the weapon, is that 144 dps?! That's a 10dps increase over s3], and other than ArP, not TOO big a difference between s2 and s3. But still, casual pvpers (like my guildies) will have nowhere near enough arena points or BG points to even present more than a speedbump. When the choice is between farming BGs for days on end in order to get competitive even at the lower brackets of arena (possibly qualifying for one extra s4 piece... maybe two or three), and saying "f it" and forgetting about arena entirely, I can already see which they'll choose, or which I would choose if I didn't really enjoy the arena gameplay itself (for all its faults, it has its moments... sometimes).


-- Z.

You know what else this does?  It will fuck-over the 'hardcore' pretty hard as well.  

There's a critical mass of players that has to happen to keep queues going at a good clip.  To this point, the constant upgrades have let casuals do their 10-and-done thing each week, getting a few bits from each season and saving points towards the next.  As you start to restrict that gear, those folks will find there's no more need to arena. They were doing it 'for fun' or 'for teh purplez' and if there's no upgrades available to them, well, why bother trying so hard to get those 10 games each week.

 I know it happened to my teams midway through last season, and I've only gotten a few games at all this season.  The response has been a pretty big "Meh, I've got everything, and I don't feel like doing it this week, I'm working on my alt."

As this happens more and more often, the rankings will start to slide.  Those players who were on the bottom end, being fodder for the higher-ranked teams will be thinned the quickest.  As this happens, everyone in the top tiers starts to slide downward, filling in those empty spots in the ladder.

  This happens because those 'fodder teams' are gone and the 1500's teams don't have 1400's teams to fight, because they're down in the 1300's now, debating quitting.  Suddenly your 1800 team is only 1750 and you can't do jack. Your 1500 team slides into oblivion-land and begins to wonder if it's worth it, and the race for gear gets that much tighter and the cycle continues on that way.

Whoops.

That's a quite common consequence. The more you open gaps, the more each group starts to lose pieces.

The hardcore games all follow that path. They hemorrhage players as they go because fewer and fewer can keep up. It happens with raids as it happens with PvP.

And we are discussing once again that Blizzard is making the game for a small minority instead of a great majority. I really would like to know how many customers bought WoW because they expected to find an "eSport" game like Kalgan says...

It is a system with far more potential for abuse than WoW's. In WoW, the difference is a few % points of passive abilities for the most part. Yeah it sucks, and it is giving an advantage to a player who already has a skill advantage, which is dumb. However...

AoC seems to be setting itself up for a system more like DAOC's realm points (or master levels), where a higher-up person actually can use extra abilities, powers, whatever, that a low RR person can't do at all. *That's* why it sucks, and that's 10 times worse than a system where one guy has slightly better gear but otherwise has the same capabilities. Endgame PVP shouldn't be an additional level grind if they want any kind of parity to exist on the battlefield.

DAoC worked because it was open PvP, so more flexible.

If a powerful group enters the fray, you can fight that with more numbers, and it becomes an epic battle on its own. DAoC wasn't just 1vs1, it was a game with an higher level of strategy so that power and realm abilities weren't everything.

Does AoC limit numbers and still give advantages to one side?

If they don't limit numbers on a given "side" then they're in for a much worse problem. See: Mordred relic status.

But you WERE spending your days rolling PUG's.  I'm not saying that is your fault or aim, but was how it was.  One premade would go in and see another premade and drop out.  That not only left a pug to come in and face certain loss, but they come in really really late and by the time the full team was populated, the match was half over.  It was a double whammy for PUG groups and gave the premade an obvious win regardless of any skill or even gear.

Does it suck that premades can't play against premades even when they choose to do it?  Yep.  It is just very telling that now that the previous practice was killed, those premades have decided to go back to PUGs or quit.  If the same number of premades were playing today as they were before, you wouldn't be having a queue issue.  The vast majority of premades were created for the specific task of rolling pugs for marks and honor.

Yeah, the S1->S3 comparison is also fair to make.  I would still maintain that it's not too big a jump; For example, that's still only about a 2.5% change in crit % chance.  Yes, if you're in full season 1 vs a season 3 team, you've got an uphill battle ahead of you.  It wouldn't be enough to simply be better than them.  You would have to play MUCH better than them.  It's still a winnable fight.  Several friends of mine routinely just screw around on alts in blues and stop in the 1700-1800's.  There are verifiable examples of folks in S1 and blues still hitting 2K rating this season and not, apparently, through win trading (although they did have a druid, which is close).

RE: arPen - Yeah, it's the biggest difference from S1 or S2.  ArPen is amazingly awesome.  Even though my PVE role is prot, I'm still seriously consdering picking up the new melee DPS badge ring.  It's pretty clear that Blizzard regards Armor Pen as a failed experiment.  They probably kept the arena realms at S2 solely so armor pen wouldn't be so prevalent.  None of the new badge plate sports any armor pen.  Instead, they're wasted the budget on haste rating.  My guess is that the stat is going to go *poof* in WOTLK.

No, the way I read it, they can't get the S4 accessories.  They can still get the slightly less optimum accessories just like before.  They can also get the majority of S3 with modest ratings.  They can get all of S2.  They can get all of that just from playing BGs and casually (10 matches/week) playing the arenas.  

I'm still not seeing the increase in the gap that is being talked about here.  What am I missing?

If we are just saying that the basic system WoW has is not very nice to newbs, I'll completely agree with that.  I'm not really seeing where this is worse than before.  In fact, I'd say it might be even better.  The gap between S1 and S3 (now) is bigger than between S2 and S4 (future), I'd wager.  Once S2's are open to be purchased with honor and marks alone, people should be able to become quite competent regardless of Arena shenanigans.

One thing that's unclear in this is whether or not the S3 bracer, ring, and boots are still going to be available through honor after S4 comes out.  When S2 gave way to S3, the old bracer and boots disappeared, replaced by the new ones.  I'm not sure if the ring did or not.  If the same applies to S3 gear when S4 comes out, then yes, the person grinding honor without arena rating will lose the ability to obtain a bracer and boots without going to the badge vendor on Quel'danas and shelling out a pretty sizable number of badges for them.

Arenas would be much better sport pvp if players were all granted the exact same gear on entry.  Then people with high rankings would be able to make a stronger claim that they were indeed better players.  Seems like the most sensible solution... though it will never happen. 

Because it would make more sense to make a Warcraft Arena game that does just that without any actual PvP or PvE. Just make a character, pick skills and fight.

A focus on Arenas is simply the antithesis of a mmorpg.

Isn't this how it is on the new tournament realms?

CoX battlegrounds also force you to a certain matching level, though it is easier to do that in a gear-free game obviously. But there's precedent.

The change to premades was not announced, most people running premades after the patch had absolutely no clue there was any change at all.  But they noticed the queue times, i don't care how much you want to play another premade you won't sit there for 45 mins for the priviledge.  It wasn't losing the ability to roll pugs that killed premades, the queues were horrible before anyone even knew there was a change.

I don't understand why Blizzard isn't pushing battlegrounds as their sport PvP.  Something like AV seems a lot more sport-like than the arena.  The matches are (usually) slower, the action is easier to understand (your team is capturing and defending territory rather than gaming some arcane system of cooldowns and debuffs that only the hardcore are going to grasp).  There's something for every class to do, too, even prot spec warriors and paladins.  Seems like it would be more interesting to watch this little "battle in a bottle" kind of thing than just "WoW Team Deathmatch".

Incorrect. With very few exceptions, MMORPGs cater heavily to the catass. It doesn't matter if the mechanic is gear or levels or gold, the barrier is time. Playing better or grouping more may reduce the time to accumulate the required asset, but those with the most free time to play have the greatest advantage. The core demographic of PvP players in MMORPGs then are not interested in tests of skill, but tests of time, because they have already excelled in that regard. An arena system that favors those with the best gear and which rewards them with better gear is entirely compatible with the rest of a time->gear game.

It is for this reason that you find that the sociopathic fuckers who obsess over PvP in MMORPGs want a steeper leveling curve, harsh penalties for losing, a smaller percentage of people to get rewards, PvP looting, and any other mechanism that creates further time-based obstacles to overcome. And this is enabled by the subscription model and the desire by publishers to lock players in for as many months as possible on a treadmill to extend revenues.

Arenas, especially in the sense Blizzard has implemented them, are fully compatible with MMORPGs.

I believe you might have miss read his point. MMORPGs are supposed to be massive. Arenas are not massive in any way. Except grind  :drill:

Or maybe I did.

We are just going to have to disagree on this because there is no way to prove which came first, longer queue times or premades figuring out they can't get quick PUG rolls.  I still contend that the reason for the long queue times is that there aren't enough premade in the system at any given time to give quick match-ups.  The reason?  The premades that go in each night looking to roll over PUGs over and over immediately found out that this was not going to work anymore and dissolved.  There were plenty of premade before the change to support low queue times IMO.

If you were a premade team that looked for challenging match-ups regardless of who was on the other side of the battelfield, you would never have noticed those other nefarious premade teams.  The reason?  They dropped out of the instance as soon as they saw you coming. 

Running as a PUG, I would see 1 out of 3 matches be ruined by premades that ran this way.  They were there and they were plentiful.  If you ran in premades all the time, you wouldn't see a single one because they were all trying to avoid each other.

The one night I ran in a nefarious premade from my server we spent the whole night avoiding other premades.  Again, this would happen about 1 out of 3 times.  The ONE time the leader decided to stop jumping queues and fight that other premade it was because it was a horde premade from our own server.  We got wtfpwn'ed bad.  Then we had to sit and listen to the leader bitch about never fighting another premade again no matter what we all said.  It was a waste of time to him.  This is about the time I quit the group and never looked back at that <channel>.

The one thing we can agree on is that that kind of practice completely ruined a good thing.  I loved it when our guild would get together and run BG's for a night.  It was fun and we didn't care who it was on the other side.  We queued and played.  That is just not possible anymore because "We can't have nice things."

This area of BG's was ruined to save the fun for the masses.  There are way way more people doing PUGs than premades, thus the change.

Great details on how metagaming jacks things up, Dren.

I agree with Dren - I faced so many premades in pugs, yet when I joined premades, the vast majority of the time, the other side's premades would leave the BG when they saw they were facing a premade.

Most people in premades were looking for quick, efficient honor, not even fights - because aren't efficient.

It seems to me that most people playing WoW go for efficiency over fun, which is a sad state of affairs, but it's designed to be that way unfortunately.

Ah well, maybe that. But then WoW is a 5/25/40 person game with a communal mall to hang out in, not massively multiplayer.

Nope, I don't mean massive. I mean persistent. Giving a sense of continuity.

A good arena game doesn't need long character development or an interesting world. This is why there are games that do just that. And do it better.

The idea of progress and character development that are the heart of WoW don't fit with the "eSport" idea.

Part of the issue is some people feel winning is the most fun. Others feel 'progress' is the most fun.

We disagree, but that is the issue. Not everyone has the same idea of fun. Some people are broken.

The #1 reason people did this is the ridiculous amount of honor it required to get the shittiest PvP gear available.  250,000 + honor AND  all those goddamn badges (WSG, BLECH).  This has been slightly mitigated since by the addition of the shitty blue PvP gear placed on the rep vendors.

However, when you out a MASSSIVE GRIND infront of an MMORPG player, it's only natural that a percentage of the player base will seek out ways to minimize the parts that are not fun.

What I want is to be able to curse the players that kill me. Say on a timer that renews every few days, so it is something you have to think about. Make the curse a nasty debuff that lasts days. But the probability of the curse working is tied to how much more powerful the opposing player is. So owning a real newb would become dangerous to a powerful player. If the newbs  have their curse power up, the result could get nasty.

Remove the zero risk to owning lower level players, and I think you would see more people playing PvP. Implementation of a system thats hard to game might be tough though.

UO-style noto griefing, mmmm. You'd see level 1s suiciding on mages trying to farm stuff and getting stuck in the frost nova radius on purpose (or consecrate if it's a paladin... or whirlwind if it's a warrior.. etc), killing themselves on reactive abilities (most classes have one), a bunch of lower level characters zerging a lv70 so he'd either have to take the humiliating death, or fight back and get cursed.

If you don't think these things'd happen (people making level1 characters / using low level alts to grief 70s, they could also have a throwaway 70 with no armor and perma-res sickness, especially if it's a warlock so they could lifetap to 1 hp every time), you have a much higher opinion of the WOW playerbase than I do. ;p


-- Z.

Hello (http://eu.wowarmory.com/team-info.xml?r=Burning+Legion&ts=2&t=DonLolo+z+Wladem&select=DonLolo+z+Wladem&fl=1)  :awesome_for_real:

I'm not sure exactly how level ones griefing level seventies is supposed to be a hideous abomination against nature while level seventies griefing level ones is A-OK.  A level seventy can do a lot of different stuff in a lot of different places; a lower or mid level character can only do one thing (level) and they have to do it in a very specific area.  So yes, if a level seventy decides to start rolling around throwing AOEs in Ashenvale or something, he might possibly get smacked for it.  So what?

Not that I think this is an ideal solution, or anything.  Migrating to a PvE server would solve this too, and wouldn't require any weird "Curse of Guilt" rules or anything.  Being able to gank lowbies with impunity seems to be the main draw of a PvP server; why mess with it?

The difference between level 70s griefing lowbies and lowbies griefing level 70s is: in the former case, the lowbie can call in / switch to a 70 to fight back, but the 70 can't, unless he wants to get "cursed". That 'curse' idea is just way too exploitable (and I'm not referring to 70s farming in lowbie areas.. I was more thinking lowbies getting to outlands / isle of queldanas with assistance and then abusing the system to grief certain 70s doing their daily quests or whatever; all you'd need to do is find a paladin killing stuff and stand in the consecrate until death)...

In fact, if the system takes gear into account (which it should, as a lv70 in full season3 can easily take 2-3 lv70s in greens) they don't even need to be lowbies, they'd just drop all gear in the bank (or get on an alt that doesn't have anything better than greens), get rez sickness, and punch/annoy people trying to farm until they finally got killed (or until they got a kill because the 'victim' wouldn't fight back), at which point they could curse 'em.

I didn't say 70s griefing lowbies was "fine" (I occasionally travel to lowbie alliance lands on my lv70 alliance character to kill high-level horde PKs).. but this solution would make things worse, while not really solving the original problem (you could still be killed by a fully twinked level 39 in STV... he might be lower level than you, but he has twice the hitpoints and three times the damage). The solution, as you said, is moving to a PVE server. People suck, etc.


-- Z.

This isn't ten years ago and we aren't trying to balance PK in UO.  Speaking as someone who's leveled on both PVP and PVE servers in WoW, if you can't take getting squashed by higher-level players, get the hell off the PVP server and STFU.

AoE could be dealt with by making it not effect low levels unless you choose to turn on an option. Zerging might be more of a problem, but the high level would be pretty safe from in in areas with high level agressive mobs.

I doubt there will be hordes of sub-58 characters in the Outlands.  If they somehow make it there, aggro radii will take care of them rather quickly.

Well, the 'level 1' was an exaggerated example, of course. But even a level 58+ character should suffice for griefing purposes, and you could always use a level 70 with purposely gimped gear and perhaps resurrection sickness. Not to mention twinked-to-the-gills level 29/39/49 characters camping out in a particular zone in their range and effortlessly 2-shotting anyone (even higher levels, possibly) without repercussion. So you get your level 70 main to take care of-- oh wait, can't do that!

Basically, any system that allows the 'victim' to put the 'killer' at a disadvantage simply because of a level/gear difference is exploitable, and there is no way for the game to detect griefing like that. (they wouldn't even need to attack first, if that was a criterion... just walk into an AOE with 1 hp, etc.) Sure, you can add convoluted systems on top of this like "only allow cursing a player if they did x% damage", but that either means the naked rez-sick 70 still dying in one hit at x% hp, or if x is high enough, a group of gankers can escape ever getting marked by spreading the damage around (not to mention the ever-so-popular 'rogue 1-shot kill at 10% hp' situation) or training mobs on the players to kill them and/or killing the players indirectly (MC them off a cliff, MC them underwater so they drown when it breaks, fear them into mobs, heal/buff the mobs they are fighting, etc).

Edit: It's WOW. People are broken. :P


-- Z.

Everyone can take their beatings and STFU.  It's not like you drop your gear or anything.  And this is WUA talking, the guy with a fucking carebear avatar.

I don't play on PvP servers so I have to ask:  Exactly how many low-levels ganking a high-level problems have there been to date?  I'm just not seeing this as an issue to get worked up over.

I play pretty much exclusively on Frostmane and have a variety of Horde characters.  Ganking does happen, but it's not nearly as rife on my server as some people seem to think it is on PvP servers in general.  Sometimes you'll get a group of 70's clearing out a lowbie town line Tarren Mill, but they almost always get bored in 5 minutes and leave. 

Last night my 42 paladin was attacked 3 times in Tanaris.  Once by a stupid night elf druid that was constantly trying to trick me into attacking her in Gadgetzan, once by a 70 shaman, and once by a 44 rogue who was with a high level warrior.  I died twice and it was a little annoying since all I was doing was just grinding mobs.

On the other hand, I brought my 70 rogue there once I had dinged and got revenge on two of them.

Zetor,

 I don't think any of the scenarios you are mentioned would be happening under the system I am proposing. I am talking being able to cast curse a once every few days, with a fairly low probability of it landing. The idea is not that a gang of low level griefers can reliably wipe out a high level player. But that occasionally the low level player would have the satisfaction of saying "Got you, you *****" when the curse landed. A curse you could use once a week would probably be good enough for that. It just to take the feeling of complete helplessness away, if you don't have a level 70 to log on and take revenge.

The game is big and has room for more than one kind of play.

Did you ever play UO with it's noto system?  Yes, they will stand in your fire field spells just to give you murder counts.  And what the hell is the need for this system anyway?  Reroll PVE and STFU.

Call pet control, we got a secular bear that needs tranquilising.

Otherwise I agree. Unless you can gank, what is the point of diku PvP? It's designed to make small boys feel like big boys. Play Quake if you want solely human skill or don't PvP at all.

And then they'll log in with their other 8 level 1 alts. And then they'll log into their second account, which has 10 level 1 alts in it.

There's not just a potential for abuse here; it's a certainty. The CS headaches alone would force a rollback of this system.

I agree with WUA, the choice between PVP and PVE servers are available to players, and they can choose (Paid Transfer) to move to a PVE server if they can't take the heat...

But seriously, even on a PVP server you get sheltered from 1-20, and in various towns you have guards to make it harder (not impossible) for gankers to kill you. With zero death penalty (not even durability loss), the worst thing about being ganked is being set back a few mins (running back) and the feeling of injustice (if any).

The thing to note is that many gankers require participation from their victims for them to get their kick. I generally scout around a bit before rezzing to see if I can spot the ganker camping, and if I am ganked again I will take anything from a 5-20min break. Very few gankers have sufficient patience, and even when they are still there its unlikely they can maintain full concentration over time - most of the time I would be able to rez in a slightly out of sight area (behind tree, in crevice etc) and ride away before they realise I am up.

Think about how you can outsmart the gankers - it's an additional challenge and thrill in return for the inconvenience of being ganked that is the essence of PVP servers...

So very true.. I've never seen a ganker last more than 3-5 minutes trying to camp somebody before they get bored and ride off..

Triforcer's mentioned he's waited as long as 20 minutes before.

I've camped two guys for 15-20 minutes before, myself.  Of course, part of that is because I was completing a quest and they were Alliance pests competing with me for limited spawns.

I'm still amazed they didn't coordinate and rez together to kick my ass.  Hunter + Mage of an equivalent level to my druid should have been able to drive me off successfuly.  Instead they just kept rezzing separately until one ran off and the other's level 60 friend finally came to guard his ass.   :awesome_for_real:

The thing is, I don't doubt there is the rare individual that can devote 20 minutes to camping a player's corpse, but that's just not what I've seen to be common on the PvP servers I've played on.  Does it happen?  Perhaps, but it's rare indeed.

I've spent two  hours killing every noob horde in Ashenvale after my daughter was repeatedly ganked leveling.

Yes, I was bored that day.  And when the 70s arrived, it was quite fun to avoid them to continue to kill the little ones.

But I usually don't do that.  20 minutes is all it generally takes to camp a camper until he logs off.

I've heard people say they are never going back to pvp servers after telling me a story about how someone camped them and killed them 17 times while they were trying to quest in a specific area.  If you are being camped LEAVE THE FUCKING AREA, the distance from your corpse at which you can rez makes it impossible to be camped unless you stubbornly try to go about your bussiness as if there wasnt someone around trying to kill you.  The attitude this people have is "im a paying customer and if i want to kill things here then by god i should be able too" while forgetting they signed off on that right when they logged in a pvp server.  Giving level ones a tool to punish level eighties for ganking them is retarded, if you get camped your options should be 1) get someone to protect you and 2) go somewhere else.

Why not decrease the slope of the power curve so that 4 level 20's can have a 50:50 shot at killing one level 70?  If people really play pvp servers for the fights, they should welcome that. 

I've played every MMO on the pvp server when available and WoW had some of the most pathetic pvp'ers I've seen in my history of online gaming.  On the trip from 1-70, I could only remember being hit about 5 times by someone that was a) alone and b) within 3 levels of me.  People play on pvp servers in WoW to level up and crush newbies.  If there's a chance they won't win a fight, most won't bother to even attempt it.  That's why I left the pvp server.  Noone there wanted to engage in interestign pvp outside of the arenas.  Odd considering that's what pvp servers used to be all about.

That would be great.  SB did this actually, the difference between a level 50 and a level 75 was maybe a 10-15% increase in power depending on class, nobody ever played the lower levels so it wasnt really an issue.

Edit: that would fall under my "get someone to protect you" option.

Not necessarily.  Druids have an awesome array of tools for camping folks.  I'm amazed more people don't play them instead of rogues after playing one.  Track humans + stealth + root meant that I was able to kill one guy who thought to try and gank me as I was turning in a quest for a good half hour.  He'd do everything he could to try and get away.  Rez as far from his corpse as he could, run, pot-up, try to bandage.  Didn't help.  He eventually logged as a ghost, I suppose, because his corpse was still there when I finally got the drop for the other quest in the area.

They do.  On Venture Co the classes that hit me the majority of the time were rogues, druids, and warlocks.  I think people are onto you.

Because if the power curve is low enough that a 50 level difference still puts you in the ballpark of the upper level character, then the PvE content becomes trivial.

Are you saying that it's difficult to code players as being on a different power curve (relative to other players) than an NPC?  I'd think that would be relatively easy. 

I don't think it's easy to code a different power curve vs players that is balanced and not easily abused.

As demoralizing as it is for a low level player who gets ganked by a high level player, I think it will suck more as a high level player who got ganked by a couple of characters less than half his level. The pvp group I ran with in DAOC’s PVP server butchered every solo purple con caster we came across (minus bone dancers) – I don’t feel that it should be doable and so easily done at that.

What about making the 'special curve' work only when attacked one might ask? Then you will have lower level grievers jumping into the AE of higher level characters so that they will get 'activated' and proceed to gank the higher level.

The capacity for gamers to abuse game systems is exponentially multiplied whenever they are given tools that are rife with potential for abuse...

Isn't leaving the PvP server "Going somewhere else" ?

 :-P

They already did.  The mechanical difference between a level 60 and 65 player is substantially less than the difference a 60 player and a 65 mob.

---

I sometimes organize lowbie zergs in Hillsbrad, particularly when faced with 2 or more high level players.  What I do ask everyone who can to form up, spread out, and spam heals on me.  A half dozen or more lowbies spamming heals on a warrior really does add up over time.  If they stop to kill the lowbies, that means they have to stop damaging me.

Sure, but by doing that, you render virtually all equipment upgrades to be pretty much trivial.  If you have 70 levels worth of armor and weapons, and the level 1 armor is almost as good as the level 70 armor, then there's very little incentive to upgrade equipment for PvP. 

Secondly, unless you eliminate world PvP you'll have players exploiting the power difference between PC's and NPC's by using the Mobs as "cover" to do damage to melee characters where they can't be retaliated against for fear of aggroing mobs that will kill them pretty much instantly.

Now, you CAN scale the damage and healing like City of Heroes does (but that doesn't stop the mob problem above) and that's about as close as I've seen to a solution, but it has its problems too. 

Basically, it's not a trivial solution to implement.

Why, exactly, is this a bad thing for pvp?  I'd consider this a very good thing. 

We're talking Diku.  Without signifigant gear upgrades to drag people kicking-and-screaming into the endgame, the game's entire social and gameplay structure would collapse in a heap of soggy poopsocks.

The difference between a lvl 65 and a 60 is not that great - for non casters. Caster wise there is a very visible increase in the number of resists vs red/skull con players.

But I get the sense that the point being raised earlier was not about a 60 being ganked by a 65, but more along a Lvl 20-30+ being killed by a 60-70. As WOW currently stands, the 60-70 have to be AFK for a 30+ to beat em. Also, at 58-60 and 70 there are significant gear upgrade options that makes the stat difference far greater - the best gear at 69 vs the best gear at 70 is like more than 10 levels apart in gear difference.

I dont know what realm nor BG you play on, but Hunters are amazing in arena. My main is Warrior and we're ranked 3rd in our BG 3on3 (2409 rating atm) and my Hunter alt is at 2162 2on2, 2133 3on3, 2011 5on5 and this is my alt character. I recommend you speccing properly (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=cZEV0oEzMjotMhhrt) and adjusting to the playstyle. With that build, say you go 2on2 with a skilled druid, I guarantee you 2000 rating your first week. A few teams will be problematic for you (Warlock / Druid) (Rogue/XX), but assuming your Druid is extremely talented you are nearly immortal and got tons of CC and will drain things very fast. Also get the scorpid of course with the posion debuff and with improved stings they will rarely get off the Viper Stings. Viper Sting needs to stick on 24/7, get some addons for timerbars.

As you say there is many hunters around and they are overrepresented due to the fact that it is an easy class to play (BM specc in BG's) in PvP, but very hard to perfect. Once you perfect your playstyle with a Druid, work around eachothers diminishing returns and use CC / stings efficiently, you will annihilate the most. Me with my Warrior and Druid (2353 2on2) are chanceless VS this setup. Its almost better to AFK out then fight it cause I will be CCed 24/7. After I pummel, interrupt complete here it goes : 3 cyclones, 3 roots (he will moonfire rank 1 spell reflect), feral charge, scatter shot, freezing trap and restart.

Go practice, don't complain about the class just yet  :uhrr:

Hunters have been at the bottom of the totem pole for every single season so far.  Just because a few of them can reach top rankings doesn't mean its MUCH MUCH harder for a hunter to do it than say a warrior or a druid.  Spec? come on.  The problem is and has always been arena design.  The classes that struggle the most are the ones affected by los the most (hunters, mages, shamans, and paladins) and classes without a get out of jail free card like ice block/bubble/cheat death or even defensive stance and travel form and hunters and shamans are the only ones who overlap those two categories.  At least shamans have the insanely overpowered heroism to assure them at least some measure of representation.  Make the arenas completely wide open like real pvp and you'd see hunters go from bottom of the barrel to one of the top classes in no time.

No, it's because most hunters suck.  We don't call them 'huntards' for nothing.  As a collective whole, hunters are by far the stupidest class in the game and are underrepresented in all content that require you NOT drool on yourself.  The hunters I grab when we need a PUG are a running gag in my guild; they are inevitably HORRIBLE, like sub 500 DPS horrible.

 :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, it's not a problem with the class.. it's the players. I remember when I failed the test to be able to roll a Lock or a MS warrior. I was crushed, but hey at least I could play a hunter, it said!

Really, sometimes you guys amaze me with your vault-like clarity and reason.

This is exactly right.  I'm so glad you're getting it.  Hunters have some abilities that lower their DPS if used improperly.  It's not obvious and since they MAKE OMG BIG NUMBERS POP UP OMG, the hunter thinks they're playing well.  >Here< (http://bp3.blogger.com/_E99rsZgp6TE/R_0G2Ih0ScI/AAAAAAAAAEU/PTK9Kfy38D0/s1600-h/us2-0408.png) is Vhairi's 2v2 rating chart.  Note how after 1700, hunters esssentially flatline until 2100.  It's almost as if once you filter out the legions of facerollers, there is a solid population of successful hunters.

Someone just fell into the sarchasm.I play a warrior and a lock (I sure got on the overpowered wagon early... back in 2004 :P), and the #1 DPSer in my guild is a hunter. It needs good reflexes / ping to weave shots properly, something most dps classes don't need to do (other than improved slam bloodfrenzy bot MS warriors, but those don't do competitive damage in the first place). Their cc also isn't as "easy" as a mage's, they actually need to keep distance AND stand still while dpsing... etc. As for easymode in pvp... yeah, maybe in BGs, but arenas are a LOS nightmare even for my 'dot and go' warlock.

[disclaimer: I don't play a hunter, but I really don't think it's as much a "lol easymode" class as the WOW forums would have you believe. When I specced 21/40 destruction on my lock, I used a grand total of three buttons for dps, didn't need good timing or anything. That's hard!]


-- Z.

Does not.  Your hunter is probably a 41/20 BM spec hunter.  He probably presses exactly ONE button to DPS.  It's a macro that looks something like this.

#showtooltip
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/cast !Auto shot
/cast Steady Shot
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1

I know about the BM macro... but the hunter (she, btw... yes, irl :P) is marksman spec, which has a more complex rotation as I understand. Plus there's a need to manage the pet (pulling back from aoe, using it to save someone or take a hit for the team, etc) also, along with the many different aspects of pet management to optimize performance (resists, trained skills, etc), switching between hawk and viper, stuff like that. Edit: Also misdirects, different sorts of traps, dealing with trap resists, scattering a mob off the healer until the tank can pick it back up, distracting shot juggling a mob when the tank needs a breather, etc.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that WOW forum blahblah like '99% of all hunters suck and their class is ezmode' is just that. Honestly, pvping on my warrior or warlock (well, back when I did) is dead easy, and doesn't need any sort of kiting skills or proper LOS use; pve dpsing is even easier. I don't see how a hunter would be easier than either of those.


-- Z.

Did i wander off into the official wow boards or something? i thought this kinda idiocy was reserved for those places.

It sort of wanders, like sand.

You CAN make an MMO work as a PvP environment by eliminating everything that makes them addictive in the PvE sense.  What you are advocating for is effectively an MMO First Person Shooter with swords and sidegraded attributes/equipment.  That might work, but it wouldn't be very compelling for those who are into the PvE 'upgrade' mindset.

Which confirms my assertion that PvE-based MMO's, in their current iteration, invariably fail as pvp games. 

Also, I'm not advocating an FPS.  MMO's are very much akin to an FPS/TBS hybrid.  I think they have value in this as a slower paced, strategy based pvp game.  I believe it's possible to have a game with both successful pve as well as pvp, it just hasn't been created yet. 

WoW *HAD* the right idea initially.  Player and Monster levels are pretty near equal, so fighting a player was supposed to be as hard as fighting a monster, just requiring a better use and understanding of your classes skills. (Since humans aren't idiot AI.)   There's been plenty of stories about guys 3-4 levels lower raping face on lousy PVPers.  However, Blizzard failed as soon as they started giving-in to achiever mentality and mudflation.   When you have a new level 70 with a 96dps weapon and 5khps they're going to be nothing but fodder for the 135dps, 11khps+ guys.

Item-centric PVP is as lame as level-centric PVP.  It's even worse than level-centric PVP in a game where aquiring equipment pairity takes you longer than leveling-up the character in the first place.

My advise would be to stop lvling at 69 instead of 70.

At 69 you can BG EOTS, AB and WSG in the 60-69 bracket vs people of equivalent gear and purchase and bank S1 gear. The difference between S1 to S3 is not that huge, and players will be able pvp if they paused to clock up some gear before they ding 70.

And a full set of S1 armor (Chest, head, leg, shoulders, hands) cost about 65K honor - by completing dailies and converting excess marks of honor via the "For Great Honor" quest one should be able to get about 7-15k honor in a single weekend of gaming - its still a grind, but its doable unlike the old honor system where working adults have practically no chance of getting any stuff from rank 11 and above.

Problem is that the queue times (on my groups anyway) for sub-70 BGs are far higher than for the seventy BGs.  I had a lot of fun running AV at 60 (run to Outland for an hour or two and you get stuff that's competitive with high end pre-BC raid gear), but the queue times were thirty or forty-five minutes.  Ding 61, and queue times drop down to less than a minute, but it's back to being killed in stunlock by rogues with dual warglaives.

The aspects I am referring to with the FPS angle is that player skill becomes more important than equipment, and weapons and armor are all side-grades. 

With respect to PvE, you would be dooming the game to have no character power progression.  That might be what you want, but it is pretty important to a lot of players to feel that their character is getting more powerful.

I agree that this is what players want.  My alternative would be something along the lines of Mario.  If gear were less important, then players would be forced to rely on player skill for not only success in pve but in pvp situations as well.  I think a game that was able to generate pve encounters interesting enough that not every player could successfully navigate them, then the game would retain interest.  Sadly, the reason MMOs have continued to succeed is because most players lack this type of skill and instead prefer that they are rewarded for time invested rather than prowess at the game.  WoW has come a long way in promoting this type of system, but still relies heavily on the gear grind to augment player success. 

Yes, what I want is niche.  I came to grips with this long ago. 

Short version:
I think your assessment that gear is sought out by folks who are poor at PvP is flawed.

Long version:
Diku players like to feel that their characters are progressing.  Getting cool stuff is just an alternate progression.  PvE teaches a player that they can win 99% of the time.  Raiding teaches players that they can see and get cool stuff, but they need to rely upon other people (extroverts do not see this as a bad thing).  Raiding enthusiasts like to conquer a map/boss/item progression so they can see new things and kill them.  PvE/Raiders see PvP as something to do while wiating for new content.

PvP enthusiasts enjoy the thrill of beating a worthy opponent.  An opponent you beat 100% of the time is not worthy.  A PvP enthusiast will play the same maps ad infinitum because the difference is more in the way the match unfolds, not in the way the map looks - in fact the PvP enthusiast would rather that there were a limited number of maps, so that they can gear up, er, learn the map to gain an advantage against someone who didn't know the maps as well.  A PvP enthusiast will grind on his skills until they are completely reflexive, and all he need think about during combat is tactical awareness.  A PvP enthusiast will optimizme his chances for winning in any way possible, because he knows that his enemies will also be optimizing their chances for winning.  In a game with gear, or some other grindable advantage, a PvP enthusiast will grind with the best, most broken PvE grinders... because even a small edge in PvP can be deciding.

That wasn't my assessment at all.  My point was that most people aren't good at gaming (just as most people aren't good at driving a car).  Gear overcomes their deficiencies.  If a player can commit enough time, their gear will allow them to beat people regardless of skill. 


I wish that I believed this, but I don't.  The majority of people that play on pvp servers or even that play pvp games want simply to win.  Crushing opponents is even better.  This is why you see the great abundance of gray ganking and attacking solos with superior numbers.  I've been playing every MMO available to date on the pvp server and found this to be almost nearly universal. 

Because ol' classic Grand Marshals aren't broken. They just like the challenge. You do realise the easiest way to win is to play against inferior players? Sportsmanship barely exists in real sports, I can't see how you can assume it exists online.

I never said anything about Grand Marshalls or sportsmanship.  I gave the extremes from a PvE-centric and PvP-centric views.  There are also the "I like causing other people greif"-centric views and the "I didn't get enough nipple time so I need to win in this game to feel important"-centic views as well.  The latter, in general, gives rise to the Grand Marshalls and the cat-assing to get the best gear to have an advantage.  Unfortunately the latter two tend to cause people to play with the same focus.

I guess what my poorly-stated point should have been is this: gear for folks who are PvE'ing has a different purpose then does gear for folks who are PvP'ing.

I think that the gear mechanism for PvP is backwards - better gear should be given to the less-able players, to artificially handicap the better players.  Instead of what is being said below: crappy players get good gear so they can beat the hell out of better players - note that I'm not saying this doesn't happen, gear is so important in this game that a well-geared bottom of the barrel player will beat the hell out of a poorly geared good player... but honestly, how long does a good player have crap gear?  Not everyone is in the top teir gear, so that good player is going to be able to beat the masses, get the honor, and gear up.

I'm not arguing that the current system isn't broken, I am arguing that the crappy player with uber gear is not a majority of the playerbase, mostly you have better-then-average players with better then average gear because time played (at PvP) does have an impact on player ability (the more you play, the better you get).

No, the crappy player with zomgloot isn't commonplace. That is true. I don't know if it even exists, realistically anyone should be able to learn enough not to be a complete tool at PvP.

But, my point is this; regardless of your skill, or your grit, or any of the progression axis you as a person can advance on (except maybe catassing), you will always be at the mercy of itemisation. Once you've begun to level out skillwise, any upgrade is worth more than maybe dozen and again dozen of hours of playing.

In short - your skill gain from grinding for a new PvP item is most likely entirely dwarfed by the augmentation you receive from said item. Which encourages grind and easy wins, not personal improvement.

Edit;
Hume (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume%27s_Law) wouldn't like this discussion.

Thank you for this.  I couldn't have stated it more clearly. 

Yea noticed that the lower BGs does have significantly less people queuing for it. All boils down to how high the pvp population is for your battlegroup I guess - for Bloodlust which I am now on, the PVP population is rather high, so the queues are mostly fast and furious even on sub 70 bgs.

In pre TOA DAOC, Players were mostly even gear wise - crafted and enchanted armor and weapons were relatively affordable and easily attained.

But then the game have to offer the players alternative advancement beyond the gear - which is the Realm abilities system where you get points after you attain higher realm levels from killing players, and use these points to purchase special stat buffs and abilities.

End result is much of the same - hardcore players grind Emain (pvp frontier zone) and got so many realm abilities that they have a huge advantage vs casuals. Worse still, many hardcore player dual boxed buff bots that made the statistical difference even greater. It is technically possible for an average player with heaps of time to grind to realm rank 8+, and a good player at realm rank 1 with the same equipment would probably be destroyed.

Point is - character advancement is the lynch pin of most MMORPGs, and this advancement is mostly underscored by time sunk. A casual player will always be at a disadvantage when matched against the hardcore catass.

The new arena changes do a lot to discourage people from team hopping and point selling.

For one thing, the market in high-ranked teams is going to drop, because a new player on a high level team can no longer get high-level points off of it. Before, a lot of gladiator type players would run a team up to 2000 or so, sell it to some scrubs, and the scrubs would ride it back down, playing 10 a week and taking points.  Now that you get points off your PR if it is more than 150 below the TR, there will be no market for this, which will stop the gladiators from rerolling all the time.  Also, if the gladiators leave their team, when they come back to it, if their average personal rating is 150 below the team rating, they'll have to fight scrub teams and risk 30 points each game to get 3 or 4, until they get back into the proper PR range. This strips the incentive for point selling, and penalizes team-hopping.

Second, there are a lot of people who ground S1 in BGs this season and they are likely to want to go and try to get s3 from arenas instead of grinding s2 in more BGs. There are a lot of people who still need S3 stuff in the lower ranks, and S4 gloves, thrown weapons, wands and offhands will be available with no PR, and pants will require only 1550. So a lot of people will be able to get 2/5 s4 and the offhand type stuff. And the S3 gear is very good, and there are a lot of people who don't have it yet. 

Hopefully the impact of the PR ratings dissuading people from competing in S4 will be outweighed by the other changes encouraging new competitors to join the system.  Of course if you're wearing worse than S1 you're not gonna be getting a whole lot of loot in the arena.

And for those who got 4/5 S3, 1700 to replace those 4 pieces is an attainable target.

The saving grace of RA's was they weren't linear (I believe that is the word to use here). There was a rough break even point, and that point was very much obtainable. It still has the retarded mechanic of 'paying your dues' in place, but in a mitigated way.

BuffBots were just retarded in almost every way. Might as well added the ability to inflate your characters level to 60 in DaoC for an extra 10 dollars a month.

I have capped honor points and close to capped arena points. I'm thinking of saying to hell with S4 and just saving up the points for level 80. Anyone know of a reason that wouldn't work?

1. The cost of honor gear will continue to scale up to level 80, so the actual 'value' of your 75k honor points will go down vs just spending it now.
2. All you'll be able to buy are maybe the gloves and pre-wotlk gear.

We also have no idea how they'll handle the 80 PvP rewards. Plus it'll be like, a year away still, it's Blizzard.

And that's assuming they don't just wipe Honor/ Arena points like they did previously.  Tho that happened at the release of the "honor as currency" system, iirc.

Basically, the whole "Personal Rating resets when you leave a team" is the biggest flaw in the Arena scheme. 2k+ teams basically will be fucked if one person quits or transfers on them because they wont be able to get someone (even if they had been on a 2k team before) to join and help them unless they NEVER LOSE.

One of our rogues was 2240 rated and his mage team-hopped and came back and they were getting 1pt a win and lost one to a D/C mid fight and they lost 32 points. He went apeshit and disbanded his team because they basically lost a chance at Gladiator titles because their mage left the team to help a friend for a night.

PR being constant makes a hell of a lot more sense than the team rating being constant imo.

But oh well, the whole arena system is fucking messed up either way.

I approve of sticky personal ratings.  It not only prevents being screwed over by a team member hopping, but it prevents people from "starting over."  No longer would you have full S3 geared teams starting over again at 1500 and battling against newbs. 

If you get the gear and skill to get to a high level in Arenas, you should always be placed to play against like opponents.  I think this would help with this regard.

It would make it difficult for people just starting out matching up with vets though.  Perhaps the scores could degrade over time of non-use.  Wipe your score after 3 weeks of non-pvp with that character perhaps?  Maybe buy back programs.  Trade in that S3 item to reduce your score some?

Sound harsh?  It is.  I'm not really a fan of powerleveling people through arenas.  If you want to do Arenas with your friend, "delevel" and you can.

Figured this was as good a place as any to stick this.

Season 4 begins June 24th (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=7102930383&sid=1)

S4 looks like clown ass.

I want a dark, sinister WoW please.

I find it more disturbing that every armor type looks exactly the same regardless of the class. Pallys and Warriors, Rogues and Druids, Hunters and Shamans, and all the freaking clothies will look exactly the same. That's gotta be a new low on laziness for Blizzard. In a game that's suppose to be all about gear and polished diku, that's a bad sign for the future.

They've said that they're designing all new PvP reward gear for WotLK, so it's different from the PvE gear.

Not sure if that means as many different ones for PvP as PvE or not, but I suspect that Season 4 isn't an indication of where things are at. They're probably just all working on WotLK now and season 4 wasn't that important.

Basically what lamaros said. Bigger fish to fry. Besides the people fighting for this gear are not the type of people who give the shits about how they look. Mostly.

As has been said before, this is their LAST SHRED of content before WotLK. (If +1 armor of uglyness can be called content.) So they better get thier butts in gear or they are going to have 10 million paying customers with nothing new to do for 5-9 months or so. You would think after four years they would have figured out how to get this shit out faster, but I guess not.

I'm bitching because I'm having fun playing WoW with my brother again, but the cold hard truth that there will be nothing new to do for months means my enjoyment is not going to last long.

I popped on to WoW for the first time in a year a week and a bit back. Golly things are boring. I'm tossing up between doing the only thing that might be slightly fun, joining some Sunwell guild and seeing some of the supposedly "best raid fights ever" and stuff, or just dicking about till this months sub runs out saving up some gold for the DK I'm going to play in WotLK. Better to do the latter probably, so that the shitty things about WoW don't piss me off and make me enjoy WotLK less when it releases (late this year I expect, Nov-Decish).

The Sunwell stuff isn't going to do it for a lot of people. The fights don't sound fun to me; they sound like another step into the "be perfect or you're fucked" territory. I like a lot of the dynamics they are playing around with, but they seem to be trying to put duct tape on their broken gearflation with ridiculous rage timers and that weird buff "Sunwell Radiance" that all the mobs get in there.

By the way, I think enrage timers are probably the worst idea ever. It's a way of reinforcing the retarded DPS race stuff outside of normal healing or tanking breakdowns.

I wouldn't worry about Season 4 looking retarded, only about 5 people on every server will have it  :oh_i_see:


Being able to grab a Season 2 weapon/shield for my Paladin will be nice.

Pretty much this - I'm going to get myself the S2 swords and some of the armour for my rogue, then start levelling up a shaman alt to 70 or so to be ready for the influx of "4 DKs need healer for instance_34" groups at the launch of WotLK.  :oh_i_see:

I'm rolling a DK but I'm not planning on doing any of the TBC instances; they're mostly rubbish and, as you say, healers will be scant. Still, I'm sure there will be a few that do, and you'll never have trouble finding a tank.

Yes you will.  There are tank, dps and pvp trees.  DK tanks will be as numerous as warrior tanks are now, unless their tank build is superior to the PVP/ DPS build for solo grinding, like Pallies.  :awesome_for_real:

Actually they changed that again. All three DK trees will be tank worthy.


There also trying to make it so a non-Protection warrior can tank a normal instance again.

Yeah all Pallies/Feral Druids/Warriors/DKs will be able to tank 5mans regardless of spec in WotLK. When it comes to heroics you might need a little mroe if you're a shitty tank, but it's only raid stuff that will need out and out tank specs.

And even then all tank specs are going to do a lot more damage in WotLK, they're moving away from notable +threat stuff and makign much more DPS based threat.

That's what they said about BC.. and it was true up until the raid instances. I had plenty of DPS wars tanking my groups right through Arcatraz, where things started to get a bit wonky. 

Dps-based worked Pre-bc, IIRC.  Plenty of our tanks in BWL would pick-up high DPS weapons for the added threat.  That's also why pally tanks sucked so hard, because they simply didn't have the tools to DPS. No heroic strike, no sunder, no cleave, etc. Just judgements every 8 seconds and whatever weapon you could pick up.  Perhaps they'll give them a ton of +spelldam to make up for it, as +spelldam weapons are capped at a DPS lower than a level 60 BC DPS weapon.  (41.5)

Well they made Shield Slam and Imp D-stance baseline now, so that alone should help the non-Prot warrior Tanks.



As to Paladins, after looking at the new shaman abilities (they roughly gave Shamans cleanse and Illumination along with other things), I *really* get the feeling we are going to see a DRASTIC rethink in paladin design.


My personal hope for Holy Paladins, is some kind of Healing through Melee spec. Place a buff on the Tank, then all Damage done is converted into healing onto the marked person. Or something.

They also added have tactical mastery as a first tier Protection talent that allows partial rage retention on stance swapping and greatly increases the threat of Mortal Strike or Blood Thirst while in Defensive stance

No green text?  Not insulting, just curious... but they made that change in bold about a year ago, iirc.

Would have been nice if they'd put that talent at the base of the Fury or Arms tree, where Warriors could actually take it... but that's Kalgan for ya.

Doesn't really help PvE spec Arms or Fury Warriors, since they don't pick up Tact Mastery; and while the default 5v5 Arena spec has TactMastery, the 3v3/2v2 spec does not.

The expansion talent fixes warrior tanks in their main issue (gear giving you less rage). Beyond that, I think warriors are still fine in other specs and can continually tank lower stuff.

Ahh... must have missed that bit.

My war was done during the days where the final talent in the Fury tree was a 100% damage boost to the next strike after killing something. Been quite some time since I last dusted it off.

Anyway pvp wise I feel that warriors are solid - if a trifle dependent on good support to really shine. Rogues on the other hand is possibly the most overpowered class in game at the moment.