f13.net

I remember reading an article from WotLK that the Blizzard design team was rethinking the desire to have the Arena be the be-all-end-all focus of PvP it had become, and that they were going to refocus on battlegrounds and the reignite the whole Horde vs. Alliance battle that had been the core of the game.  From what I can tell, the storyline in WotLK sets that situation up, in that the battle against the Lich King starts to chip away at the uneasy peace that had been forged between the 2.  So maybe this is the beginning?

I'm not optimistic.

The way gear rewards are now structured, the game seems to me to be currently designed to only reward players who spend time in the arena.  The ones who just go to the battlegrounds are not privy to decent gear, hence their status as being sheep for the arena wolves ensured.

If the sheep never get to access the purples that make them a little more wolf-like, there is no reason to go to the battlegrounds.

What seems to me to be happening is that there is even less horde v. alliance pvp going on, except in Wintergrasp.

I suspect that battlegrounds are quite a bit less popular now than they were prior to launch of WOTLK.  I don't have numbers, but just basing this on my own experience.

The design of gear rewards is flawed, if the design is meant to make battlegrounds more popular.  Paying 60k honor for a piece of shitty blue pvp gear, with an honor cap of 75k (so there is no sense in trying to save it up in hopes of better gear later) seems terribly stupid to me.

I have always lamented the idea of arena being the core PvP... there is something so static, sterile and stale about it. Arena should ancillary and complimentary to a larger scale mechanic to PVP.

My ideas would include:

1. Collision detection in PvP

2. The ability to (at least on a PvP server) take over and control an entire city. Yes I know people would QQ that they could not get to the flight master or auction house or whatever, but thats part of a PvP Server.

One of the problems is that currently, when you see that "Org is under attack" most just ignore it and let the Alliance (or Horde if on the other side) do their thing because there is no risk. On PvP servers if you are in a capital city when it is attacked, everyone should be flagged and you either log, fight, run, die. I also thing there should be better rewards for capturing a city. Increased xp (like WG) and perhaps a small movement buff (5%).

3. Oh and can we please remove the fing nets from guards in BB and Gadget? Ridiculous.

No, those would be silly with how WoW is designed. Collision detection alone would fuck over the entire system.


Things like Collision Detection and capital capturing need to be designed from the ground up, not patched into a 4 year old game.

I'd imagine that the do such a refocus on Alliance vs. Horde conflict via BGs, they would need to change the cost and restriction of gear.  They'd probably piss off the people who want to be hardcore, but WoTLK seems to be a step in the direction of reducing the gear grind so more people can actually experience the endgame.

It's just Blizzard bizarre vision of how people will 'progress' in PvP.


They are trying to create a "raid game" for PvP, with it's own tiered reward structure and advancement path. Except that is absolutely retarded in pretty much every conceivable way. Raid bosses don't get harder when someone else kills them before you.

In Blizzard's mind:

BG's are 5 man dungeons
Arena's are 10-25 man raids (with each tier of rating being the next dungeon, naxx to uludar to icecrown etc)
Wintergrasp is a open world BoE epic boss


It's all kinds of stupid.

Again, they'd have to change that mentality for this to work.  From what I have read, the gear requirements are starting to become less than the TBC levels.

Gear requirements are less than the TBC levels if you count the end of TBC when gear requirements went 31 flavors of retarded.

That said, the old system of "buy two season old arena gear for honor, one or two pieces of current season have ratings reqs" was far FAR better than the current system of "if you don't play arenas competitively, fuck off and die"

I currently have everything I could possibly get from BG/WG honor and marks. There's seriously no reason for me to keep going with the system, because I can no longer advance in it without joining an arena team. That didn't happen in pre lich king, really. There was always a new set of shit to save up for later, or you could join an arena insurance fraud team to slowly grind gear.

Oh, my hatred for arena, and what they've done to try and get people to play a part of the game that they do NOT enjoy. I like pug capture and hold as a way to waste time. Fuck you blizzard for telling me that's not the right way to play the system you built with it included. AB is freaking fun, I just don't like feeling like I'm wasting my time by playing it.

Pretty sure it was a blue post from a major Developer on the WoW general forums.

However, it was made shortly before the launch of WAR if I remember correctly and seemed like it was mostly a PR stunt to appease the masses and keep as many people playing WoW instead of bailing to try WAR as possible.

It talked about adding XP to battlegrounds (which would really piss off their dedicated twink crowd) creating more new battlegrounds and improving open world pvp stuff etc etc.

However most of the big changes they talked about were said to be way off in the future with a typical Blizzard Soon(TM) timeline.  Since WAR has all but flopped at this point I don't see them really being pressured very hard to make those changes in the near future.

A best case scenario would be after Icecrown has been out for a while and there is no more PvE treadmill to keep the masses busy so they add some of the changes to keep people playing until the next expansion launches, but if they make any significant changes before the next expansion I'd be shocked.

The lead PVP designer hated the Honor-For-Arena-Gear method.  He was the one that coined the term "Welfare Epics" and instituted all of the rating requirements.  Until such time as he is gone, expect this system to continue along as it is.

 Yes, it's incredibly stupid.
 Yes, it goes against the grain of the game making things 'more accessible' on other fronts.
 No, I don't expect it to change before Kalgan is gone.

The guy is a 'hardcore' with the hardcore blinders on.   If you don't play like him you're just a noob who deserves to be food for the 'real players.' 

Xanthippie, its not just your perception that BGs are run less frequently.  There used to be 20-30 instances of each BG running prior to WOTLK coming out.  Now while I'll admit some of that was inflated by boredom after people had maxed-out toons, I shouldn't see only 3-4 WSG and a maximum of 15 ABs running on the weekend.  Not three months after launch and not after seeing those numbers in every BG PLUS 10-20 AVs running at a time during the 'middle period' of BC.

Nowadays I have to wait in queue for BGs to start up if I feel like running the daily.  That's a crazy turnaround from what it was. 

I remember seeing as many as 30 AVs running on the Nightfall group.  Nowadays, I see 3.  The falloff on other BGs has been about as bad, although it's more on the order of "16 ABs running was common" then down to the typical 2 or 3 that are going now.

I don't expect Wintergrasp to maintain any sort of popularity either.  We're already seeing people use tactics such as parachuting into the keep at the start to whack guns, or running vehicles through walls that aren't destroyed.  While the first is apparently an approved tactic (although I consider it to be cheese at best) I'm fairly certain the second is not.  At least, I'm fairly sure Blizzard didn't intend for siege to be driven through the narrow entries between the sections of the keep.

As has already been noted, but I'll repeat because goddamn does it fill me with rage, Arena is absolutely painful unless you are in the top... 30%?  Adding those level of requirements to BG gear was an absolutely stupid idea, one they're already scaling back.

The only reason I'm going in BGs at all is to earn tokens towards mounts, or maybe to run the daily, if I feel like bashing my skull against the Horde Nightfall (nightfail lol) complete and utter inability to maintain any sort of cohesion in a BG.  Once I have the final tokens, I probably won't have any reason to go into BGs... at all.  Because really, I have a very limited ability to enjoy how many different ways I can lose complete control of my character while being burned down.

As long as WG still gives you 4-10k honor a game, it'll have lots of people. My current issue with WG, is when the Alliance is on the offense, there is roughly a 4 minute window of actual game-time before the ZergTrain shows up and bulldozes anything and everything in it's path.


We'll never get Against the Odds (http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=1739) but just about all my high level alts have Within Our Grasp (http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=1755)  :oh_i_see:

There were rumors going around in EJ that Kalgan wanted the game to keep focusing on arenas, and then Tigule pointed that, y'know, people simply prefer bg's, so kalgan went STFU, and tigule went NO U.

But yes, kalgan must die in a car fire.

I sort of disagree with the first part.  I currently have probably close to 70k honor, and nothing to spend it on.  The pvp gear obtainable via honor only is distinctly inferior to ... well... everything.  I could put that on, which will reduce my damage/healing, while extending my lifespan by entire seconds.  Maybe.  Probably not, as a matter of fact.

No thanks.  In fact, when it comes down to it, I am mostly doing WG in order to give a whack at the dailies.  I need shards, dammit.  Plus the crazy (to me) goal of amassing something north of 40k gold.  To buy three mounts.  Stupid 100 mount achievement.

Oddly enough, I got the first achievement the first time I ran Wintergrasp, and... after checking armory, I see that I managed to get the second one almost two months ago.  Whoops.

I think our fastest capture time was like... 3-4 minutes? Most of that was the actual siege tank travel time. Someone managed to get max rank right off the bat (no idea how exactly, tenacity reward lag probably), and was cranking out Siege tanks for the Zerg to drive. It's amazing how fast the walls crumble when 16 siege tanks pile into the same point.

The last assault I tried on WG, we were cruising along with about 9 minutes to go, doing ok... then the match instantly ended after alliance capped the last tower.   :oh_i_see:  As I've already alluded to, Horde is particularly failboat on Nightfall, so there's little point to protecting the towers, as no one else will move with you to protect them, and alliance moves in groups of two or more when they go after a goal.

It's really baffling to me the organizational differences.

If I wanted to play 'arena style' pvp, I'd do it in Soul Calibur or Guild Wars.

Seriously, the arena alterations scream "manager's pet project" because it's metrics blow, and all the changes being made are to drive people into forced participation. It's kalgan's own little perfect game type, and nobody seems to be able to tell him it's just not working out, and we should see other people.

Well WG is server specific. On Doomhammer, the Horde is on average probably more organized in WG, if only out of necessity and circumstance.

"Guys, we're ONLY outnumbered 2:1 this game, we can totally do this!"



The Alliance is decently organized itself, but there are just so many of us, it doesn't matter most of the time.

"Ok Guys, I'll fly out back and parachute into the left Courtyard to clear the guns... the zerg already cleared the outer wall? All of it? Even the... k."

The next member of the Alliance should be a faction of Sithilidss or Nerubians  :grin:



Kild: Remember Retard rocks?  :awesome_for_real:

No? Unless this is a vague reference to that years old guild drama from me not being sensitive about word usage when ranting about pugs <3

Meeting stones!

Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

I really don't understand why they don't just have a flat reduction in damage in pvp, possibly a scaled reduction based on how many people are currently raping you (like tenacity), scrap resilience, and hand out tier gear for top-level arena play (because raiding is so hardcore the top 10% of pvp'ers don't deserve the epics :awesome_for_real: ).

Apparently because healers become unkillable very quickly - see late season arena in TBC.

The real question is why the hell do you give out the best gear to the top PvPers?  It's like telling baseball teams that one team can use aluminum bats, while the other uses wiffle bats.  It's your aim is to create a fair balanced PvP playing field, this is kind of a no brainer.

Well, yes. It is in fact so obvious and has been the other way around for so long in WoW, that the only conclusion I can come to is they don't WANT a balanced PVP playing field, for whatever reason.

Oh that's easy.  Kalgan is hardcore and wants to award players for skill!

STOP FOCUS FIRING YOU GODDAMN NOOBS
Because PVP gear and PVE gear are different in ways other than just resilience.

-They have different set bonuses, some of which are meaningful.
-I shit all over stamina when it's on PVE DPS gear, but PVP gear has stamina in spades and that's OK.
-PVP gear has very little hit rating because the +hit cap is much lower in pvp because using the same +hit table for pvp and pve would make any level differences in world pvp retardedly lopsided.

Why is this a bad thing?  PVE works the exact same way.  At a certain point you run out of ways to advance by repeatedly grinding Nexus, so you either focus on achievements, move up to raiding, or roll up an alt.  You can even run out of upgrades in raiding pretty quickly depending on class/spec, leaving you to work on achievements until the next content patch - Which, conveniently, will also be when everyone can go back to afking in the cave for epics.
1. Gear doesn't make as much a difference in PVP as people like to tell themselves it does.  Being in full deadly gladiator gear isn't going to give you automatic 2.2k rating.

2. If there is no tangible reward for doing something, no-one will do it.  Witness people in this thread saying they're going to stop doing BGs because there is no more shiny.

3. You're not going to face them in the arenas unless you're already on their level.

Because I can have a purple in every slot from pve, and it will eventually end until new content.

I can get 4-5 of them (because healer rings: STILL NOT LIVE) via BG PVP.

There's a pretty large difference in how long you can play the raid game and still have progression, and how long you can play the BG game and still have progression.

Heck, if you want to just use crafting/heroics, there's STILL far more progression for that over the 4-5 items you can get from non arena PVP. Hell, you can't even get a blue weapon from pvp.

edit: the hidden rating system screws the "only fight people on your level" thing, plus matchmaking is Best Effort. If it can't find someone at your level, but there's a 2200 team looking who can't find anyone, you two fight. And gear doesn't matter, except it does. Someone with 0 resil and pve dps gear (low stam) versus someone with a few hundred resil, the person with the dps gear is likely fucked, barring flat out playing quite a few levels above them. So on an even skill basis, gear very much matters.

That's true, however, the imbalance still exists.  Take two teams equally competent, and place 1 in hateful, and 1 in deadly, watch who wins.


Allow me to correct you.  That would be "not enough people would do it".  If the Arena had no gear benefits, you would have people doing it: the people who enjoy highly competitive, small group combat.  Forcing people to it as Blizzard has done is a sign that the Arena isn't quite working out as they had hoped, so rather then simple let is become the niche it really is, they are forcing everyone to do it if they want to enjoy the PvP combat in general.  Kind of the like ward system in WAR is cockblock to force people to either PvE or grind keeps incessantly.


Which is why you have a rating system.

Not being in that sure as fuck will make it a lot harder.

The other reason to force people into Arenas is that the rating system does not function properly without large amounts of participation, neither does the matching system.

If only the hardest of the hardcore played arena, half of them would have shit ratings, because half the people must have shit ratings. This doesn't work, as they'll stop playing with no actual reward. And then people's ratings slide down, the cycle repeats, and eventually you run out of people willing to play. It needs an influx of BAD players. Not players, just people who are supposed to occupy the shitty ratings levels, and essentially boost other people's ratings by moving the middle point of "skill".

This isn't a sustainable model if there's nothing in it for the people at the bottom of the barrel. You already see this being adjusted by lowering the ratings requirements on some of the items.

Yes, ELO is great for chess. It tells you very accurately who the better player is. It is iffy for games like, say, MtG where the game isn't the same every time, and downright stupid to use for something like WoW.

I feel stupid: ELO? MtG?  I assume ELO refers to the ratings system, but not MtG.

This was always my major bitch of the system.

I'm 1500 and the other dude is 2000 whatever. He's already proved he's better then me at Arena's, so we are going to increase his already superior skill artificially through superior gear? Wat?  :uhrr:

To say nothing that now this dude can wafflestomp me in PvP that isn't Arena.


MtG: Magic the Gathering I assume

Yes, sorry, MtG = Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast uses ELO style ratings for some of their competitive games, it was used for D&D Minis too when that was a going concern (another iffy choice.)

Nerd.

...Nerdhag?

Is that actually a valid niche of women?

My disinterest in BG pvp is more about the ridiculous burst damage and CC, not the lack of shiny.  Arcane mages and Ret paladins being (until recently) a fine example of how NOT to implement a pvp class.  I mentioned that I'm currently doing BGs for marks, mostly because my desire to try to complete an achievement overrides my dislike for standing around for 10s while I die without any ability to actually do anything.

What, are you trying to imply that if Kasparov got to start with 2 queens and pawns that could also move sideways that that wouldn't have made chess matches more exciting?

1. The difference between pvp tiers is 10% of stats.  That's it.  It is not a magical, awe-inspiring change that takes you from scrub to god.
2. There is still a random number generator.  Unless you'd like to add a further descriptor 'and everyone rolled the same number of hits, crits, resists, procs, and runs in the same directions from identically timed fears'?
3. I'll happily bet on the guys in hateful winning if you'll let me pick the classes.
Kaplan's said they intended for PVPers to PVE for their weapons, which is why there are none available until 2k.  Clearly this means their raid content is a complete failure that is not working out how they hoped and is propped up by people being forced to do it to compete at grinding out their Hodir dailies and arenas.
Which is why you have ratings on gear.  You don't face the guy in full deadly when you're at 1500 with no gear because he's at 2.1k and you're at 1500 unless you have a habit of queueing up at 5 am on monday mornings.  Instead you are facing the guys at 1575 who might have a 1% gear advantage over you from the time they got lucky and broke 1600.  Contrast this with BC where by the end of season 3 you had people in the very best pvp gear queueing up at 1500.  You could still totally beat them because they were bad, but it was still incredibly demoralizing for people just dipping their toes into arena to be immediately curbstomped by better players in better gear than they'd be able to get for months.
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If you're talking about the recent change to deadly gear getting 100 of its rating requirement chopped off, that is a bone to the hardcore souls still running 5's.  It's ludicrous that you could be the best team on your BG and still not be able to buy shoulders.

If you're talking about the new dramatic change in how ratings for gear will work in Season 6, those changes good because the current setup is pretty retarded and actually worse than Season 4.  The first set of carrots (1600) are a touch too high to tempt newbies into the arena.

I was going to make a Karazhan chess joke here, but then I remembered you never did Karazhan. :(

If you're aim is to try and create a balanced, fair PvP competition environment, 10% is still too much.  It has to be equlalized.

They also give the best Draft picks to the worst teams. I don't think the NFL would be nearly as interesting if the SuperBowl teams got the number 1 and 2 choices.


Then again I don't know much about football.

The point I was trying to lead you to is that having no rating requirements on gear leads to serious power inflation at the bottom end, ever-bigger power differential between newbies and old timers, and otherwise makes arena worse.

In my (and blizzard's) world with ratings on gear, Joe Noob is on a fairly level playing field because the people at 1300 will only have the PVP gear you can get by being at 1300-1350 -  the hateful set, deadly offsets, relics/idols/librams, and deadly gloves.  They can also have PVE gear, but that's pretty accessible thanks to the lack of attunements.  Those guys can lose all the matches they want, they're not going to get better PVP gear until they actually start winning some matches and moving up out of range of the newbies trying the arenas for the first time.

But what happens when Joe Noob wants to play arenas in your world with no rating requirements on gear?

He queues up and is immediately matched up against people that have been losing arena matches forever.  They're terrible, but are sporting a full set of ulduar-25 grade pvp gear vs what he was able to buy with honor.  His first experience with arena is getting farmed for 150 rating in a 0-10 knock-out down to his 'proper' rating.  So he looks up how many arena points he gets per week and realizes it will take months for him to reach gear parity with the people at 1300 who just brutally sodomized him.  He says fuck it and /signs a petition to delete arenas.

Why do you hate newbies?  Do you work for Mythic?

That happens anyway, as groups tank their ratings to gank noobs OR form teams to power other noobs ratings up for cash or gold.

Then you have that whole problem where you meet them on the battleground - the part people actually LIKE playing - and you have no chance of killing them because of both gear and skill.  THAT's what the complaint here is.

We understand you want to protect the e-peen system. We just don't care what you want.

1. So you lose a bunch of matches and tank your rating.  Then you win some and regain your rating, so now you need to lose some so you can keep 'ganking' noobs.  This sounds less like grief than performance art.
2. Hidden rating will sabotage most efforts to power level noobs up in ratings.

You also noticed I said giving out gear rewards for PvP is as bad as having ratings on the gear.  Given that Blizzard is not going to grant that wish, my solution would be to let people buy all PvP gear with honor or Arena tokens.  That way, the people who want to Arena can do the Arena, and the people who want to do the Battlegrounds can do the Battlegrounds, and people who enjoy both enjoy both.  Gear is a means to and end, not and end.  It's good that Blizzard has developed a varied endgame of PvE and PvP related activities.  It's no great how they force you to "do it all".  

You only get arena points once per week.
You can only run each raid once per week.
You can grind as much honor as you want.

Are you proposing all of these methods of advancement provide gear of the exact same quality?

No, but there is probably a middle ground (and indeed, there USED TO BE) between "useless crap you might as well not wear" and "lol stompy stomp." Arena needs people to play it, and the way it works right now does not make it attractive to the fodder (and I am part of that group, mind) to even try.

Seriously, buying old arena stuff with honor points worked fine. If one INSISTS that there MUST be ratings on arena shit, I'd say go for it as long as those ratings get stripped when they get tossed on the honor merchant because they're seasons out of date. That way the arena hardcore dorks still have their peens to waggle, but people new to the system aren't so hopelessly behind it's embarrassing to all involved.

*note: I haven't read about the s6 changes, but unless they involve removing all ratings from all gear, my point stands*
About 1: wrong, very wrong. I seem to remember this claim being made in season4, and it was wrong then, too. :P
You need to compare deadly to the blue starter set. (I'll go ahead and compare it to the honor-grind set instead of the crafted one, which'd be even worse)
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40786 vs http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40778
35 stam, 23 strength, 15 crit rating, 14 resil, 132 armor, for ONE piece (arguably the one with the most stats, but still). That's more like 30%. And this is the first WOTLK season, any bets what it'll be like in season8 for a newcomer who starts with blues? Blizzard have shown that they don't want to make old pieces available through honor, see also season4 gear STILL having rating requirements -- even if they relax / eliminate those, the newcomer still won't start with any arena points to buy them, and things are even worse if he doesn't want to grind the insane amount of honor required for the 'starter' blue set.

The other problem (regularly brought up at arenajunkies etc) is raid gear in arenas. Some classes can get away with using tons of pve gear (this isn't new either, it's been the case since season2), which puts raid guilds above casual guilds by a lot. Weapons are actually more worthwhile to get from high-end raid PVE - look at the ratings of melee classes with titansteel destroyers vs those with betrayers of humanity vs those with s5 weapons (do they exist?). You also need 25-man tokens to buy the 'lower end' epics from an arena season from the badge vendor (lol @ blue pvp gear buyable with heroic tokens), which means ulduar raiders will be able to spend their surplus badges on s5-6 gear even if they're 1200 players and non-raiders will be SOL. [barring getting lucky on archavon 2.0 - I killed him nearly every week as one of the few priests in the raid, and have one piece of pve gear to show for it, sigh]

My POV on this is the same as it's ever been - normalize gear inside arena, BGs and wintergrasp (when the battle is going on), and allow everyone to set up their trinkets/weapons/enchants/gems at an arena battlemaster or something beforehand. That's it. The better players will still win, and they'll get their titles / epeen pieces to tote around in ironforge, and the newcomers / non-raiders / worse geared players won't feel like cannon fodder. It doesn't solve the problem of ubergeared people ganking in the world, but world pvp is a joke either way.

(Edit: #3 doesn't help the case of arena being glorified rock-paper-scissors, which is pretty damning when it comes to 'skill' claims... unless you play like 100 games a week at completely random times and get a good spread of assorted teams to fight. I'll play my 10 games a week in the scrub-1700 bracket, kek.)


-- Z.

Considering that Tigole no longer works for Blizzard don't expect anything to change. For once I agree with "hardcore", PvP isn't raiding where you just have to poopsock your way into epics. If you want PvP gear L2P and earn it, you can do it in under 2hours/week.

He still works for Blizz, just not on WoW.

Also, less people are participating so that top 30% will be an ever-smaller number of players as more and more drop out.  Even true 'elite pvpers' will be blocked out since there's no reason for noobs to compete.  Then there's the part Zetor mentioned where you do indeed need to raid to compete, since those weapons > PVP weapons at this point, plus the need for Heroic Raid (valor) badges.

And this all still ignores that folks like BGs more, and the Arena gear totally fucks up that system with no ratings or gear check in place at all.

And thus, you see the issue with the ratings system: It requires BAD players in order to not fuck over the GOOD players by it's ratings system. The carrots are being lowered because the current setup says "hey guys, you can play arena with us! Oh, but you can't get the toys out of it. 50% of you can't have any. But if you stop playing, it doesn't mean 100% of the players get them, it means the 50% moves."

Arenas with their current ratings system and gear requirements are simply a social experiment to see how much people will accept a horribly flawed system in order to feel elite. It's the same issues EQ1 had with people purposefully killing off key progression targets below them just to cockblock other players.

I can run heroics on a daily basis. I'm suggesting that it's a viable level of gear (ilevel ~200) for BG grinding. Hell, those items are available via CRAFTING.

Are you saying crafted epics and badge epics are ruining WoW? If you want to keep the ilvl213 gear for the l33t, go nuts. But ilvl200 is handed out like candy, so I see no reason for ilvl200 pvp gear to be arbitrarily more difficult to acquire.

PVP is about balance. You don't accomplish this by jacking around the gear levels. Besides, your situation of "if you're 1500 and they're 1575, you have the same gear!" is actually broken if you didn't start arena at the same time. Weekly points accumulation is what causes that problem, not BG honor. BG honor was buying old season shit. The guys in full season gear minus shoulder/weapon were an issue because the arena ratings/points system artificially punishes new players, since they start with nothing and need to slowly grind up points to acquire the gear they need to compete.

The only way to make wow viable as an arena sport is to give everyone preset gear on entering an arena, and removing random "proc" talents and enchantments. At that point, it's a test of skill and class combinations. That's the fundamental flaw in Arenas as an esport: unless everyone has an exactly level playing field at the start of every match, it's not being decided entirely by player skill.

Exactly.

If arena is about skill, then why not have naked arena?  Why not have arena gear that is only usable in arena?

Here's the problem with the current system for me:  I hate arena and won't do arena, regardless.  There is no carrot for me to do arena, being a sheep for the wolves.

Since there are no more welfare epics, then my choices for battleground gear are also very limited.

If I am to become a sheep in the battlegrounds as well as arena, with crappy blue pvp gear as my reward - well, it's pve time for me!

See how this works?  It means that the enjoyable battleground experience that I used to have no longer is there for me.  So not only do I avoid arenas but I am also avoiding battlegrounds.

I guess I'm too noob for WoW pvp anymore.  Fortunately the pve game is still holding my interest - as well as the occasional Wintergrasp.

Do you think failing/AFK for couple hours in BGs should be seriously rewarded? Even in raids you have to succeed and down that foozle to get to that gear. I think first you need to be talking about not giving out honor/marks to losers, second about measuring performance of individual players and only then you should be talking about making adequate rewards available through BG system.

My idea was always that marks and honour in BGs should only be awarded to people who had done at least 10-20% of the damage or healing done by the average of the top 3 damage dealers or healers in the BG, where neither damage and healing done to NPCs, nor overheal/overkill are counted. It would solve the afk problem wthout punishing anyone who is actually making an effort. n.b. this would require all honour to be held in limbo until the point at which the player exits the BG.

AFKing no.

But Failing? Yes. If you don't reward the people who constantly fail, then you won't have a PvP system for much longer. No one but the mob ever has to 'lose' in PvE, and the mob does not care how many times it gets farmed.

Participation, no matter how futile, needs to be rewarded.

A-yup. Pretty much that.

Of course, the next argument is that "participation is it's own god damned reward", which is just silly.

This might come as a shock to some, but the vast majority of people who are in the battlegrounds are not afk.

Some of us have never ever once afk'ed in a battleground for honor.

Afking is a separate problem than failing.  And yes, as was pointed out, failing while trying still needs to be rewarded, or there are no sheep for the wolves.

Not to mention the /afk problem is relativly easily solved by tweaking the way honor is rewarded and by granting 0 honor and tokens for 0 damage/ healing done in a round.  Even the shittiest of shit players can land one blow over a 10 min game. 

I'm not saying Honor should provide equal gear to top tier arena, but it shouldn't be the loltastic shit it is right now. 

As an amusing sidenote, most of the AFKers I see in battlegrounds are people with gladiator or duelist titles.


-- Z.

This. The great unwashed don't AFK in BGs often. The people who think they're ABOVE bgs, but want more gear do. Usually Arena people trying to get the off-set epics from honor.

That's fixed by both not having marks requirements for items, and by having ALL pieces available via arena points instead of the split system.

Ideally, setup zones of influence (flag rooms, cap points, etc) and base your honor/mark gains by either being A) constantly in combat (being camped at your spawn situation), or B) spending more than 30% of the match at control zones (which allows for the 0damage/healing guy who was guarding the farm all match)

Worst case, AFKers have to run back to control zones all the time to AFK, and they're gankbait there. It becomes inefficient to AFK because movement every death is required, and deaths are frequent.

But really, I just oppose setting up the system to punish EVERYONE, because a few people AFKed in an annoying fashion. If someone cheats on a math test, the entire class isn't flunked :P

The AFK in BG's thing is something that constantly nags at me and constantly reinforces the thought in the back of my mind that says Blizzard just doesn't have a clue when it comes to pvp.

I mean, even WAR with it's cascade of epic fail decisions managed to patch in a moderately effective way to prevent people AFK'ing in scenarios a few weeks after launch.  WoW has been around 4+ years with BG's for 3+ years and the best they've come up with is a tedious report system that doesn't even really do much to stop people AFK'ing.  :uhrr:

It's thoughts like that, that make you wonder if your a masochist if you try to have fun in WoW PvP.  :grin:

I just tried the battlegrounds again after several weeks of not.  Classes that have to stand relatively still in order to dps suffer quite a bit.  Classes that can dps on the move seem to end up at the top of the charts.

The makeup seems to have changed a lot since TBC - there were no warriors at all, but lots of dks and pallies.  Fewer rogues, locks and hunters.

High survival burst classes.

Sadly, the response seems to have been "get resil, noobs" about fixing burst classes. Arcane mages were pretty absurd, too. Healer not in plate? Hi, I'm going to threeshot you.

Which is why Arcane mages got gutted in 3.0.9, PoM + AP can no longer be used at the same time, AP got reduced to 10% more dmg from 20%, Arcane Barrage had it's spell damage coefficient reduced to the point it isn't useful in PvE unless you have to move around, Arcane blast glyph got lowered to 3% per stack from 5%.

They lowered some cd's to try and keep the spec competitive in PvE but it is still got nerfed pretty harshly, I'd be shocked if the WoW forums aren't flooded with pissed mages on a witch hunt.

I knew they got hit, DKs and Ret Pallies are still absurd, though. I've lived through some seriously stupid shit in AB (like holding the LM against four attackers by my gnomish lonesome)

Yeah, they still are pretty crazy, wondering when the "PvP burst reduction" nerf will come for them.  Played my mage alt last week and getting 2-3 shotted by a fully epic'd out DK gave me flashbacks of the days when MS warriors with Askhandi -> Edge of Insanity -> Might of Menethil would run around 2-3 shotting people in cloth/leather while mages and warlocks could realistically 1 shot people.   :ye_gods:

The more things change the more they stay the same I guess, even if we have 3-4x bigger health and mana pools now.  :grin:

Wut?

No. We could not.

We did get raped pretty badly by warriors, tho.

Back in those days you could for a bit, it was entirely due to negative resists though. A 2x damage multiplier on a soulfire crit was pretty much lights out.

Curse of Shadows/Elements was a grand ole time before they fixed negative resists.

I could be wrong, but my memory says that they fixed negative resists before ashkandi was available.
I'm absolutely certain that they were gone by the time c'thun bit the dust.

1. I favor the wintergrasp model for BG rewards.  Even if your side is full of failure, that's not necessarily your fault and the game should recognize that.  Give people rewards for success and failure, but make sure the rewards for success are large enough that people really try.

2. It only looks really bad because this is the first season and the tier set is still blue.  In season 6, you'll be able to buy the entire hateful set for honor with no rating requirements.

Double posting because goddamnit, I pressed spacebar and it replied.
---
and that's exactly the level of pvp gear you get from BGs: ilevel 200 blues (the savage set, yes, they are actually ilevel 200) and a half-dozen ilevel 200 epics (the off-set hateful gear, plus I'd include the wintergrasp helm and trinket).  Glad we're unintentionally in agreement!
---
Objections:
1. Arenas will experience a short-term renaissance, then it'll crash and burn as people find out gear is not why they are getting farmed every week.  The gear differential gives them something to blame for their failures.  When the only answer for failure is 'lol you need to reroll or l2play', they'll stop showing up fast.

edit: nix points 2-4 if your proposal is "You get rewards for playing that in no way actually help you get better at what you spend your play time doing" and just repeat that mantra to yourself: You get rewards that do not actually make you better.

2. BGs will experience an explosion in popularity, then people will stop showing up because the only remaining incentive will be completing achievements.

3. PVPers will no longer be able to join in on PVE because unless they go out of your way to participate in PVE, their gear will be nothing but shitty leveling greens and blues.  The current model means when I'm putting together a 5 man or scrounging up a puggies to fill in some slots in a raid, I can take PVPers without hesitation because even though their gear isn't great for PVE, it's at least good enough.

4. PVPers will get farmed in any sort of world PVP (like when they go do their dailies) because, again, they are in shitty leveling gear.

5. You can queue up for BGs and get into WG before you're 80.  Shall we autolevel all the 71's to 80 while we're giving them free epics?

I have very adequately addressed why comparing the deadly gear to what people can get via honor is retarded: It all requires rating.  You do not have to face people in full deadly in the arenas in the starting gear because they are at a higher rating because the deadly gear requires a high rating by definition.  Finally, if you want to participate in this discussion, come in informed and not spouting off idiocy like "Blizzard have shown that they don't want to make old pieces available through honor"  Go get informed (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/11/14910422788-arena-matchmaking-system-faq.html).

There aren't many wolves in BGs, we don't generally eat carrion. You can't reward people for BGs, because there is currently no way to make sure they try (and most don't). I have no problem giving something people for trying and failing, but I have huge issues rewarding people for not trying and failing. You don't have to be AFK to be entirely and intentionally useless to your team.

Even PvE that is designed to be defeated, you have to show some basic competence. There isn't such check in place in BGs and there isn't incentive to try because you still get rewarded even if you don't. The main reason you don't see many people AFKing in battlegrounds is because gear you can get by only AFKing isn't that desirable.  AFKing in BGs is directly proportional to quality of BG-only rewards that you can obtain by AFKing.

Here is good analogy - Imagine if in a raid you could wipe 3 times on a boss and get the loot. Do you think such encounter calls for best-in-the-slot loot?

Mmk. Point 1 is pure speculation, but even if it were to come true, it doesn't change my point that arenas NEED to be on an even footing to have a semblance of fairness, being promoted like the esport [lol] that they are. If gear is equalized, people will blame countercomps, lag, disconnects, racials, RNG or specs - high-end arena players have ALREADY been doing this since season1. None of those factors are directly within Blizz's control (except for maybe RNG-related skills), so it's ok. I personally don't care about bruised egos when one of the 500 teams thinking they're the best priest/rogue combo in the galaxy get completely dominated by a mirror, and being unable to use the "my rogue only had two week's worth of arena points, you are in 5/5, gg" excuse.

Why exactly is "you get items that don't let you get better" (I assume you refer to the full 'welfare' pvp set everyone would have an option of using) bad? Arenas and BGs are minigames, they should be treated as such. In chess terms, like it was already stated, it'd be stupid to get an extra queen and get your bishops to fire lazer beams out of their eyes when you hit a certain ELO rating. Or getting an auto-headshot-targeting deagle if your K/D ratio in counterstrike is over 10. The entire point of arena is glorified dueling/deathmatching for fun / fame / epeen. To clarify my proposal, it'd give players the option to set up an alternate current-season pvp kit at an arena master with enchants/gems, switching out individual pieces with stuff they actually own. Then they could use their arena points and rating to buy those items so they can use it outside arenas/BGs. Last year's public WOW tournament server (which used this system, sorta) was pretty successful, even though most of the people who joined and thought "oh man we'll be #1 for sure" didn't get past 1600 when they went up against the big fish. But at least they were able to do it in a fair environment and have fun.
About the 71-80 comment: the only two BGs 71s can fight 80s are wintergrasp and AV (and I've seen level 20 alts in wintergrasp driving tanks for lulz and honor), where WG is not really gear-dependent and AV is a pve zergfest. So no.

Lastly, I strongly disagree with the deadly/honor comparison. I was talking about barrier of entry. We're at the start of s5 now... TBC had four seasons, and participating in s4 as a newcomer was pure pain. ALL a newcomer has access to is the crafted gear (I was actually being generous by linking the savage stuff). They have to do a LOT of honor grinding for the 2-seasons-behind gear (also note that weapons are not getting 'honorized', refer to my raid gear comment). Oh, and my 'blizzard HAS shown' part was pointing out how s3 weapons/shoulders lost a whole 50 of their rating requirement when arena moved into s4, and how season2 got the name 'welfare epics'  because it was honor-obtainable gear with 0 rating requirements. And while you might get matched against people of your gear level in arenas (remains to be seen, in the 1600s everyone is using a mixture of hateful and t7.5 with quite a few deadly pieces, while me and my partner have savage and heroic gear - we started arenas a week ago), that won't happen in BGs, which are, incidentally, required as part of the massive grind to 'get up to speed'.

(edit: you didn't address my points about raid gear, its effect on arenas, and 1200-rated raiders getting full arena sets via tokens, btw - Kalgan's "it won't be quite as easy" implies it'll still be possible. Yes, I read the article, and it does sound way better than the old arena system, but it's still stupid. :p)


-- Z.

You normalize people's gear when they enter arenas, so they all use a proscribed set with some modification options.  When they leave the arena they are put back in their normal gear.  The normal gear will be tier gear and Naxx-equivalent epics, bought with arena points (Tier 7.5 for high rank, 7 for low) or honor (Blue heroic gear).  Resilience will be redesigned as a passive buff applied to all classes but only affecting actions initiated by other players, and will apply outside of instanced pvp as well.  Healing will not become overpowered in instanced pvp, this cannot happen when Blizzard controls all the variables and doesn't even have to add new gear tiers to their arena system, just new tiers of rewards to be used outside of it (as an aside, it also allows minute tweaks to classes by changing their arena sets).

The problem with arena participation is that it is an ELO system.  It needs fodder to run, but the fodder needs a realistic change at shinies in order to attempt it, and you apparently can't give out the shinies to the bads, even though that is what Naxx-10 and heroics do.  Short answer: ratings should determine whether you get the Naxx-10 loot or the Naxx-25 loot for use outside of the arenas.  As an additional option, make a point scoring system and divvy up a gold pot between the teams after the game is over.

Has anyone considered that their mention of having items and skill bars which equip when changing between dual talent specs would be easy to replicate for arenas and battlegrounds to ensure a more balanced playing field as far as equipment is concerned?

Basically, I only do BGs for fun. Otherwise, I'm PvE with my guild or the occasional PUG. So I'm geared that way--right now I'm in Naxx purples, mostly: my rogue has very few PvP items. I could acquire the blue stuff pretty quickly, I'm sure, but I have other fish to fry.

For Wintergrasp, this is no problem: if you're doing a lot of straight up PvP in there, you're already failing at it anyway. It's about tactical action at the larger scale, and your gear or spec is not so important. WG has issues with its design, but the issues are not issues with PvP.

Strand is substantially the same, and it's the only BG I still find really fun. There's enough to do in there that isn't pegged to your own character's gear or spec.

In TBC, I felt like I could go into Eye or AB or even Warsong Gulch and still have some fun. Yes, sometimes you'd get steamrolled by a premade, but that wasn't gear. Yes, sometimes you'd come up against someone who was in the very best PvP gear and you'd die pretty fast, but it wasn't to the point where it felt like it was pointless. But I ran AB the other night, and basically insta-died again and again to arena-focused players. One-shots, constantly, whereas what I was doing to them was negligible on the few occasions where I got a chance to open up on someone. And I'm not in greens: I'm in some of the best PvE gear in the game at the moment.

That's pretty much broken. Arenas are absolutely no fun from my perspective--exactly what everyone here has said already. If I want that kind of game, I'll go play a game that's designed around that game, rather than a game where that's been awkwardly kludged into a design that can't really accomodate it.

This is not a big deal now but it will be a big deal soon, because the usefulness of BGs to the game since they've appeared has largely been "something to keep people busy while we work on new content, when they start to totally exhaust the existing content". If walking into a BG is roughly the same as bending over for the soap in prison, expect that usefulness to evaporate.

They fixed negative resists around the time of BWL, but once that was gone the era of double trinkets was just starting to take off.  Although mages were much more notorious for double trinket abuse with AP+PoM+Pyro or AP+PoM+Frosbolt shatter crits, warlocks could use it to devastating effect too, heck even elemental shamans (horde only) were brutal in that era.  Plus you have to remember how terrible the gear of the average Joe was in those days compared to the people in T2, T2.5, T3.  Just about any well geared raider of any class could go into WSG/AB and be more than capable of 1-2 shotting your average random BG'er in greens/blues.  Factor in the berserker buff and your just adding insult to injury.  I mean, having more than 3k health as a clothy w/o epics or rank 7/8+ pvp gear was not really feasable.

I guess I should have just simplified it and said, flashbacks to the days when just about everyone could 1-3 shot everyone else.   :why_so_serious:

/necro


Since this seems to be the generic PvP whine thread:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIXYMY4dOmI




 :awesome_for_real:

-edit- Pasting the entire link makes it work better.

That just reminds me of the SA 'make a wow pvp' video attempt.

Now I think about it I was effectively spamming random buttons when I started levelling a pair of DeathKnights. I should just copy that macro and zero-stress one-button it, awesome  :awesome_for_real:

Amazing.  Now that's real skill.  From the class most likely to say "l2p" on the forums.

I'm going to laugh when every arena team that wins any competition has at least one DK on it, if not 2. I never liked arena much anyway, but to even bother setting foot in there unless you have a DK on your team is to waste your time.

Ret-Disc doesn't do awfully against DK+XXX

Here's the top 100 on the tournament realm about a week ago.

56 Paladins
41 Hunters
33 Rogues
31 Warlocks
30 Death Knights
29 Shamans
27 Mages
19 Priests
6 Druids
3 Warriors

There's an extremely overpowered class in the death knight/paladin comp.  It's not the death knight.

More pallies than I would have guessed, for sure. I would have figured about 50/50.

I'm a warrior though, and as you can see by the numbers, we know not to bother with it. It's a completely reversal from the way arena teams used to be for a warrior.

Sounds like Deathknights have become the IWAY (http://pvx.wikia.com/wiki/Build:Team_-_IWAY) of WoW PvP... beatable by the experienced, but an easy to play "I win" button against the masses.

Clearly all the warriors forgot all their skill, while all the hunters finally learned to play.  :awesome_for_real:



Also clearly, Arena is the only pvp which blizzard can accurately measure skill.  :oh_i_see:

Obviously, I mean it's an E-Sport right? We warriors just drank the retard juice this season. That has to be it.

If they would stop touting Arenas as a sport, or skill, or some kind of display of awesome outside of group composition choices and FOTM classes, I wouldn't care. But they don't.

Are you claiming there is absolutely no difference in average personal ability between players at 1400 and 2400, merely a difference in gear and comps?

I don't think anyone is saying anything about the people at 2400. That's a different universe than the majority of arenas. The difference between 1400 and 1800 though...

I'm claiming that to get to 2400 you have to have the right FOTM arena class setup and gear. Put the best skilled players on warriors and druids and watch them fail over and over again. Why? Those classes suck in this current iteration. Skill is irrelevent when the playing field is so unbalanced.

It's true that the deck is stacked against druids and warriors, but they are still succeeding at even the highest levels of play in the hands of excellent players.  For example, Alloraan (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Daggerspine&n=Alloraan) earned the title Arena Master as a prot warrior (Yes, he PVPs as prot in the gear set you see him in) and currently sits at #3 in the 5's bracket on his BG and #29 in 2's.

Fortunately, Blizzard recognizes the relative weakness of warriors and is doing something about it.  This isn't BC where if your class is weak, the rational response is to reroll the FOTM because Blizzard isn't going to do anything about either of the situations.  Warriors are getting across the board PVP buffs in 3.1.  They might not be enough to bring warriors up to shaman representation, but it shows Blizzard is at least paying attention.

Missing the point.

WoW Arenas aren't about any kind of intelligent design.

IT'S ABOUT ESPORTZ.

And yes, Warriors drank the retard juice. As proof that there IS juice somewhere and people must be drinking it, as a very well geared Retribution Paladin I could faceroll my way to 2k not five months ago.

For some reason, I am absolutely no longer viable at the higher levels of competition no matter what I do. Gotta be the juice.

Overpowered spec gets nerfed, does not like it, news at 11. 

Counter example: The #1 2v2 team on EU Misery (http://eu.wowarmory.com/team-info.xml?r=Kazzak&ts=2&t=my+dk+has+leaves) is resto druid/ret.

You're that same kind of asshole who said Hunters were fine in BC, and just needed to L2P.  After all, there were 3 or 4 hunters in the worldwide tournament who did great, and you could cherry pick teams from the top tier of each individual battle group to show they were also fine.  Never mind the aggregate showed they were underpowered, they just needed to L2P. 

Clearly they all did and should get no nerfs at all from here on out, right?  This, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the wars drinking retard juice at the same time.

The way 'balance' is right now, would be like playing a Hockey Game, but not allowing 1 of the teams a goalie.



Sure, there is probably some set of players that can compete without ever having a goalie... but otherwise.  :awesome_for_real:

There would still be a subsect of people that would say that because it's possible for the best players in the world to play without a goalie, that the whole system is perfectly acceptable...

While everyone is riding the failboat.

A fine fellow named Shepherd once argued with me.  You are also arguing with me.  Thus, you are definitely dogfuckers.  Colorless, formerly-green ideas should be allowed to sleep in whatever manner they wish!  By making a strained, meaningless analogy and appending some word salad, I have won the day.

There is a difference between a "X is not viable" and "X is fine".  If you had said back in BC "Hunters are not viable", yes I would have pointed you to the many successful hunter-based drain teams and asked how you think the lot of the rest of the class could be improved without making high-level arenas into World of Petcraft.

That analogy doesn't work because ret really is fine.  There are about as many people at 2k+ playing ret as there are of some classes (hunters, mages, warrior, warlocks, and shaman, depending on bracket) and that's with ret as a less-viable bitch spec.  You're not going to see very many people playing ret competitively when they could be playing the FOTM if they just put their points in the tree on the left instead of the right.

Nobody is contesting that the top-rated prot warrior Alloraan is an awesome player (I'm on his battlegroup and fought him a few times in BGs etc), but he couldn't be a top-rated prot warrior if he didn't stack high-end pve gear for block value; this'll be true even after charge stops being on DR with other stuns in 3.1.

Also, lol arena esports, gear inequality, class balance, rng, racials, blah blah (I made my points several times over this thread already, not going to bother repeating them).


-- Z.

Balance!

(http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/march/tournamentus.jpg)

(http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/march/tournamenteu.jpg)

Those graphs show how many of each class are in the current top 10 arena tournament teams.  Aside from the fact that A) WoW PvP has always been a mess and B) the whole tourney thing is especially stupid, it does make me wonder why they keep nerfing Druids in PvP.  Last live patch, the only Druid change was a PvP nerf.  Upcoming patch, not even including the collateral damage from the Armor/HP nerf (PvE change), there's also the nerf to Maim stun.  Why?

Americans clearly need to L2P

Top 10 teams is a pretty small sample. I think if it was the top 100 it would be worth talking about. That said druids/warriors are going to be in short supply on the list even if it was the top 100.

How can the developers even justify a system like arenas with a straight face? I mean shit, the lack of parity is astounding. Sample size or not.  :ye_gods:

Gobbeldygook already posted the top 100 (American? Both?) list from a couple of weeks ago.  6 Druids, 3 Warriors.  He just didn't have a cool chart!  :thumbs_up:

Tell yourself that no players will ever be equally skilled, chalk it up to player skill and coincidence, call it a day and go enjoy your piles and piles of money as you see fit.   :why_so_serious:

The same reason the only warrior change in a previous patch was to stop making warriors periodically making people instantly die: Because the only person having fun when you literally tear off 50%+ of someone HPs in one GCD is you.  When you're triaging what needs to be fixed right now and what can wait till tomorrow, you deal with things that are making the game unfun for everyone everywhere (e.g. sudden death/ferocious bite) today and things that make the game suck for people in limited circumstances (e.g. holy paladins being overpowered, resto druids being underpowered) tomorrow.

The maim change is a wash at worst.  Maim was an incapacitate effect that had a chance to break on damage.  This meant while it COULD last up to 7 seconds with 5 CP, it had a good chance of breaking on damage before then.  They changed it to a stun.  It could no longer break on damage, but was affected by the -30% damage while stunned talents and warriors could no longer break it with Berserker Rage.  Now feral druids had a 7-second stun that did damage...and shared DR with pounce, so it was actually 3.5 seconds most of the time.  So pounce was put on Kidney Shot's DR and maim was left on the standard stun DR, but cut to one second per CP.

Looking at the top 10 doesn't tell you anything except that death knights and paladins are overpowered.  If you believe those numbers and that of sk-gaming represented reality, you'd think rogues are underpowered and desperately need buffs.  Reality check: Rogues are the third-best represented class at 2k+ in 2's and 3's and that's in a metagame where the two horribly overrepresented classes wear plate.

Every set of numbers I've seen so far tell me no matter which spec of druid I play, I'm going to be behind the curve. Pretty sure Warriors are in the same boat currently.

Everything you can do as a warrior can be done better by a DK in the exact same gear. Or a pally. That's the real reason you don't see them roaming around.

I think feral is probably the best bet for arenas, we'll have to see how things pan out though.

Mortal Strike, except it doesn't matter much anymore due to ridiculous burst and the consequent effect on the viability of non-burst teams, and the sub-par performance of arms and (to a lesser extent) fury in the arena.

EDIT:


1. That bitch enjoyed it. :drill:
2. Well played.
3. Still no explanation why your gear in the arena shouldn't be disassociated from your gear outside the arena.