Quick PVP gear question...

[WindupAtheist]

With the end of the current arena season coming up, is anything good going onto honor vendors? With Blizzard's current April Fools thing fucking up the boards, I'm not about to prowl around there.

[Fordel]

Short Answer: Not really.


Long(er) Answer: We won't really know till it is out and patched. The current honour only gear, didn't actually exist on the PTR as honour only. With that said, someone at Blizzard is still DETERMINED to make Arena work, somehow, so don't expect much suport for non-arena PvP avenues.


WinterGrasp is getting a few new items. Chest, Waist and some more trinkets for pvp.

[K9]

Deadly Bracers and Feet for honour; Chest, Waist and Trinket for WG marks.

I think that'll be it for the upgrades that don't require arena.

Linky

[Gobbeldygook]

List of gear in season 6.  Short version: Hateful set pieces available for honor, deadly off-set (except for libram/totem/relic/idol) will be available for honor.

[WindupAtheist]

Man this shit is confusing. They really need to give these things tier numbers instead of just calling them hateful/deadly/naughty/whatever. So let me see if I have this right:

For season 5, arena people have had 2 purple sets available, Hateful and Deadly, with Deadly being the better of the two. With season 6, all of Hateful and the crappy bits of Deadly are getting kicked to honor. Yes?

[Gobbeldygook]

Man this shit is confusing. They really need to give these things tier numbers instead of just calling them hateful/deadly/naughty/whatever. So let me see if I have this right:

For season 5, arena people have had 2 purple sets available, Hateful and Deadly, with Deadly being the better of the two. With season 6, all of Hateful and the crappy bits of Deadly are getting kicked to honor. Yes?

Yes.

Hateful gear is equivalent to naxx 10, deadly is equivalent to naxx-25, furious is equivalent to ulduar-25.

[K9]

Code:

Brutal Gladiator	== ilvl 159 Sunwell Equivalent Gear

-- WoTLK -- 

Savage Gladiator	== ilvl 200 (Blue) WoTLK Heroic Equivalent Gear
Hateful Gladiator	== ilvl 200 (Epic) Naxx-10 Equivalent Gear
Deadly Gladiator 	== ilvl 213 Naxx-25 Equivalent Gear
Furious Gladiator 	== ilvl 232 Ulduar-25 Hard Mode Equivalent Gear

There are some ranges in the level of the gear, the Furious gear ranges from 226-232 for example.

Also I wholly agree with WUA, the naming convention is fucking retarded.

[WindupAtheist]

Cool, thanks for the info.

[Paelos]

They name all the pve set too you know. They just happen to be a hell of a lot more popular and have tokens attached.

[Fordel]

The PVE sets don't overlap as much either.

[Ingmar]

The PVE is different by both class AND tier for names, which is why everyone calls it by tier.

[Xanthippe]

I've heard that arena participation is down 60% over last season.  Why does Blizzard continue to promote this?

I wonder what percentage of players are in arena?  My guess is that it's 20% or less.

I don't care about arena, but I really resent the emphasis on it for a relatively small number of players who enjoy it.

[Fordel]

I've read that people are deleting their arena teams at this point, just to ensure as few people as possible actually get the Gladiator titles this season. Just to burn the entire system to the ground.

[Paelos]

I've heard that arena participation is down 60% over last season.  Why does Blizzard continue to promote this?

WoW can market arena games. They can try to make it into a competition with bright flashing lights and big cash prizes. They can hope to bring more people to the game because of that exposure to the public. They can't do that with raiding because it's not a "sport" if you aren't playing against human competition.

Only the people on the inside know this is really just a heavy pile of bullshit. Nothing about the system is fair or balanced, and the majority of the players realized that if you played X class, you were fucked. Certain classes right now are awesome, others are terrible if you suck or average if you are highly skilled, and a couple just can't show up unless you draw the right opponents and are absolutely top notch and lucky.

http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/The-Life-e-Casual/Season-5-Now-65-Less-Popular

That's the article ppl are drawing the decline in numbers from. He runs the data breakout per battlegroup for arena teams, and the numbers (if correct) are pretty damning. In essence, there were ~640k teams in Season 4 and 220k in Season 5. Two of every three teams just said "Fuck it."

[Drubear]

I thought it was pretty well understood that (many? most?) people were doing arenas for "welfare epics" or whatever the word was. Now that there are ratings requirements there are fewer that want to put up with them.

Pretty sure at least a couple of sites actually said "get on an arena team and get your 10 matches a week going. Even if you hate PvP - the rewards are awesome."

I suppose you might tin-hat that the "easy" rewards were the hook into the thing just to get it jump-started and buzz-worthy. Now that there's "enough" participation let it go esport...?

[Paelos]

I'll freely admit I only did arena for a shield during TBC. Shield drop rates were shitty and the arena one had armor and stam that was head and shoulders above anything you could get in pve if you were already def capped. Arena drew me in for the rewards, but I also enjoyed being able to compete. I would, in fact, still do it if I had a remote shot at being effective as a warrior.

[Sheepherder]

I thought it was pretty well understood that (many? most?) people were doing arenas for "welfare epics" or whatever the word was. Now that there are ratings requirements there are fewer that want to put up with them.

Pretty sure at least a couple of sites actually said "get on an arena team and get your 10 matches a week going. Even if you hate PvP - the rewards are awesome."

I suppose you might tin-hat that the "easy" rewards were the hook into the thing just to get it jump-started and buzz-worthy. Now that there's "enough" participation let it go esport...?

Participation is right fucking down, and with the arena system the way it is that means less people get rewards, not more.

[Merusk]

Someone got all pissy that you didn't have to 'work' to get good gear. During the run-up to WOTLK Blizz had said they came to realize that the ease with which you could get PVP items was completly out of balance with the ease of obtaining PVE items and this had to be rebalanced.  They'd originally made noises to the extent of making PvE items as easily obtainable as PVP, which lots of us took to mean fewer hours put in, good quality items for everyone.  It sounded like the game would reach the point that you'd have no excuse NOT to be fully-epic geared, just putting in a little time here and there which was OK with me.  (Particularly since I love playing alts.)

However, while they DID drop the effort required to get PvE gear in a lot of ways, they also increased the effort required to get PvP gear.  Kind of a shitty way of going about it, but I guess someone in the leadership still has that whole "Purples should MEAN something" mentality going.  So while it's balanced more evenly between the two, it's now harder to get PvP gear than pve gear.  Maybe some day they'll get it right. Heh.

[Gobbeldygook]

The writer dismisses arguments relating to 'not everyone is 80 yet', but that's not the actual argument.  The argument is about alts.  Even PVE players often had multiple alts they arena'd with because of the gear.

I sat down with a spreadsheet when I hit 80.  The deadly gladiator gear came out equal to or worse than level 80 blues.  It's not just that the carrots are too high (They totally are), it's that there is no carrot.  Unless you're a shaman then you angst over the best in slot PVE totem requiring a 2050 arena rating.

As for his 'suggestions' - lulz.  Complaining about PVE gear in arenas makes you look old.  Racials are always a good choice, but make you look older than John McCain.  Bitching about engineering makes you look hip in a vintage way.

[WindupAtheist]

All moot. A blue has spoken, and they didn't even try to dispute that Arena has been abandoned by large numbers of players.

I posted this in another thread somewhere, but I think the major conclusion you can really draw from this is that players go where the loot is. In season 1, it was much easier to get epics from Arena than raiding. We have almost completely flipped to the opposite extreme now.

Our goal isn't to force players into Arena who hate it but suffer through to get the loot. Everyone will be happier if the players doing Arenas are the players who like to do Arenas. Similarly, the people raiding should be the people who like raiding.

One of the designers came up with a smart saying recently, which is that you should not conculde that all heroics should be like Mechanar just because Mechanar was our most popular heroic. :)

From here. Nothing about leveling or alts, just "We didn't want many people in Arena anyway!"

[Paelos]

For people who understand their playerbase pretty well, they are sure drawing the wrong conclusions from that information in regard to arenas. I often get the feeling, as everyone does, that if it wasn't either a marketing ploy or some BigDawg's pet project, this would have been totally revamped or lost.

[K9]

I think he's mostly correct. Before rating requirements Arenas were the path of least resistance to get high-end weapons. Then came the "welfare epics" for honour that further exacerbated the trend.

I do agree though that the Arena format, like meeting stones, is someone's pet and not likely to die or diminish anytime soon.

[Kail]

Our goal isn't to force players into Arena who hate it but suffer through to get the loot.

Well, it's a good thing your entire PvP reward system isn't designed around that, or anything, otherwise I might think you were full of shit.

[Simond]

How to fix the arena system: "Season six will be the last arena season on the normal servers. Once that is complete, all future ranked arena battles will take place on the Tournament servers only. These server may have slightly different rulesets from the rest of the server types to facilitate arena combat balance.

The arenas will remain active on the rest of the servers, but only for exhibition or practice matches. Acquiring new PvP armour will in future be based around the existing battlegrounds and Lake Wintergrasp."

Whoever's pet project (Evocare, I'd guess) Arena is gets their own little private ghetto to play in, and the rest of the game stops having to have everything balanced around 2v2 PvP.

[K9]

Th icing on that cake would be for them to announch the Azshara BG as a team deathmatch battleground, 20v20, first side to 1500 kills wins.

[WindupAtheist]

Overall I'm digging the life of a battleground whore. Honor comes at a decent rate, and come Season 6 I'll be able to deck myself out fully in PVP purples without setting foot in the Arena. Granted I'll always be outgeared by Arena whores, but in the chaos of battlegrounds and Wintergrasp that's less of an issue. Whose faction buddies come riding over the hill looking to gank someone is at least as frequent a decider as who has better gear.

Only nuisance will be getting a better weapon than my Titansteel Destroyer. One of my UO buddies somehow became leader of a raiding guild all of three days after dinging 80, and he keeps trying to get me to go to Naxx with him, but bleh.

Speaking of PVE, I had just hearthed out of Wintergrasp and into Crusader's Pinnacle. Some freakin' blood elf prot pally, of all things, tried to gank me since I was still flagged. I'm like, is she kidding? Does she think I'm AFK, or lagged, or something? Bitch I am not AI, and your PVE purples do not impress me. Squish.

[K9]

Only nuisance will be getting a better weapon than my Titansteel Destroyer. One of my UO buddies somehow became leader of a raiding guild all of three days after dinging 80, and he keeps trying to get me to go to Naxx with him, but bleh.

The argent tournament is coming in 3.1 and there are some epic 2h weapons that will be buyable for 25 tokens (Champion's Seals).

The Alliance version is [Claymore of the Prophet]. I'm pretty sure that it's not an upgrade over the Titansteel Destroyer, however it is a change of scenery if nothing else. If you do want to improve though, your only real option is raids. I'd only look for Naxx-25 and Ulduar-10 stuff, Naxx-10 is all sidegrades except for Death's Bite. If the guild isn't a load of mouthbreathers it may be bearable for you, bearing in mind your dislike for PvE.

n.b. The tournament is not a pvp event, altough it is planned to have multiple stages across several patches.

[Paelos]

Warrior and Druid class representation at the top of the Arena tournament by week:




LOLZ

[Nevermore]

Druids are obviously overpowered and need to be hammered with more nerfs.

[Ingmar]

The warrior (arms) and one of the druids (resto) are on the same team, with an affliction warlock. It is like a weird throwback arena team from last expansion.

[Fordel]

I find the overall class differences between Europe and the US to be interesting. Why does Europe favor Disc Priests over Holy Paladins? Why are there so many more DK's in the US?

[dd0029]

What exactly are those numbers?  Is it some sort of weighted average?  Is it numbers from top teams?  Or do they really have possibly two entire servers for 60-63 players worldwide?

[Ingmar]

Class breakdown for the top 10 teams on each realm I believe.

[Fordel]

From the tourney realm: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=48560.0


The Tourney realm lets you pick whichever class/race you want and have them be maxed and ready to go instantly. You get a pool of gear to select from pvp and pve. So everyone is on equal footing gear/class wise, so it's all about composition and planning (and execution obviously).

It also displays what most people who PvP regularly already know. X spec is totally dominate, Y spec is totally shit.

[WindupAtheist]

I kinda miss playing on a PVP server, but not really. On one hand, sometimes you just want to get your damn quests done without fighting the same guy 18 times. On the other hand, when I was on a PVP server I never did battlegrounds, and was much more pleased with my couple hundred kills than I am now with my paladin's several thousand kills.

The former meant there were a couple hundred times where I met someone within my own level range out in the world and bested them, by hook or by crook. (I almost always ran around solo.) The latter means I fired the weapons in Wintergrasp a bunch of times.

I'll sit here and bemoan it, but I know if I went to a PVP server, sooner or later the whole "having to play PVP even when I don't feel like it" thing would bore me out like it did in the first place.

/random