Knowing your class
Knowing how to play with your partner(s) class
Choosing the appropriate class to fight by your side

To all the people complaining that there’s “Scrub warlocks with imbued netherweave” getting the “cool pvp” items, go learn to play. if you’re a good pvp’er, it really shouldn’t matter if you’re facing someone with equivalent gear.. if it does.. then either they’re a good player, or you’re not as good as you thought you were. Using gear as a status symbol in PvP (where the play cycle is measured in months instead of years for “progression”), the built in status symbols are the things like the Armored netherdrake mount, not the fact that you have pvp gear.

The “gear is a status symbol” works when it’s PvE because the “competition” is between the players and the environment. When the competition is supposed to be between players, gear needs to be relatively equal. or at least easily attainable. This allows growth in the PvP competition and player base. If you limit access to the gear, and the gear has a large impact on success, then you’re limiting the competitor pool to those who are already established. This will reduce the growth of the playerbase, creating stagnation in the PvP gameplay.

Basically.. if you complain because anyone can wear the PvP gear you have, it’s because you don’t want to have to work to keep your rating. Go PvE some more.. once you figure out how to kill something there, you can do it over and over again, and it’ll never get “smarter”.. PvP is about constant change, where the status is about your skill.. not about how cool your shoulders look compared to someone elses.

The issue with raiders getting pvp gear is a separate issue that blizzard will continue to fight with as they try to balance the “something for everyone” approach. All you hardcore players need to start preparing yourself to not be the ones catered to. With the “last” addon for the game due out this year, get ready for way more attention to be spent on the “casual” player base that makes up 80% of the revenue. having the “elite” players playing often will not be nearly the marketing strategy that they are now as blizzard tries to get the last couple of years of maximum profit from this game.

But to be honest, is it really that bad to see someone with one or two arena items while the rest of the items are crap.

If you’re successful at arena, you just don’t have to bother with these people, because it will be an easy win or you won’t duel then because they still sit at 1500.

Regarding PVE: the batch venor stuff and the removal of the prequests made mount hjal and black temple accessible for many people even casuals.

Why is this a casual killer? Are casual pvp’ers prevented from getting pvp items? Nope. Are they prevented from getting high end S4 items? Yes, as they should be.

Compare to pve. Is a casual raider going to have any chance at getting T6 items? No way. So why should a casual pvp player have the ability to get the corresponding pvp item?

Right now you have situations where scrub warlocks in Imbued Netherweave outfits are wearing S3 helms. That’s just plain messed up. This change will prevent that from happening with S4.

This is not a casual killer. It doesn’t prevent someone from getting pvp gear. What it DOES do, is put a barrier in place so that a level of play must be achieved before the ultra-high end items can be attained. Just like pve.

I hate being buttonholed into a “perfect” team make up or with only really good players.

I am taking my 5/5 Vengeful and DE’g it all.

When I want PvP I will play WAR (when it comes out)

People playing arena hardcore and manage to achieve a high rating quickly would get most of the gear within one or two weeks. I don’t think that this should be the case.

For more casual players removing the points is centainly an idea, since the rating is the cruicial point and it would be anoying to reach a certain raing but lacking the point.

I guess the way to go would be to grant an item to the arena players every week, which could be used as a currency to purachase one item with a rating up to a certain numer.

Although I play arenas as resto (on druid of course), I did get a couple of items which I use for tanking, bracers from battlegrounds, and shoulders and gloves for arena points. It helped fill the gaps nicely when I couldn’t get any better gear. It may not be the best tanking gear out there, but for an occasional Karazhan or Gruul’s it’s more than enough.

Perhaps that’s exactly what Blizzard wanted, forcing players to raid.

Most of you commenters seem to agree with me to a degree, but many many others see this from a completely different perspective. Those at 2000+ rating want the gear to be exclusive and hate seeing every scrub running around with the same epics, while raiders are happy because many of them were ‘forced’ to grind honor and play arenas because the items are damn good.

What I didn’t mention in the post is an idea I had but it won’t happen, never. I was thinking, why not remove arena points completely. Since most of the items require certain ratings now anyway, you could gear up for offspecs more easily. I’d of course play resto druid cause it’s ten times easier to find arena teams then being feral of moonkin. I would love some destruction gear as well, but with 800ish points per week I’ll never get it all.
It awfully reminds me of the old PvP system with ranks, but that doesn’t necesarrily mean it needs to be such a bad thing (you wouldn’t have to grind 16 hours per day).

Any thoughts on that?

I don’t like PvP and I am no good at it, still I managed to get some PvP gear like S1 Weapon and the current bracers. It was easier to go for PvP to fill the slot with decent gear than hoping for luck in a raid.

I farmed my weapon with my gildies by doing 10 arena duells a week regardless of the result. By doing so we all aquired one or two arena items, even our def main tank. Sometimes it was fun sometimes not.

If there is a rating on every item, people like the MT don’t really have a chance to participate. If we’re honest, we all play to get better gear. We stopped playing arena when the ratings were introduced because we realized that we do not have a chance to get anything decent. Therefore the time could be better invested in relaxing from raids or farming.

Don’t forget that getting a high rating is easier for some classes.

WoW gets more and more a gear race, and the only important thing is to keep ahead of people. Not out of playability or fun, but out of sheer pride and competiveness.

What needs to be done is to make the PvP rewards more useful in PvP and less useful in PvE, and vice versa.

Since then I’ve only played with my best friend in the entire universe and Warrior+Lock doesn’t work all that well. I’m outfitted in mostly S3/Vindicator stuff with a Winherald while she doesn’t have much PvP gear, so we’re not really successful but we have fun.

Next season, if I were to find a druid or priest to play with that had the gear for it, I’m sure I could get 4/5 S4, possibly a weapon, without much problem. I’m not even going to bother trying though. I don’t really miss the 1800+ bracket where all you see is Druid/Warrior, Druid/Lock, Druid/Hunter, etc and the average match takes 15 mins.

Plus the gear is ugly. I’m just hoping this results in fewer people with 2K+ rating gear in the much lower brackets, but I doubt it will.

It will be interesting to see how this will affect those of us that just dabble in PvP. But honestly I don’t think it will change a thing.

My thoughts are for those who know what they are doing (http://outofmana.blogspot.com/) and rated in the 1700. It is disheartening to me that someone who has participated in all seasons cannot buy something that they may want out of S4.

This also seems to go against what Blizzard has done by making the SSO gear available to everyone. Items that maybe better than T4/ZA/T5 are available to someone who runs exclusively heroics and Kara.

As always Horns thanks for the updates!