TheCutlery

I'm not seeing a big problem with it, and this is coming from the scrub end of the ladder.

Hit 1550 for legs the first week, not a problem. Hit 1600 a week later for BP, still no problem. Partner has some sand in his nether regions and hasn't logged on for 3 weeks, partnering with a priest (probably the weakest healer for warrior 2's) and we're within spitting distance of being able to grab a ring, after that I'm sure 1700 will be achievable with a bit of work. It seems set up pretty well. Don't have access to weapon, and I'm a little miffed that they decided to hand out S2 shoulders to scrubs in BG's when you could be rated 1900 in arena and not be able to get better than S2 shoulders, but that's more or less the extent of my complaints.

You're also not 2 seasons behind on anything except shoulders + weapon. You can get S3 for every slot other than that, and get a couple pieces of S4 for no rating requirement. They even dropped the points required for S3 to less than S2 was last season, which was pretty nice for the newcomers as well.

The only big change I've noticed is that there are A LOT less people doing Arena now. If my 2's ranking is any indication, there's about half as many people playing this season as last. Currently ranked 5kish or so at 1606, and that would be closer to a 10-12k rank last season. We had to climb to 1750 or so to get in the neighborhood of 5k ranked. I'm sure some of it is that it's still early in the season, but there are definitely less people playing this time around. That could also be a sign that there are just fewer teams playing as well, since the rating + point selling has greatly diminished, I haven't quite nailed either down yet. It's too early to be running into reroll teams and assuming they're point selling.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the changes, and they affect me quite a bit since I've never been over 1800.