Those people don't matter then. They want the loot so they can stand in Shat and show off? That doesn't impact the ladder system that much nor could they compete as their gear would be lacking.

From my understanding the ladder system can still be exploited. There are rumors of a group in Stormstrike that have a 2nd team that is in there just to lose to their main team. Those types of people are a far greater problem than the casual that wants to gain just one epic a season.

They don't want to just get the loot to show off, they want the loot to PvE with. Thats why I worked up to rank 10 on my warrior back before 2.0, there were several DPS items that were the best available to me at my point in progression. And when 2.0 came out I worked toward a pair of HWL swords so I could perform in PvE.

I thought they were updating the arena gear every season to keep up with where the largest portion of the raiding population was in order to eliminate the old World of Gearcraft situation, but instead Blizzard apparently decided that they would instead make raid gear stay the same to eliminate the advantage.

Maybe they have two separate design teams for PvP and PvE who both came up with different solutions to the problem and both implemented them, the PvP design team came up with updating the gear seasonally, and the PvE guys came up with never giving us better gear. I hate to think Blizzard is that bad at communication, but I don't see why they would come up with a good solution(updating PvP gear) and then make that solution unnecessary by eliminating the gap.

I'd have to say I disagree with this. Simply because back in the day when I had just rerolled to a rogue, getting totally humiliated by another rogue in BGs with a few pieces of tier2 and a perditions blade or whatever gave me a "wow, that really hurt!" experience.

And why is it bad that this isn't happening now ?

Because ot gave me some very clear cut goals. I knew I could work my way into a "casual" friendly raiding guild (in lack of a better term I..) and, some day, get the items I learned to fear from others and love on myself.

For me, and I'd bet quite a lot of others, getting the gear is merely a bonus of a presumably fun encounter. However, when I do get the gear I want it to feel like it's worth the time invested.

Basically, I'm in the "remove pvp and focus on what the game is really built around" camp. I enjoyed the gear advantage in pvp when I actually did work my way up the tiers and got my (in my opinion) hard earned gear.

In a way, I still enjoyed getting totally beat down by a fully geared up tier3 / naxx / cthun / etc team.

It showed me that I had good things coming. It was my incentive. The game design, perhaps trough accident, dangled the carrot in front of me constantly. And it's probably one of the things that kept me going for 2 years.

I'm still playing, but I'm not as enthusiastic as I was 6 months ago. I know this is the case for a lot of other players as well. I'm not really enjoying the direction the design is taking. We'll see where it goes I guess, but the whole arena rank matching should, over a few rounds, even out whatever gear advantage a well decked PvE team might have.

I mean, the game has grown to what 8.5 million customers with the previous design in place. You would've though that Blizzard would take notice and not change the basic design philosophy.

(Oh and I do know they'll never remove PvP from the game even though they've theoretically done this already with the arenas being both faction and cross-faction.)

Actually, TBC increased their subscribers. In WoW 1.0, I recall the cap of 7 or 7.5 million. Now it is 8.5 million, so changing the design of the game gave them around a net gain of 1 million subscribers.

Not really, their subscriber count only consists of people actively paying, so a lot of this boost could be attributed to people who quit, returning to test out the new content. Who knows whether they'll stay or not once they reach the cap.

They're clearly not going to abandon either path.

EJ's readership is, um, a little biased towards PvE- specifically PvE endgame- and even more specifically PvE Endgame via raiding.

Blizzard is trying to branch out the available activities at "end game"

PvE: Questing. Netherstorm and SMV have far more quests than is even possibly needed to take a player from the 68-70 that the zone is tuned for- leaving a respectable "questing" endgame for the ultra casual that will give them 2+ months of solo/super easily pugable play at super low play times.
PvE: MicroGrouping. A large number of level 70 tuned 5 mans, and an even larger number of heroics. This is not intended solely as a stepping stone for raiding, this is an end game in and of itself. Crafting fits in here as well, with Primal Nethers.
PvE: Raiding. A variety of 25 man content for larger guilds and people who enjoy large group content.
PvP: Battlegrounds/World. The casuals choice for PvP play, limited but acceptable rewards- doesn't require anything but some time and whatever greens/blues you picked up from leveling.
PvP: Arena. PvP for highly organized groups- can also be dabbled in by the casuals, but frankly, most will be out of their league in the long run.

10 man content straddles the line between raiding and MicroGroup. It has some upgrades for heroic runners, but they're not so amazing that you feel compelled to step up to raid. It has basic upgrades for raiders, but it's clearly a stepping stone.

Of all of this, the only true end games that existed in Classic were Raiding and Battlegrounds (arena style). The questable content at 60 was crap. The MicroGroup play had such massive limitations on acquirable gear that it was pretty much eliminated as "end game" and was relegated to a stepping stone mechanic for the two viable paths.

I'd argue that the balancing wasn't strictly PvP:Arena/PvE:Raiding. They also tried to balance in PvE:MicroGroup- and keep ALL of them from destroying PvP:Battlegrounds and PvE:Questing for at least the first 3-6 months of the release.

It gave each end game group designers a very narrow range to work in. It also shook up the balance where raiders were accustomed to MicroGroup content being *strictly* a stepping stone and not a viable alternative path (and therefore raiding being a minor upgrade at best)... and where raiders were accustomed to raiding being an alternative gear path to PvP.

It opened the options and, from a global standpoint, it's probably going to be amazing for the game IF they can settle out the risk/reward balance without upsetting the gear balance.

That said, it's sunshine and daisies for everyone *except* the raiders right now. Where before raiding was the primary gearing path for every part of endgame, that's been taken away and given to alternatives.... weakening raiding and strengthening everything else.

Suddenly the choice to keep raiding is harder. It's not the only choice for game-wide progression anymore and it's not necessarily the best choice depending on what you enjoy best about the game. They'll lose raiders in the long run if they keep this approach- but honestly I'd say most of the lost raiders will be people like me. People who, instead of leaving the game over it, looked at the other choices and started down one of those paths because raiding wasn't worth it to them personally. Not such a bad thing for the game, but a little death to the raiding game.

It's still PvP, and I much prefer having the chance to fight your own realmmates. While it's no longer Faction vs Faction, it's definitely still PvP.

So what you're saying is that after PvE'ers dominating PvP because of gear for a long time, now that we're en route to a fix, we should instead just let PvP'ers dominate PvE?

Obviously it's not like every team above 2000 rating will waltz in and kill Kael'Thas, the point is that it's very, very easy to save up 3k points during the course of a season, and if you can then spend those on a main-hand Dagger with equal DPS to a bossdrop that maybe 3 raiders in the world have picked up, then people will do it.

I can easily see myself having close to the 5k mark by the end of the season if I don't spend anything, is it fair that I go pick up a 240 spelldamage weapon the first day of season 2, while Nihilum and DnT are still flasking up and trying to beat the boss that drops the same thing?

Apologies, my wording really wasn't that great seeing what I ment.

It should have been something along the lines of;

They'll never remove the two very distinct factions at war, even though the new pvp system would open up for this in a perfect manner.

You're right about it still being pvp. A better form then say BG's as well, at least in my opinion.

Exactly. I would believe this would skew over the difficulty of said encounters as well, seeing as the right could, in theory, be pushing more dps and healing then they -progress wise- would be pushing if they followed the pve route exclusively.

Some might argue this is not a bad thing, but I believe you should have some real incentive to keep moving in the PvE raiding world. For very, very many people the sheer joy of killing something you've worked on is shortlived, the next 20 kills or so is because the boss drops something you want.

Remove the last part and the lifespan of any given dungeon, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, will drop quite significantly.

Looking back, it was actually quite ingenious of Bliz to put T2 pants on Ragnaross. It gave guilds that had BWL on farm a good reason to go back to the oldest raid instance in the game over and over again. It might have been a whee bit tedious after a while, but it made the content stand far better on its own.

They already said they're updating the loot. BGs are meaningless -- PUG stomps barely exist these days. The arena gives viable PvP progression so you can't dominate with PvE gear. There's no reason to balance for PvP and I think the terrible loot we're seeing is based almost purely on the endgame being unfinished and largely untested.

Even though lockout bugs and terrible loot was extremely annoying at release, they could afford to go light on the endgame since so few guilds even had the 60s available to run MC -- now it was a big mistake not launching with a finished entryway endgame when there was only a 10 level gap and vastly more pre-organized guilds.

No, I'm pretty sure he's saying that people proclaiming things such as "WoW is a PvE centric game" are hilariously wrong.

Most of the problems introduced in this thread don't seem like problems to me.

Most everyone here was in Naxx prior to TBC. Why were you in Naxx? Sure, the loot was a big upgrade, and yes, there were a lot of amazing fights. The main reason so many guilds were in Naxx, was that it was the only thing to do in game. To succeed in Naxx, most guilds had to become a little more hardcore, bring more consumables, and everyone had to focus a little bit more.

Now we fast forward to TBC, and there are a ton of things to do outside of raiding (see Bekah's post). Instead of everyone naturally doing what they "want" to do, everyone seems to be asking Blizzard to skew the reward systems as badly as they used to be so that we only want to raid.

Also, the PvP rewards don't seem like the best raiding gear available. If I use this list of Cat DPS gear http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....sid=1&pageNo=1 almost every piece of Tier 4 gear (except gloves, which are close) provides a bigger sustained DPS boost than the Gladiator set, which is 5 item levels higher. That comes from heavy itemization spent on stamina and resilience, stats that as useful for raiding.

The only potential "problem" I see is with weapons, but it is hardly game breaking. If you enjoy raiding, you should raid. The encounters and the experience should be what drives you. If it was only loot that was driving you, well, now you're a bit more free on how to get that loot.

Nothing is stopping them from playing arena for gear as well, however, raiding is a much larger time investment than PvP at the moment. I can field a 2000 rated team playing pretty casually compared to the time it takes to gear up via raiding.

Unfortunately it is. Under current prices with 40g/stack dreamfoils which peak up to 70ish gold at raid hours or contantly 5-6g a piece mana thistles, only way to make more money would be selling 20 transmutes a day.

The one thing that bugs me about Arena Rewards is that its so inexpensive to get them (No/Low Repairs, Reg-Free Buffs, 0 Consumables), its what a 50g/season entry fee?
Whereas raiding is unquestionably ALOT more expensive and yet still bosses drop shit gold in comparison to the costs to kill them.

I dont understand why they removed the 'goldsink' from PvP ala Arenas.

PvE requires Blizzard to provide content to the players. In PvP, players make content out of each other. The latter scales better by far. This is a very dated article, but it's the only one I know of that discusses the rate of content creation versus content consumption.

How many people are playing Starcraft competitively today? Brood War was released nine years ago? If I were the one responsible for the money decisions at Blizzard, I'd want to tap into as much of what continues to drive Starcraft as possible. Setting up Arena ladders, Arena World Championships and the like would be a good start. Preventing PvE'ers from mopping the floor with the PvPers would be as well.


If it keeps that half of the server renewing their subscription, then hell yes.



Also, it is interesting to note that the first sponsorships of Arena Teams have been announced.

http://www.check6gaming.com/news.php?id=67
http://www.teampandemic.net/article/101

Congratulations to both Zerg It Down and Power Trip.

I think a large part of the problem comes from perception, which has been discussed on this board, a lot.

For those of us who have been through Nax, we find Gruul as hard as nax bosses, we expect "wow nax" upgrades, the kind of upgrades that made us say "holy hell" over vent.

Instead, we do these very difficult encounters (haven't beaten gruul yet), pot, flask and world buff, just like nax, only, in the end, we say "meh", on vent. The problem is, we were saying "meh" about MC loot, way back when, not nax loot.

Which brings us to the difficulty argument. I expected gruul to be easy, and drop crap loot that was "just a little" better then 5 mans...I expected Kara to be UBRS elite, and drop loot, slightly better then 5 mans. I expected Mag to be easy, and, again, drop loot slightly better then 5 mans.

My "perception" was simple...Kara=UBRS elite..Mag/Gruul=Onyxia..Serp=MC..Kael=BWL..Hyj=AQ40 and Black temple=Nax.

Following that type of progression, I would not only accept crap loot, I would happily farm it.

Instead...We start out at late nax difficulty, with crap loot, and looking ahead, the loot ain't getting much better, t5 is a downgrade in some ways.

I know t5 is going to be "fixed" and honestly, with "good" stat allocation, it can be good for its power curve, but the general difficulty curve for all this content needs to be corrected. Guilds should really not be slamming their heads against a wall until they reached Vash/Kael...Everything until then, at least, logically, should have been BWL- crap, especially if the loot is going to be tuned to mirror MC.

In summary..If you want the first tier raid zones to be "small jumps" in loot, which is fine, especially to combat inflation, then their difficulty also needs to be "small jumps". People shouldn't be potting for a boss that drops loot that is 5% or so better then 5 mans, thats rediculous, if your loot upgrades are that narrow then the most difficult thing about that boss should be orchestrating 25 people who aren't retarded.

Now, if Hyjal has loot that blows 5 mans away, then asbolutely, beef that puppy up so it needs the best farmed gear, and pots...but not the first tier, crappy loot, stupid stepping stone raid boss..Its completely counter productive...To those who PvP, its like not giving *any* arena points for losses, and the ladder system matching somone in full season 1 gear, 2000+ team against somone in greens, its absurd, it wouldn't make sense in PvP, and it doesn't make sense in PvE, loot should scale with difficulty, this isn't rocket science.

My only theory as to the difficulty right now, is that blizzard is still tuning the "real" ultimate dungeons, hyjal and Black temple, and these overtuned bosses are to slow us down..Hey, thats never happened before .

I completely disagree with this, for some very simple reasons.

Take a look at a fight, any fight, in the game right now. Let's take, for example, Thaddeus in Naxxramas. Thaddeus has one main schtick - you have to separate the positively charged from the negative, while dealing with his chain lightning and fighting him.

Is there anything in particular about this fight that would make it impossible to tune it to a group of players in fresh UBRS and Dire Maul blues? The only difference here is that designers tune a specific encounter to an arbitrary gear level of their own choosing. Raiding players do not have a separate set of in-game skills that are available only through raiding, with the single dubious exception of Tranquilizing Shot. Vaelastrasz deals some nasty damage and has a lot of health, but you could tune him up to be killable only by the best of the best geared Naxx players, or you could tune him down to be killable by the blue and green casual brigade without affecting the actual encounter design at all.

A gear plateau doesn't have much to do with widening design space at all. If anything, gear checks are more *limiting* to design space, because you are inherently precluding groups of your player base from the encounter.

What it appears you want is gear to jump from instance to instance, and you feel that you aren't being sufficiently rewarded going from instance to instance. You feel it is not worth the effort to progress, so you want them to make it worth the effort. The encounters in the burning crusade really aren't that much harder than the encounters in vanilla wow. The only real difference is that the new encounters are tuned a little high (at the moment), so they appear to be 'naxx level' difficulty to you. What it appears you are saying is "if your gear was better or the numbers tuned down, it wouldn't be 'naxx level' difficulty anymore". However, it's important to note that numerical difficulty is not the same as coordination and strategic difficulty. Numerical difficulty is completely arbitrary, while strategic difficulty is not (and should not be) limited by this sort of thing.

In short... the 'curtailing' of the design space is purely of an arbitrary size anyway. It isn't limiting the designers at all, unless you think it is a much richer experience to have 200 instead of 100.

Not to derail the thread, but this is definitely interesting.

I'm curious to see whether sponsorships and interest from the eSports community changes the way PvP and PvE balance is considered. Sponsorship for PvE guilds has historically not happened...I seem to recall hearing something recently about Nihilum and SteelSeries, but that's about it.

The arena play has the potential to generate a lot of interest, PR opportunities, and (as a result) revenue for Blizzard Entertainment. Starcraft and Warcraft III were huge eSports successes, and I'm curious to see to what extent Blizzard attempts to develop competitive arena play. A year or two from now, will we be talking about how PvE content releases are set to be opened at the same time as a new arena season begins, because - gosh durnit - it just ain't fair for those PvE'rs to have an edge over people who earn their upgrades the good, old fashioned, wholesome way in PvP? Maybe not, but it will be interesting to see how Blizzard balances the two spheres of play with this new (and essentially untapped) aspect of play being developed.

No, it was fucking retarded and I fucking hated being asked to go farm bullshit in MC every week because some goddamned druid was such a lootwhore that he couldn't live without his precious t2 pants, which wouldn't drop for 6 months straight.

Ragnaros still dropped things I wanted (like choker of the firelord), but I didn't give a shit because MC was such a boring endeavor. If the content isn't fun on it's own then putting loot in it isn't going to make it more fun, it will just make me hate the raid designers even more.

Personally, consumables and difficulty aside I love what they've done with the TBC end-game =).

Attempting to balance two different subsets of a game in regards to risk versus reward is a monumental task and I don't envy Blizzard's attempts at tackling it.

Their current itemization woes (I won't go into examples I think its covered more than adequately elsewhere) stem from this precarious balancing act Blizzard is attempting to pull off. Raiders aren't receiving the upgrades necessary to progressively tackle PVE raid content, since we can't have an advantage in the Arena. Although, perhaps this is all a part of their master plan. If the majority of raid guilds can't progress through instances for upgrades, perhaps they'll be forced to enjoy Blizzard's proud creation in Arenas. Conspiracy theories are fun.

The Arena doesn't suffer from the current state of game balance regarding raid upgrades versus Arena upgrades. Raiding does.

Regardless, neither are deal breakers at the moment. Consumables can get you over the hump so far as raiding for now, but personally, I'd rather not develop an addiction to Adept's Elixirs. I hear it makes your weeny smaller.

Also, Molten Core blew every week. Start to finish.

They need to make separate rulesets for the two. I dont get why they are so stubborn about it.

Also, the Horde needs a Fear Ward.

No, it was awful. Nobody cared about the loot from the 8 bosses before Rag for the MOST part, and unless you ran it with all mains and powered through in 2 hours or less.... it was mind numbingly boring.

What usually was the case was it was alts going and it was a somewhat sloppy affair, that would take 4 hours and then everyone was pissed off when Rag didn't drop what they wanted. Separating gear tiers like that is just awful implementation. Onyxia did it right, that was fine to have a T2 set piece there.