What happens then if your having a bad night or/and your bringing a new guy in the team to gear him up and add him to your core later on? not only would you lose rating, you would lose the gear you had..? Besides, restrictions like that would bring arena's back to the old honor system.

Do you suppose there are others who feel differently on this subject? I would be interested to hear from top-ranked PvPers whether or not they would be in favor of implementing a standardized gear set. It seems one of the draws of PvP is being better than your opponents, not just out-gearing them.

Also to address a comment in your post: I really don't see teams wearing level 70 blues posing much of a threat to those teams who earned full season 1 gladiator sets whenever season 2 comes around. Sure, very skilled teams may pull it off, but in that case, wouldn't you agree that they deserve the gear upgrades?

Then everyone who couldn't be at 1500 would quit the arena system. The median of everyone who is left would gravitate to 1500, all the people now below 1500 would quit, and the process would repeat.

I am not exaggerating when I assert that this would wholly devastate the arena system and reduce the number of people playing in it by at least 90%.

"Making sure that other people have worse gear than I do" is clearly not the objective of the arena system, so I wish people would stop making proposals to reform it towards that goal.

I agree, many people like the idea they can play 10 games a week and get a new weapon in 2 months. Also, ratings are very fluid. I've had times where I was up over 1800 then dipped below 1700 in the same day. Having to switch out my gear because I had a few tough losses, then losing games because I was out geared would not make a lot of sense. Also it would make PvE gear more important in the lower brackets. I could use my Malchazeen as a 1500 rating player and have a significant advantage over everyone else due to their inability to use the Arena weapons they earned.

I think another interesting question is what will happen to the gear that goes in the other 12 slots besides the set gear. Will the epic pvp rewards be upgraded or will there be new ranks of those too?

Before they look at the set bonus for the Dreadweave set, there's another important thing they need to do first: Reevaluate the living shit out of it.

I'm affliction for arenas right now and, despite intending to spec back to Destruction some day, I feel absolutely no guilt for taking the Felweave gear over Dreadweave.

That being said, in a 43/18/0 build, the 0.2s off Immolate is kinda nice, but not great. Definately needs something else. 30% extra interrupt resist on Drain Life? Who's with me? Eh? Eh?

And some of us actually have a two handed weapon and 5 pieces of gladiator gear already (well...I will when I log on after my class tonight!). So, relatively speaking in WOW vanilla terms, I'm a hardcore AQ40 C'thun farming sonuvabitch and most everyone else is working on BWL.

A simple analogy to the fact that I have over 12,000 arena points of gear and most people have about 4,000.

Wow, to think this entire time I've been reading your posts I always read your name as "Bidby". 2352 rating, not bad

Most people do...I gave up correcting them a long, long time ago. Thanks, though its really about 2304 or something as of last night, because certain individuals that hadn't played for 2+ weeks wanted points and left it until the last night of the week to queue up. Not a smart idea.

Sorry, I misread you. I still do not agree. The fact that you have found one item where you consider the gladiator reward to be better for raiding than the tier 4 reward does not really prove anything. Most are not. As a counter-example I give you this:

Tier 4 Rogue pants

292 Armor
+38 Agility
+34 Stamina
Durability 90 / 90
Classes: Rogue
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves hit rating by 22.
Equip: Increases attack power by 76.

Gladiator Rogue pants

305 Armor
+32 Agility
+48 Stamina
Durability 90 / 90
Classes: Rogue
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 16.
Equip: Improves your resilience rating by 32.
Equip: Increases attack power by 34.

There is no question about which of these is better for raiding. In fact,

Leggings of Assassination

256 Armor
+40 Agility
+33 Stamina
Durability 75 / 75
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves hit rating by 22
Equip: Increases attack power by 44.

and 4-5 other blue items which are easy to obtain are better as DPS than the gladiator gear.

This is not an isolated incident, this is the case with almost all slots for almost all classes, and keep in mind that this is *prior* to the incoming raid item buff which tigole posted about.

The only items from the arena which should be of any interest to raiders on a general basis are the weapons, which you are free to join and get. After all, getting the arena items is so quick and easy. Sure you wont be able to upgrade those through raids for a while, but you got 15 other slots to worry about anyway, so its not like you wont see any progress.

You are comparing ilvl 105 with ilvl 115.
If the next tier of gladiator gear is released at the same time the first BT boss dies then you will have to be comparing ilvl 105 with ilvl 135 in 3 weeks.
I think I can safely say that there is going to be a significant difference.

Certainly a correct assumption. At the same time, you want to feel rewarded for being the better team. If it was *only* about the competition one would be better off playing something like counter-strike, where there is just one class and the playing-field is dead even at the start of a match.

A full set of battleground blues is not that far behind a set of gladiator items. If you throw in weapons from the arena on top of those blues, you have reduced most of that gap. I am sure that if you gave my teams gear to power trip and vice versa, they would still kick our ass 10 out of 10 times. The gear is not *that* important, getting gear that is "good enough" to play is easy, the rest is about reward and a feeling of progression.

I am confused, it was *you* that started comparing items that drop off gruul to the gladiator ones.

No it doesn't. For starters they don't cover every slot, and secondly it will take many months to get the limited amounts of slots available filled with arena gear. For those who chose X arena item, Y raid item will be passed over. Big deal, we're seeing that with the tailored items already and it hasn't destroyed progression. I also saw this when I rerolled on a new server right around when the PVP items received a buff. They all became as good or better than tier 2 and before the server was even in MC. The PVPers were geared better than anyone else hands down, for a while, and then it evened out. You'll see that with arenas too. People who saved will get a couple items when the next tier comes out and then they'll be back on the single item every few months track again and raiders will catch up. People who didn't save will be even further behind. Once stuff is on farm you RAKE in the gear for raiding, not so much in arenas unless you rate highly. You can see that just because a raid instance is out desn't mean everyone is farming it, why can't you see that just because new arena items are out doesn't mean everyone is going to get all of them?

They tried something like that with the original honor system. It was scrapped for good reason.

This is also to the suggestions of having to progress through gear as well, but remember that arenas are about competition. They aren't about progression or phat loot, they are about PVPing against roughly equally skilled opponents. Any gear barriers you put in place lessen the competition and make it more about gear and less about the players. If they ripped out rewards entirely and just had a number of items to choose from when equiping yourself that would actually be the ideal, but they can't do that in an item-centric game and the items give incentive to participate even if you're not a hardcore PVPer.

Also they HAVE to make arena rewards scale to the highest available in raiding if they intend to scale them because the whole point is to make it so arena players do not also have to be hardcore raiders to compete. If arena gear is only on par with Joe Average... who cares? Only Joe Average does. The top arena teams will be raiding or quitting and no question about it. Remember that the top arena players are also likely to be (and/or have been) top raiders if so inclined.