No it's not.
This is the great fallacy here.

While the idea behind it (think ELO) is zero sum, the execution breaks it.
The ability to reform teams when they get too low breaks the zero sum system.
Teams are reformed all day. Do you really want to tell me that the *actual* average rating for 5x5 Teams in a Battlegroup is around 1500? Do you really believe that?

There is no zero sum in arena ratings because of this simple fact. You can leave the 1200 rating team (which gave its points to a 1800 rated team ... so balance was established) and start from scratch on a 1500 rated team. Where is the balance now?

See my point?

You can't just look at the weapon slot in isolation like that. A PvE guild killing illidan will get those weapons, but they are also getting trinkets/rings/armour upgrades.

Sure that 1400 rated pvp'er might get an equivilant weapon after a couple of months of pvp, but they won't have enough points to upgrade their armour slots as well, so their gear will be miles behind.

I would argue that only a small percentage of PvP'ers will end up with near full sets of PvP gear that is compariable to Top Tier raiding loot, as they are the only ones earning enough points per week.

He's not talking about the ELO system, he's talking about PVP itself. Someone wins (+1), and someone loses (-1), aka its a zero sum proposition. In PVE it doesn't matter to how successful another guild is directly (though there is competition for apps), there isn't someone losing because Nihilum killed Illidan, nor is anyone else's PVE impacted because they're all geared up.

I definitely agree that a player who excels at all facets of the game should be offered some advantage in PvE for participating in PvP and vice versa. My only beef with it is that you don't actually have to excel to get the advantage in the case of PvE advantages from PvPing, but you do for the reverse. That said, the gladiator spellblades really do seem a bit too good for PvE. A good approach would be to make the weapons confer some power gain from having the rest of the gladiator set equipped and adjust the base stats of the weapon downward to compensate. It would be even more effective if the stats that were removed and made a part of this "set bonus" were the damage stats and not the PvP survivability stats on the weapon. For example, you could change

From:
Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade
18 - 113 Damage Speed 1.60
(41.2 damage per second)
+27 Stamina
+18 Intellect
Equip: Improves spell hit rating by 15.
Equip: Improves your resilience rating by 18.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 225.

To:
Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade
18 - 113 Damage Speed 1.60
(41.2 damage per second)
+27 Stamina
+18 Intellect
Equip: Improves your resilience rating by 18.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 210.
(2): Improves spell hit rating by 15.
(3): Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 15.

This would allow you recieve the full stats of the item only when you had 2 pieces of gladiator gear equipped, making it just as desirable for PvP, and keeps it much more in line with items like Fang of the Leviathan for PvE. In addition, if you wanted to PvP for the sole purpose of obtaining an item for PvE, you wouldn't recieve quite as much of a boost if your team chain-lost 10 arena games for a few weeks and you bought only the weapon, helping to alleviate the issue of "free epix".

All that said though I'm pretty satisfied with the current implementation. Praetorian's post later in the thread pretty much hit it on the head; if you're great in PvP you should get a little bonus for PvE and vice versa. The only thing to debate in my eyes is the power of that boost and balancing it so that the benefit gained is roughly equal in both directions.

I think you are misunderstanding me. How is the win/lose ratio important for PvP gear upgrades? It's not. The only relevant part is the total of arena points you have. You trade arena points for gear. So it is sufficient to identify the PvP gear upgrade path to aren point distribution.

The distribution of arena points (as due to arena ratings ) is not zero sum, due to reforming of arena teams. That was my point.

To say it more blatantly. The actual median for a given battlegroup lies nowhere near 1450 or 1500 points as stated by some posters here. A simple disbanding of all teams below 1400 and reforming from scratch makes this happening a non reality.

It's painfully clear that a lot of people in this thread need to take a breather from WoW for a little bit. Between folks complaining that an oh-so-valuable loot table spot on a single boss is taken up by PvP-friendly item, and the folks who are outright offended that more than a month of PvP can get players a weapon that's decent for PvE, I don't know if there's any room for left for rationality in this thread.

Why is "cheapening" bad?


Back when Naxx was cutting edge, what did hardcore raid guilds care that the previous cutting edge raids (MC/BWL) were made easier (bugfixes, better pre-raid gear, etc)? Easier MC/BWL cheapened the epic gear that dropped from those instances.


The PvP patch (earn points to buy PvP items rather than rely on ranks) cheapened all the top-end PvP gear. (R12/13/14 stuff).


TBC coming out cheapened all the gear you earned from WoW 1.0 due to the itemization changes.


If the problem is with timing (ie: those changes cheapened old gear; this change cheapens top of the line gear), how long does it take some "random scrub" to earn all that "illidan quality PvE loot"? How long does it take raiding guilds to earn that same amount?

I keep hearing this and it is a total non-issue. Yes it is possible to remake every week. But in reality very few people do this. Why? Because the people at 1200 rating are not hardcore enough to care that they get 50 less points than they could. Not everyone takes this game as seriously as you.

The median was 1450 last season in 5v5 for the Bloodlust battle group. I checked. Several times during the season. Don't believe me? Go check it out yourself. Look at http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/te...Afk+Epics&fl=1 . They played every week and they did not remake.

I agree the remake issue is an exploit that should be fixed. But it seems it is not used widely enough and the consequences are not dire enough for it to matter.

Yeah, this thread still sucks.