If I'm reading the costs right on the new arena sets, it looks like Blizzard went with the more graduated stratification that a lot of people were asking for:

When I saw the data mined sets, I made the same assumption a lot of people did and thought that it was multiple seasons worth of progression that were already in the data files. But if these prices are correct, it looks like it's all coming out for the first WotlK season. And personally, I think the costs/requirements are great. There's the easy-to-get savage gladiator set with no AR requirement, and with such absurdly low costs that sub-1400 teams can still get a piece every week or two. The better Hateful set has slightly higher costs, but AR requirements such that if you have the rating for them, you can still afford a piece every week or two. And the deadly set which knocks the costs back up to what we're used to, but you have to be reasonably good to get *any* of it (not just weapons/shoulders). But the best part is, by the time you can get the last piece in the Hateful set, you're only 75 AR away from the first piece in the Deadly set. No more seemingly insurmountable 150 point gaps for people trying to work their way to the next piece. Very good system in my opinion.

It seems the ilvl of all the Deadly Gladiator gear is 213 which is equal to the Naxx-25 man drops, so raiders won't feel compelled to become a 2000+ rated arena player to supplement gear. The drastically increased number of weapon drops on the loot tables will probably help that situation as well.

An interesting thought: Will PVP players be upset about the few ilevel 226 items that drop from KT in 25-man naxx? Is that going to be considered the main benefit PVE-players will have in PVP (Since blizzard wants to encourage crossover)?

This is going to make disbanding teams and running your friends up the ranking ladder much easier once you have the ilvl 213 arena gear, since the lower rankings won't really have a way to match the gear disparity. Not sure if that's a bad thing, but there are bound to be complaints.

Looks like 25-man Malygos was downed and dropped (as expected) ilvl 226 items.

So progression looks like this-

Heroics/10-man Naxx and Chamber of Aspects/Crafted or Reputation gear - ilvl 200
10-man Kel'Thuzad/25-man Naxx and Chamber of Aspects/10-man Malygos - ilvl 213
25-man Kel'Thuzad and Malygos - ilvl 226

No idea if 10-man or 25-man Malygos also dropped Emblems of Valor or Heroism.

Except that the 1400 rating players would probably progress one boss a week in Naxx-10 in a 4 hour sessie. That means 4 weeks and 16 hours to get a piece, while they can get a piece in 2 weeks and 4 hours doing arena's and daily bg's. That is a massive discrepancy in effort to get equal (in ilvl at least) gear. The same discrepancy exists on the top levels and will stay with future additions of raids and seasons. Welfare epics indeed.

Edit: Ok, I'm a tier off. Still, PvP seems to give gear double as fast as PvE (in game time, and equal RL time). And, like now, adding 25% of your raiding time in PvP will make you a significantly better raider compared to someone who doesn't (like me).

Except the 1400 rating won't actually allow them to buy anything more than Savage Gladiator, which is blue gear.

Am I correct in saying that you can bypass the whole arena rating requirement / points system by just killing Archavon? Or has that changed?

Why do we care if PvPers are getting bunches of gear so long as it's not useful in PvE?

The problem with TBC arena gear wasn't the quantity (that was an issue with PvE itemization and drop rates, not a PvP problem), it was that the weapons were often flat out better than the PvE options and the armour was of such a massive item level that even itemized for PvP it was often a very reasonable choice for PvE use. As long as the PvP gear is itemized for PvP and does not blow the PvE gear out of the water item-budget-wise, there will be no major incentive for raiders to trudge into the arenas and that's exactly what we should be looking for - minor rewards for those who excel at both aspects of the game, but no one required to excel at one in order to do well in the other.

Even if those rates of progression are accurate, it still doesn't take into account the fact that you get bosses on farm, and thus increase the rate at which you obtain gear.

It does seem like they're moving away from the "welfare epics" model entirely, with the 3-tiered system for PVP gear. The lowest Arena Rating requirement for any PVP epic looks to be 1695, which isn't easy to obtain unless you actually put in some effort in the arena system.

One change from the level 70 gear: Resilience has hugely increasing numbers as the seasons progress, as well. Each of the 3 tiers of PVP gear has increasing Resilience, and the ilevel 252 season6 gear that showed up on mmo-champion provides substantially more. It will be interesting to see the new "base" Resilience number, that all the level 80 PVP gear eventually levels out at, assuming they go the same way they did with level 70 gear.

Not to nit pick, but several of the Heroic epics seem to be coming with 4 stats while the raid epics are coming with 5 sets of stats so there's a slight, but not insignificant, bump in power from heroics to Naxx.

So i don't want to come across as complaining because I think at first glance the new arena system is about as close to an acceptable compromise as we're going to get: Reward good players, give players a chance to compete. I still think it's forever hard once people higher rated than you have better gear to close the gap and I'm fairly sure the ratings prove that, but the important lesson there is --> If you want a high rating, start early. Anyway, it really does seem like a solid compromise.

That said, the honor component still has this broken piece which all the "welfare epics" complaints belie. You have to sit in AV to farm the honor. And only AV. Unless you are blessed with a pre-made team for AB, WSG or EotS, you will spend disproportionate time in those BGs not winning and, regardless, not earning honor.

It's time to equalize the time:honor ratio of all the BGs. (Note: I have no clue how Wintergrasp changes things). For every minute you sit in a non-AV battleground you should get a tick of about 5-8 honor. You are defending a base, trying to capture one, whatever. There are no useful NPCs or giant maps in those BGs and no free piles of honor for just showing up. WSG games can easily take 45 mins in defeat and earn you ~100 honor. The benefits for participating during the honor grind are zero. And as a result you often get a very ragtag mix of crappy players. If there was a backstop of an additional 225-360 honor, it still wouldn't be as honor rewarding as AV, but at least it wouldn't be punitive, you wouldn't have people "AV-ing" out constantly during the games, etc. I'm unclear why this wasn't done long ago.

There was an old Quake mod that did CTF complete with bonus points for flag defense, assisting the flag carrier, and so on. That's what you need in WSG. For AB, increased honor if someone has touched a flag recently, or bonus honour based on how close you are to a flag might help. AV, I dunno, it's pretty solid on signifigant rewards for playing the instance the way it's intended.

Incentives for losing have to be stronger in WSG and AB, because right now, AV is the only way to get good honour regardless.

In battlegrounds, you don't want to punish strategy. If doing something one way gets you more honor, there will be no strategy because everyone will do the one thing that gives the most honor, leading to a rather boring battleground.

With a 10+ level difference, I wasn't able to land any attacks with HotR though. BoSanc & Holy Shield were enough to provide me with endless mana. Holy Shield & Ret Aura were pretty much my only sources of damage; along with Avengers' Shield which (for some reason, I wasn't aware of this until now) would often miss my target, but *always* hit the chained mobs. I wasn't aware that Avenger's Shield was guaranteed to hit the bounce targets? Anywho. Judgement of Light was the only real healing I had, and as "somewhat broken" as you might claim Paladins to be, the problem lies solely with Judgement of Light. If they were to decrease the effect of JoL for each difference in level between the Paladin and the target, I think it would solve the "problem."

One thing though, is that in the time it takes to AoE grind 10x level 80 mobs, I could grind 50x level 72 mobs and recieve more than 3 times the EXP. So whilst this could be regarded as an issue, it certainly doesn't provide any sort of immediate advantage.

It's fair to assume that Wintergrasp will shift this substantially. That's the new focus for non-arena PVP, and the rewards directly from it and controlling it are such that there will always be an interest for PVPers to go there. If the final honor rewards are anything like they are in beta, there will be incentives even for the losing side to go and "get involved", with rewards from actual involvement, not just afking or sitting around, regardless of whether your side wins or not.

While that doesn't fix the current imbalance in honor per hour in the battlegrounds that you mentioned, it does mitigate it by providing a better way to get honor than those, possibly even better per hour than AV. If it's set up properly, the best honor/time reward will come down to doing the daily battleground and Wintergrasp quests, not grinding for hours on end in a single battleground. Battlegrounds might shift to the places you go to get specific tokens, and fill in your achievements, not to grind out honor.

This is easily fixed.

You give constant ticks for playing any of these and meaningfully more honor for winning, capping flags, recapping flags, whatever.

It's so insanely out of whack now with AV vs. anything else, there needs to be a tick in the others even if you add rewards for the other sub-goals.

If they are going to add arena ratings on everything they really needs to make the arena into a real ladder system. With different level of progression. If they are still going to let players with all the gear reroll and fight fresh players just starting out then the system isn't going to be very fun.

Something simple would be to use the personal rating on the gear you have as a minimum team rating when queing. For instance buying a piece of gear that needs 1650 rating would mean any team you are on would automatically count as at least 1650 rating (while you are queuing at least). Or something slightly less harse like the team counting as 1650-50=1600 or so.

So as skill improves you do move up in ratings permanently; and also drops out of the pool of players who still try to reach the lower tier gear. Othervise this whole personal rating thing just isn't going to add anything fun to the game.

Wat annoys me the most about all this honor gain is that there is no way to actually get "decent" amount of reputation with the factions of WSG and AB. AV is easily since any capture will give you reputation and pretty much any kill does too. (Not sure if this actually got changed). However in WSG/AB it's a pain to get reputation, especially WSG. While I will get honor in WSG for killling people, returning the flag etc. There is only one way for me to get reputation right now.That's by winning, however even if I lose I get a good amount of honor for the time spend.

If I actually want to gain reputation from both BGs I have to be extremely lucky and hope for a good group. Premades are almost never done on my server which makes it a nono. While getting honor for me isn't a problem a full day of WSB/ABs gave me a good 5000 honor and this is without turning in marks for more honor. While the reputation gain was barely noticable.

I'm definitely concerned about this (even though I've never stepped into an arena). With this system, those that are at the top of the rating system will *always* have better gear than those just starting out in arena. Right now those who have at least decent ratings will be able to acquire the best available pvp gear such that no one can have a gear advantage on them. With the new system, higher ranked players will continually have more gear available to them.

Now it is true that by gradually giving out the pieces as the Arena rating rises that those you'll normally be fighting against can't have all that much better gear, but the issue mainly comes when then ratings get reset for a new season (assuming that happens still). Given two teams of equal skill, the one that had a higher rating last season will have better gear by an amount relatively equal to the distance between their ratings instead of only possibly being separated by shoulders and weapons. While this makes sense in terms of MMO "progression" of having to claw your way up to the top, it sorta goes against a great deal that they've done to equalize arena matches.

Nevertheless, I suppose that the tournament realms' existence now gives a place for those that are only interested in games of equal gear and leave the live arenas as a place where you can revel in the fact that being a high rated arena player means always being able to beat someone of equal skill that doesn't currently have the same rating solely because you started before them. As long as players interested in "fairness" realize they won't get that on live and thus stay on the tournament realms, I see this as quite a nice way of implementing arena gear.

I'm quite pleased with the systematic addition of rating on every arena gear. Keep the reward in the competitive part of the game, to the competitive players. That's all ok.
But I'm much more worried about the PvP/PvE balance.
For now it's good.
But then, arena S1 didn't cause an uproar either, because the "open to all" PvP gear was still the blue honor one.

Where the PvE/PvP balance is at risk, is two or three arena season down the path, when the "entry-level" PvP gear won't be the blue ilvl 200 Savage, but the previous-season-top-arena epic ilvl 213 or 226. When you will be able to welfare your way into full purples for PvE while skipping all the PvE content at the same time.
PvE gear may be better itemized for PvE than PvP gear, but with enough ilvl, the "entry level" PvP gear will end up outclassing the "entry level" PvE gear, and it risks to be S2-honor season all over again.

That is the (admitedly in the long-term future) problem we will have if they keep the season increase in gear.

I'm sorry, but the main problem in BG seems to me that there is too much "free honor", and not that you should add even more incentive to AFK in them.

I never understood why AFK detection was so difficult. For the most part just reward honor provided your within a reasonable proximity of a controllable point. I think there are not enough honor rewards in BGs as it stands. Yet to increase them there needs to be a way to award those who are working for it. The simple fact is that since BG items let people get equipped enough to get into Heroics and beyond because too many groups form these days with silly requirements to have it always easy. The weight put on gear is almost as bad as class sometimes. I

Other than weapons most of the gear isn't on par with many heroics. It was far worse for the game when they lowered the reputation requirement for Heroics to honored. That did more damage to the game than any BG did. This ended up making it very hard for late comers to get in on the action. Why run a normal instance when you can do the heroic? So instead of encouraging higher end players to group up with lower levels they put a mechanism in place that separated them. It used to be a lot of runs to get your rep up, that was fine to me. It meant that as we grouped with those coming up that hopefully they were learning to play in a team environment.

I'm not so worried about gear stratification near season resets as I am about manual resets during a season. Or just cross-bracket resets; An awesome 2v2 team and an awesome 3v3 team (with a perfect class matchup because I'm making the example) make a 5v5 and start out at 1500. Or boosting; While a lot more rare now than in the past, it certainly isn't extinct. The more gear is allowed to matter, the more important it is - if you want the system to remain somewhat competitive gaming - that you face people of similar gear levels.

What they really should do is remodel personal rating - a "last minute" addition to combat boosting rather than an integrated part of the original design - to be a more permanent kind of rating, like HCP in golf. It shouldn't be impossible to switch partners and then play at a lesser rating, but it certainly doesn't need to be as easy a it is today.