Anenga

How about put more armor pen on melee weapons but make it not work on players? That's what you're pretty much suggesting for PvP weapons. And Resil Pen would be a BAD BAD BAD idea.

 

Galred

1. Those rings weren't in the game until a recent patch. And they're hardly a guaranteed drop, the way an item purchased for Arena points are.

2. The difference is one very key word: "farming". As in, an activity which a player can engage in solo, without a need for a group, without needing a specific time to accomplish the goal, and without a high level of skill at a portion of WoW that not all players enjoy or are good at. Forcing players who wish to improve their gear into the Arena because of the glaring holes in current itemization is a highly objectionable practice, and condoning it sends a message to Blizzard that it's ok to do a half-assed job on itemizing gear upgrades.

As to "months behind BT progess" - mmm. Yeahhh. How many 2200+ Arena teams have you, personally, fought which had BT weapons? How many guilds are actually progressing in BT compared to the guilds which have S2 weapons?

The issue is not about PvP gear competing with 2nd tier raid gear; I think most of us are fine with that. The problem is it's PvP gear competing with "whatever dropped for you in Kara, haha RNG beats j00".

 

Celandro

Dinadass: I don't think anyone has an issue with crossover. PVPers certainly have a huge issue with the complete lack of any comparable ring/neck/trinket/wrist/belt/boot to anything from BT and PVErs have a huge issue with the extremely low and random weapon drop rate in PVE.

 

hkdigital

Hypothetically if Season 3 armor provides up to 800 resilience, and season 3 weapons provide 400 resilience penetration. I really doubt your PvE weapon will have enough raw DPS to overcome the difference. You see, it's just a matter of tuning the numbers, but resilience penetration will solve the problem.

 

Ghando

I don't see the problem with this. If I can farm Illidan every week AND be successful in Arenas, why shouldn't I be rewarded for my accomplishments, not to mention my investments in terms of time and gold (respeccing 2-4 times a week, repairs, consumables)? Obviously being at the top of the Arena game requires a lot of skill and dedication, but the investment in terms of time and resources is simply not comparable. Even in total-farm mode, T6 content takes ~8 hours a week which is more time than I ever spend playing Arenas (maintaining 2s and 5s teams over 2000). I am guaranteed exactly nothing from that 8-hour investment. Meanwhile, I generate enough Arena points every week from 3-4 hours of play for an offhand weapon that's competitive with ANYTHING out of T6 content short of a legendary off Illidan (ignore my class/role). It could be significantly less time, if I were just playing 10 games a week to maintain rating.

Arenas offer a reward:investment ratio that competely blows away anything else in the history of the game. Bringing it more in line with the raiding game isn't out of the question, and weapons are the items that really make the disparity glaring.

edit: also consider that Nether Vortices are easily purchased from top guilds on many servers. After a couple months of T5 content, the supply of Vortices will greatly outstrip the demand for them.

 

Kasi

Which once again Ghando leads to PVE'ers completely dominating the top of the PVP scene. Add in there that your T5/6 gear is probably part of what helps you do well in PVP. I wish I could hunt down the post by Elendril that made it pretty clear what happens when you give the best stuff exclusively to raiders. They dominate the PVP too. Feym's solution might not be ideal, but its one of the few thats gone in the right direction. If PVE raiders want it that PVP weapons/items aren't as good for raiding, then the opposite must hold true as well. PVE items must be nerfed for PVP, or PVP items made so strong in PVP that one would never consider using PVE T6 epics there.

As for how many people I've seen wear T6 gear against me in Arenas? None, then again I've not gotten above 1650. Seen plenty of PVE'ers though at that level wearing nothing but pure T5 gear though. Doesn't seem to hurt them too much at that level, considering they have no resilience.

 

Hand

Although I agree with you, it seems to me like Blizzard doesn't. With the way they set up arena points and all the rewards, it seems clear that they want the two to be completely unrelated. One of the biggest gripes pre-TBC was that you HAD to be extremely competetive in pve in order to pvp. If you didn't pve, there was no way to get any gear and the game wasn't even really worth playing. Now, blizzard wants to stray away from that, and make it so nothing that you ever get in PVE will help you in PVP. This is to make it so the hardcore sponsored PVPers that practice upwards of 30 hours a week are not put at any sort of gear disadvantage. The main problem I see is that they put no thought into making this go both ways, because most of our raid wears at least one piece from arena, if not more in PVE.

 

Kasi

Oh come on Hand, you know better than that. You don't think that [Dragonspine Trophy], [Stormherald], [Torch of the Damned], [Grips of Silent Justice]. [Choker of Serrated Blades] and countless other items aren't useful in PVP? It goes both ways big time, but in one way we have T5.5 weapons from PVP going into PVE while at the other time we have trinkets, rings, weapons, cloaks, offset armor pieces, totems, etc all being used in PVP.

 

Harwin

I agree with you that some crossover can be good, assuming you're allowing non-arena gear at all into arenas (which they are). But right now it seems to be all about weapons. Having PVP weapons be essentially the same thing as PVE weapons hurts this in two ways:
1. Since weapons are the most important thing to a lot of classes, a lot of T5 raiders are much better off if they've done arena for a weapon than if they've waited on drops. So you have this massive buff from arena (since weapon DPS seems to matter so much).

2. For the same reasons, BT weapons are now a big buff for T6 raiders when they're trying to do PVP content. Since weapons are so important, you'd always use the T6 content weapon over the arena reward weapon. That's a problem, because it's a large imbalance for arena teams.

As long as PVP weapons and PVE weapons don't have any differentiating procs/stats, that's going to continue.

By making PVP weapons have some special bonuses that only work in PVP (like various procs, or -resilience, or something else), you can make them better than their PVE equivalents even if they have lower DPS(or the same DPS but other stat allocations)

If you want crossover, the SSC rings seem ok in terms of power. Yeah, they're not great if you get them as a loot drop when you want something better, but if say the Ashtongue faction vendor sold them in addition to normal loot, I think'd they be ok. Ring slots aren't huge, and now you get a buff in PVP for doing PVE. On the same token, what if you could spend arena points buying a ring for PVE? Now you've got an upgrade because you PVP, but it isn't the massive upgrade that a weapon is.

 

Anenga

Yes, before you needed to PvE in order to PvP. Now you don't. If you want to be competitive in PvP now, or play it enough to tune your strategy and gain more experience, it's difficult to do that and obide by 4-5 raid day schedule. Of course it's possible, but it requires an insane amount of time required. Raiding at the high end (with a 90%+ schedule), and sustaining a 2300+ 5v5 team seems kinda unrealistic to me. Although the minimum number of games needed is 10, take a look at the number of games the top 10 or top 20 teams in Bloodlust plays. It's significantly more than 10 a week, and it if it's less it's because other top teams are playing (which raiding is no doubt to blame).

It also just does not make sense for PvE to drop PvP items (like those Resilience rings in SSC), because raiders just get upset that they aren't getting more items to progress their guild through instances. And this thread is about PvErs being upset you have to get PvE items through PvP. I think the majority of the WoW playerbase would rather get PvE upgrades via PvE and PvP upgrades via PvP.

 

Ghando

I don't see many raiders complaining that their raiding gear isn't good enough in Arenas. I've actually been quite happy with how Resilience has worked out on gear thus far, making Arena items the best choices for Arena play. T5/T6 gear supplements arena play in the same way that honor-grinding rewards (bracers belt ring neck etc.) supplement it...I know for a fact that I would get nailed to the wall if I tried to play 2v2 in my PvE healing gear. That's fine, it means the system works for my class/role. Where it DOESN'T work (and this was Gurgthock's point when he first posted) is the weaponry, for melee classes especially. Arena weapons should be top of the heap in arenas, and raiding weapons should be top of the heap in raids. Take those weapons out of their element, and they should perform to roughly the same level that armor does...that 2/3 threshold or whatever it was.

 

Jebraltar

If PvP weapons weren't so damned good in PvE, what reason would they have to not allow you guys to pick up PvP weapons that are equivalent (in PvP dps) to BT/Hyjal weapons? They could even let you have superior ones without penalty.

The biggest reason that arena seasons lag behind pve content is because PvP gear trivializes PvE content in many cases. Pushing to maintain a situation where PvP'ers are perpetually behind PvE'ers, PvP weapons are frequently used as replacements for PvE itemization holes, and PvP'ers lack gear selection across all slots seems silly to me. If you're upset that there are no Arena cloaks/rings/trinkets, it's something that should probably be worked on in addition to the PvP weapons being borderline required for PvE due to the nature of weapon drops.

The arena weapons are not the only things that should be headed for a change here. There should be more and better cloaks, rings, trinkets, etc available from PvP. PvP weapons should not be so effective in PvE, especially since their effectiveness is completely disproportionate to the effort required to get them.

The current situation is akin to what it would be if there were a full season 3 arena set currently available from a low-level PvE instance. Sure, it's not hard to get the gear, but few hardcore PvPers would be too happy about needing to PvE to PvP.

Arena weapons are a problem because they are the only reliable source of weapons in the game, they are extremely good for PvE (and being released ahead of the actual content curve - Wowjutsu suggests that ~20% of the raiding community is in SSC. Less than a quarter have even killed Magtheridon, and yet 100% of the raiding community has access to weapons near the quality of current Kael'thas loot. This doesn't seem problematic?

 

◊ pewsey

I've read through this, and the vast weight of opinion is that the PvP epics are too good for PvE relative to their ease of availability.

I agree.

And, what people also seem to agree is that there is a large itemisation hole (including RNG failure) in weapons for the "average" raider.

So, I propose that all SSC(*) bosses drop a weapon token that can be handed in for the equivalent of a S1 weapon. (Maybe the token is a 50%, or 30%, or 20% drop, or heroic token like model). Implement a reasonable rating cap on the ability to purchase PvP weapons (top 10%)

This allows Blizzard to be able to have the epeen weapons for PvE, make them rare, make them desirable.

This allows the uber-PvPers to have their S2 weapons as epeen factors.

This then also allows PvE who want to just PvE to have some acceptable upgrades available from raiding.

I can't stress how frustrating it was for my character progression to not have any suitable rogue OH (except via BoP crafting) from a lvl 70 blue instance (Black Morass) until BT (Blade of Infamy)


(*) I chose SSC because that seems the right point. Latros/Dirge is still a good choice while starting SSC, but not while finishing. People might want to argue exactly which bosses, what instances might drop these tokens, but the mechanism and solution remain the same.

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
Nemesis: "Pewsey is single-handedly turning around every guy in the BB that didn't want to have kids."
Viator: Because I had a baby so I'm better than non-breeders.

 

Kasi

But that doesn't work for weapons. Unless you made pvp/e only stats (like the much used +20 dps, + 100 ap vs players/monsters which would never happen) or found a new mechanic like the -200 resilience in PVP idea that was so powerful in pvp to make it the overwhelming choice people are just going to go with the most dps weapons. Which are all from raiding. Stormherald, Torch, Cataclysm's Edge are all better PVP weapons than the S2 one, both for having higher dps, better speed and special procs/passives that the PVP items don't have.

I would also call some doubt on comparing the epic BG rewards to the supplemental gear people get from raiding. 1) While the ring, neck and armor is pretty good, the cloak, second ring and trinkets are not. 2) The level of the BG rewards is lower than that of the PVE epics. Only belt/boots are above lvl 130. Everything in BT/MH is above lvl 141. 3) Many classes do not get focus fired in Arenas. Very few classes once they get full Merciless need much of the BG rewards. Sure priests and warlocks definately need to get as much resil/sta as they can, and some other classes need to be pretty good too, but many classes do not need to stack resil/sta to the exclusivity of offensive or healing throughput.

Heck I just looked at your armory. You are clearly in PVP gear with your Glad pieces. But you have 7 pieces of high level raiding gear on in your set. Some of those are more powerful than anything you could get from purely PVPing, especially your mace which is getting fixed shortly and has an extremely powerful PVP use. Is it so bad that a PVP'er has access to T5.5 level loot while T6 raiders consistently used 4-5+ pieces of PVE gear in PVP? I don't think so, and due to the nature of how Blizzard itemizes and how things like armor pen and spell haste are very powerful in both PVE and PVP (and are also only found in top end raiding) I think it is kind of petty to complain that PVP items hurt PVE. Sure they do to an extent, but I'm sure every clothie stunned by a Stormherald thinks the opposite.

 

Jebraltar

Kasi, my question to you is this:

Why does the present state of PvP "power levels" compared to PvE "power levels" need to remain constant if this last slot is changed so that it does not provide upgrades to all but the farthest-progressed raiders? What would prevent them from buffing PvP loot to t10 quality, as long as it was still worse than the raid sets for raiding? Arena loot is currently being intentionally held back in order to avoid trivializing the highest tier of raid content, allowing raiders to be more powerful. No one says that Kael'thas has gotten anything but easier with a steady flow of Kael'thas/Vashj quality weapons. T6 weapons available from PvP would have much the same effect on BT - loot you would not normally be able to attain through PvE yet being given to you from PvP. This is problematic for raid design for the exact same reason that consumable usage once was. (Do they assume you're using PvP gear and overtune or PvE gear and undertune?) This means that you're never going to get PvP weapons on par with PvE loot right now.

If PvP weapons changed so that they were not comparable to raiding weapons, this concern would evaporate and PvPers would likely be given loot on quality with the highest currently available. Which would be better - permanently lagging behind tx+1 raiders or not being able to use your pvp epix in PvE?

 

Kasi

2 answers to the question Jebraltar

1) Blizzard wants people to play both sides of the game. They are never going to make it so that loot gotten in PVE is not going to be useful in PVP. It just won't happen. PVP items are useful in PVE and vice versa.

2) Weapons for melee classes are there to do damage. This is intrinsicly tied into the weapon dps and weapon speed for all the melee classes. Find a way to make PVP weapons more powerful than their PVE alternatives when in the current game PVP weapons aren't even as powerful as T6 stuff, and soon will be less powerful than all T5 stuff. Even if you took 10% of the dps and gave 50 sta, 50 resilience it would not matter. The better weapon for damage is still the better weapon and resilience has a cap.

Sure I'd be fine with PVP weapons being as powerful as PVE weapons two tiers behind if they were more powerful than PVE gear at equal level for pvp. But I don't know how to make a lvl 115 2h weapon better than Stormherald or a Mindblade better than the sword from Archimonde. Well for Casters its much smaller part really. I'm sure many warlocks/priests out there who only pvp might trade 25 spell dmg for 30+ each of sta and resil, because 25 dmg out of 750 is much smaller than 15 dps on a 2h weapon.

 

◊ Birdemani

That isn't the problem of the Arena system, that fault lies only on the itemization team for leaving gear gaps like that in PvE. Would a token drop fix that? I'm not sure they would have all the many different weapon types desired. At Blizcon they said they wanted the randomness of loot to always be there in PvE. That is the frustrating part of it; raiders tend to play the min/max game more than PvPers, but they cannot directly choose what slot to upgrade and when.

 

TrevvyTrev

Except it will hose pet classes something fierce. My pet would basically never crit someone with 800 resilience (assuming the cap is lifted, of course) and it wouldn't have any "resilience penetration" because it's not like I could gear it. Blizzard's "pet scaling" solutions suggest that Blizzard is unwilling to allow a 1:1 ratio for scaling -- based on past practices the most someone could expect is something around 45% of your resilience penetration applying to your pet (and that's a big if -- if armor/spell penetration, crit, hit, etc. provide any guidance, the more likely number is 0%). Even in the best case scenario pets would be facing people with 620 resilience, which would drastically reduce the effectiveness of classes/specs that are balanced around pet use.

 

Lavode

Commentary from the peanut gallery:
the actual problem is mainly offhand weapons where the number of available choices from raiding is sufficently low that the basic choice for the bulk of your raid is arena or blue - which is what "forces" most anyone that dualwields to do some arena or gimp themselves a fair amount.

It doesnt really matter a jot that arena weapons are useful in pve, the problematic issue is pve'rs being somewhat forced to do arenas whether they enjoy them or not.
.
The obvious solution is to stick some more offhand weapons, like a 2.7 speed offhand only claw/axe ect.. on the badge vendor (since G'eras has every other type of offhand in the universe anyway..) so that people who just dont like the arena have an alternative choice. As for the whole "pvp weapons should suck in pve" argument...
Why? the reverse is certainly not true. a pvp happy guild having a somewhat easier time making it trough ssc / The Eye than they otherwise would have is a feature, not a bug.

 

• sadris

Problem is that that vendor is iLevel 115 or something. Raiders needs real upgrades to stay competitive (141 or higher) and selling 141 loot for Heroic badges would trivialize progression; which brings us back to the need for raid-based token drops for weapons. ("super heroic badges"?)

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
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◊ Lord BEEF

We're veering a bit from the original topic but I've always thought that the 4 piece set bonus for hunters should be changed. The concussion shot bonus is pretty underwhelming (to my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong) and a +75 resilience to your pet or something similar would be a lot more useful. If resilience penetration were to be implemented it could be on the set bonus as well.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Kasi

It would have to be something different than - resilience on weapons though. Because at that point teams who get their gear from PVE could just stack stamina everywhere and say who cares about resilience and then the other side is stuck with a weapon 2 tiers behind with mediocre dps and a useless bonus. Or you could have people getting points til they can get the PVP weapon and then once they get that use pure PVE gear other than the weapon. Who would you bet on then, the guys with 350-450 resilience (effectively 150-250 with the weapon bonuses) or the side with vastly better AP, dmg, healing, and so on. Heck even BT/MH armor in most cases have more stamina than the PVP alternatives.

 

Lodekim

First of all, I just have to point out this argument is retarded, 1 person out of 25 isn't even close to 1 out of 5 that's in pvp. You're also ignoring the importance of the spell, if one fireblast in the first 30 seconds gets resisted in 5v5 that's not necessarily going to cause you to lose for a guild who's on RoS he resists a deaden and they may wipe, crucial spells in pvp and pve are both important. Yes, your counterspell on the healer gets resisted and you lose, you know what, Kael's third pyro, your melee dps is MC'd your tank's shield bash misses, or he's out of range to avoid getting 1 shot melee after the second and the mage gets resisted, can be the same thing.



On the note of the thread, the problem would be that as the game is developing, you shouldn't have to pve to pvp and you shouldn't have to pvp to pve. AT ALL EVER. Personally, I don't like the current interaction between pvp and pve, but that could just be me. If we're going with the trend that pvpers don't have to raid cause it's not fair, then there should be no item in pvp that you just simply have to get for pve, regardless of whether it's because of bad luck or not.

 

oldmandennis

I took a bit of time on a lazy Friday to hit the armory and the geekboys arena ranker. My conclusion is that it is far from necessary to PvE to PvP. The prospect of top notch raiders blowing away arena players is not happening yet. Thus there is no real need for a major overhaul of arena gear - possibly the S3 stuff will be trivial upgrades with flashy graphics, higher costs, and maybe a very high rating cutoff (2300). If season 3 is not going to make BT level weapons widely available, then there isn't as much need for handwringing about PvP weapons trivializing PvE or making PvP necessary for PvE.

The data: I looked at the 5 players who played the most on the top 25 teams. I left out teams with less then 100 wins, because there might be something fishy going on with smurfing or something. One team caused armory errors. Players without a PvP trinket on were deemed to not be in PvP gear and discarded (this included several players wielding PvP weapons).

Out of 77 eligible players, only 2 had T6 weapons equipped: a torch of the damned and a bow. 1 rogue and 9/11 warriors used crafted maces, 3 elemental shaman used the Prince dagger, 1 hunter used the vashj bow, and one priest used the maden mace. Everything else was a PvP weapon. The guilds were split almost evenly between those deep into T6 and those who were not. There was no trend for T6 capable guilds (defined as being on the first 2 pages of wowjujitsu - 6/14 T6 bosses down) to be at the top.

 

Celandro

oldman: Nice research however I dont think eliminating teams with less than 100 wins is valid as reformed teams might be able to get that high in 100 wins. Leaving out teams with no players > 70% win rate would probably work better.

Possible problems with the analysis
Top 25 teams may not be a good candidate though as you are not going to get a good battlegroup selection, you are going to hit a ton of european teams for example. Something like top 5 for each battlegroup for 5v5, 3v3, and 2v2 would probably be better. You should also throw out anyone with less than 150 resilance as they are obviously in PVE gear (tank gear or dps gear or whatever)

Due to the scarcity of weapon drops, the problem of PVE ->PVP is more likely relegated to the combined effect of trinkets/rings/amulets/cloaks. A better question to ask is what % of people with access to BT gear are wearing it when they pvp (Im going to guess very close to 100% here) and what % of their gear comes from BT (Im going to guess 25%).

If you add in SSC gear, the % of players PVEing to PVP will likely go up as well.

The reverse comparison is useful too.. what % of BT guilds have players using arena gear and what % of SSC guilds have players using arena gear. Probably simplest to look for players with arena gear on with less than 150 resiliance.

PS. any excluded players due to resiliance/play time criteria should be noted and categorized as a BT guild or non-BT guild as scanning is more likely to hit raiders when they are PVE equipped than non-raiders.