The arguments are pretty cogent here, but from where I sit the current situation is pretty good.

You go to the arena and are skilled, you get a new mainhand weapon in 3-5 weeks (casters take a bit longer due to the itemization situation).

You go to the arena and are unskilled (my whole 5v5 team), you get a new mainhand weapon in about 9-10 weeks.

You go to SSC, and your guild maybe sees 3-5 mainhand weapons over that period of time.

The third one surely is the least logical; but it's always been that way. I raided BWL 22 times before getting the CTS. Looking back, that doesn't make any sense at all.

You want to fix the raid zones so they actually provide weapons to raiders? Go for it. You want to nerf arenas? That part I just don't get.

And I'm sorry, but the <1 hour a week I spend with my 5v5 team is surely something the average raider can budget.

For what it's worth, the current system means new weapons approximately 4x during a year+ of arena-ing. That hardly breaks the game and is somewhat more "fun" than going 6+ months with the same weapons. Given the pacing of raid content in TBC, it's pretty logical for that purpose too.

This might not have been intentional by Blizzard, but its working. And the downside is what? DKP doesn't get spent on weapons? People with arena weapons let people get raid weapons for less DKP? 24 people don't have to pretend to be excited for the one guy who finally, at last, gets the weapon drop in the raid zone?

What needs fixing here?

PvE players that take game more seriously are forced to do arenas which they don't really want to do.

PvE itemization holes and RNG loot system.

I would like to see maybe vendor with items that require marks from bosses and reputation from that instance. One each instance or one each tier (simpler). Harder bosses = more marks and more rep. Trash = random marks and some rep.

Simple, nice, no RNG and easy. Just vendors need to have enough items plus need to adjust tokens and rep to match arena effort curve. Maybe even bonuses for players that clear instance faster to reward skill?

I do not mind the whole 'dropped weapons should be super cool and kinda rare' thingy, but more faction stuff from raiding zones would help fixing some gear holes. The faction does not have to build up as fast as BT either. But if you run BT for like 6-7 weeks, being able to to buy some sort of faction based stuff seems a good idea.
Probably the harder to come by slots, like neck, sometimes rings (although the BT trash drop rings fix that nicely) and especially weapons. Those weapons should obviously only be place holders for the boss drops. They should definitely be weaker then the pvp stuff with the same itemlvl, but that it's either pvp weapon or stuff from a 5 men instance for T5/T6 raiding guilds is just a joke.
Just give Hyjal faction weapons that are superior to the lower city/thrallmar etc faction rewards but worse then pvp weapons. That would help things a lot already and if the faction gain takes a reasonable amount of time, no one can complain really.

Would a guaranteed source of worse-than-t5 epic weapons from Hyjal really eliminate the problem with feeling the need to PvP in order to compensate for a lack of boss drops? Arena weapons are currently at the T5 level.

You're assuming that you don't run into anyone unnecessarily dragging out games. (Ruins of Lordaeron being particularly bad for this, with people hiding in the entrance for tactical advantage in probably one of three games I play in there these days.) I've seen queue times run five minutes a game or longer before - that would put me over an hour for any realistic length of games. Less than an hour a week is not the average arena situation. Most are probably looking at 2 hours or more. A Karazhan clear takes about two hours for my (not very progressed in SSC/TK) guild. Would it be reasonable to demand a Karazhan clear every week from PvPers?

I agree that nerfing arena is not the ideal answer, but the current situation is ridiculous. (And is it honestly even nerfing arena if a solution were implemented that left arena weapons functionally identical within arenas whilst subpar in PvE content compared to PvE loot? The only people it removes from the arena system are people who don't want to be there, including myself and nearly everyone else I've been on an arena team with.)

It depends on Blizzard's goal. If their goal is to retain PvE weapons as solely available as rare-ish drops off bosses, then readily available weapons from PvP vendors makes those rare jewels of weapons less unique and desireable. If their goal is to try and make PvE and PvP roughly equally satisfying in terms of character progression in all aspects, then they need to address the "slow" spots in PvP gearing (trinkets, etc) and weapons for PvE'ers.

The idea of tokens is all well and good, but are things going too far when we seem to want every boss dropping a token for each piece of gear?

They said at one point that they wouldn't numb down the armor token any smaller because compared to what it used to be, its greatly improved (which is true).

Similar things could be said about weapons now, quite a few bosses have a 'weapon table' which you will always get a drop from (curse you Gorehowl). it would be great if every boss who was capable of dropping weapons did this, or they itemized the bosses loot tables in such a way that weapons had a fairly high chance to be one of the drops all the time.

I personally was alot more excited when my T2 pieces dropped rather than my T2.5 (despite T2.5 being vastly superior), its nice to have the actual item rather than some meaningless token which to me feels like the numbing down of the situation into a politically correct state.

There is an understandable reason why you get loot from vendors in PvP, but PvE bosses are ment to drop loot, dragons are ment to have vast hoards of shiney epics. I dont think Malygos will want to drop a token that you reclaim with the mages of Dalaran, because he hates them and the idea of working with them to make getting your T8 items easier must make him want to retch more than the knowledge of how poorly he will be represented.

Atleast the AQA's and AQR's had some sence of feeling to them, you felt like you were really getting this amazing item crafted for you, the sence of progression made you happy because you got closer to being able to craft them each time etc...


Simply fixing the drop rate of weapons in PvE (so they wern't completly rare with chances of never dropping) would lower the stress of needing PvP weapons to be able to make up for the high chance of no drops in PvE, no matter how close the PvP items are in relative power.

Hmm, but unless they increase the total drop rate for items in PvE, then getting more weapons must inevitably mean fewer armor items, fewer trinkets and neckpieces, or whatever.

On rereading this thread, it looks to me as though there's partly some simple jealousy at the reduced time investment for PvP epics. Sure, the total number of items per person per week is approximately comparable, but that "costs" you 16+ hours in PvE and only 1 hour in PvP. One way to "fix" this would be to require 160 arena games per week to qualify for points. Somehow I don't see that one flying.

A secondary factor is that people are also unaccountably jealous that someone who participates in both PvP and PvE gets more items faster than someone who does only PvE or only PvP. To which the only possible answer is "well duh".

Either it's pvp&pve dominate in pve AND pvp or it's none of it. Spending time in both aspects of the game and only getting a use out of it for one is quite obviously stupid.
Now as people whine 24/7 that pve players should not draw any/little use out of their items in pvp and Blizzard acknowledged that, it surely should not go the other direction either.

The problem with this is exactly as Anenga outlined earlier in the thread. Simply put, that extra bit of damage on the PvP weapons is more important than a tiny dps upgrade is in PvE. Nerfing the damage or pve potential of the weapons certainly isn't the answer as others have pointed out, but they seem to have no inclination to fix PvE weapon itemization so there's a clear and obtainable weapon track in PvE. If PvE weapons were clearly better for PvE (this is easy by using +hit and other things not needed much in PvP) then I doubt anyone would complain. Then there's the whole "Why is there 1 caster dagger between Prince and Illidan?" issue. I guess what I'm getting at is that it is relatively easy to ensure people would never want to use PvP weapons over PvE weapons in PvE if given a choice, but for instance with our guild we just don't have a choice. Forget changing the arena weapons, fix PvE.

That was certainly a rambling point I was getting at. Maybe I'll edit it later.

Worse, Merciless Spellblade is well beyond T5, and will still be better post the upcoming buff.

2 hours? How is that even possible? Even if we take 10 people who far outgear it, it takes at least 4 (The possibility that we just suck is noted.)

I'm sorry you feel this way. Do you care about the PVP'ers who are forced to do PVE to compete? Heck Noktyn had to go do raiding to get the vortexes to get his Stormherald. And even considering that SH and S2 weapons are available to them now, the best weapons in the game currently are from T6 content.

And what about PVP itemization holes? Like a second trinket, second ring, decent cloak, items with armor pen or spell haste on them, etc. Yes pvp has affected pve now with the quality of S2 weapons. But it also goes the other way bigtime, and some people don't seem to realize this.

Arena gear is still S2 (~T5) while the gear you described (haste, armor pen) is T6. It's like comparing [Fang of Vashj] to [Gladiator's Shanker]. Give it some time, if things don't change when S3 (~T6) is announced, I would agree with you.

[E] Can't seem to get the shanker to link

I'm sorry you feel this way. Do you care about the PVE'ers who are forced to do PVP to compete? Heck Druids have to do arena's to get crit immune. And even considering there are options from raiding content, the best options in the game currently are from arenas.

And what about PVE itemization holes? Like a surplus of weapons for every single player in the game?


It is a circular argument, PVPers don't want to PVE to PVP and PVE'ers don't want to PVP to PVE. Both systems need fixing.

I personally don't see why there should be a divide between PVPers and PVEers. In order to be the best you should take part in all aspects of the game. It is like saying why should i have to solo grind rep when all i want to participate in is 5 mans, why should i have to 5man in order to raid...

Having cross-over items makes for interesting short-cuts and i love the season 2 shield.

The best arena teams should in my opinion get gear similar to organize raiding groups. I like the solution which requires a certain rating to access top arena gear.

How about having an 1900 rating minimum vendor selling top tier gear, then have a 2nd arena vendor selling gear 1 tier under but with no requirement.

The skilled arena players would have access to the best gear, while unskilled would have access to lesser gear, with the option of getting that gear in the next season.

The devs made many mistakes in itemization, one of which being that PVE weapons are harder and takes longer to get then PVP weapons.

I think you should probably try rereading the thread again since it generally seems to be less about jealousy and more about people wanting their freedom of choice back i.e. they choose whether or not to play arena, rather than now where many feel forced to play in order to make up for the RNG screwing over their guild.

If people are right and blizzard are using the quality of the weapons as a way to encourage people to play arena then that would tend to imply that they lack confidence in the gameplay experience of arena itself.

If they feel the need to bribe people just to boost numbers then they should go back and look at ways to improve it or more sensibly they should just realise that arena won't be for everyone and be happy that those people who want their pvp action like that are catered for rather than having to goto an fps or another mmo.

A more sensible option would be something like the qiraji lord's insignias and tie it into rep, those guilds struggling to take down any or just a few bosses in that tier would be able to gradually inch their way towards a new weapon from trash rep with those guilds killing more stuff would get those rewards faster enabling them to move on with a bit less farming required, which would have to be a good thing if blizzard seriously wants more people to experience the high end of their content.

These raid badges wouldn't even need to become useless once you had all you needed for your raid role from a particular tier, you would simply need to have the vendor selling other stuff besides weapons so tanks could use them for dps gear or you could buy vortexs with them or recipes or whatever, just moving things away from the RNG dependence that PVE currently has.

Also, to aid the slower guilds who weren't killing many bosses so their repgain was slow, you could also have trash sometimes dropping an equivalent to the ancient qiraji artifacts for a nice little random boost to their repgain.

It is bad too. But this only affect one class really and mace spec will be nerfed in 2.3 anyway.

No! Arena time/effort is good. It is raid time/effort that is broken. However to make it right it would require big changes that will not happen (no trash, badge loot system, no durability, no corpseruns, no consumables etc.).

You really think "pve 2 pvp" only applies to Warriors? Look at Lurker rings, Paladin 4pc CrystalForge, Serpent-Coil Braid, Crystal Spire of Karabor, Skull of Gul'dan, etc. The list is enormous and there are many slots you simply cannot fill via PvP. Hell, there's even that nasty side effect of BT that allows every raider in the zone to wear full SR in an arena match if they want. I've even come up against a Warrior who had Hydross frost resist to switch into when a match became a 2v2 with our Mage being the primary damage source left (intim shout -> swap gear). Granted that will be changed next patch, but it's just another example of how PvE affects PvP. Claiming it's just Stormherald is ignorant and/or silly.

Well that's not a "clear" then is it?

Meh. It hits the majority of bosses that actually drop anything that anyone wants, with a few five to ten minute clears left to any other bosses you want to hit. I might as well exaggerate on the other end since I see so many people talking about how small a sacrifice the supposed hour of arena is.

I was thinking about another option for arena weapons to differentiate melee pve weapons from melee pvp weapons:

Equip: Chance on hit to drain 1 energy, 2 rage, or 20 mana from target.

That shouldn't affect pve too much (other than a return of the AQ moam-type mobs), but would add another aspect to the game. It has the added benefit of lengthening time-to-death, on average, which is apparentely what Blizzard wants, as seen by the inclusion of resilience.

I'm guessing the mana portion of it would be much lower than the other two, because there are already mana draining options available.

The rage vs energy aspect would be so that it's not useless against rogues, but it helps take care of the (perceived) warrior problem somewhat.

It could even lead to more interesting metagame mechanics - stick a rogue with two extremely fast low dps weapons on the warrior just for the purpose of rage-draining, for instance.

But, I'm not sure if I'm missing some huge problems with this mechanic - I don't pvp that much, so I probably am.

Mana Drains are already a serious problem in the arena, please don't even consider adding more of them. This proc wouldn't change much though unless it was a high proc rate. If it was then mana classes (except Warlocks) would face even more of a drain problem.