I agree with Kalman's comparison of the Stormherald to the Merc Glad's Bonegrinder. I think it's extremely awkward for the PvE-oriented* weapon to have a proc effect that is never going to come into play in a raid encounter, while what's supposed to be a PvP-oriented weapon misses out on a proc that's EXTREMELY useful in PvP.

That being said, I feel that if you're going to include abilities that are going to heavily skew one weapon in favor of another in TBC's attempt to divorce PvP and PvE much like the separation of Church and State, you had damn well better make that weapon pay through the nose in itemization points for that ability. Best example I've seen: Lionheart Executioner. Fear resist? Again, another ability that's not useful in a raid, but shines in PvP. What's the drawback? 0 STA.

Yes, it would be boring if no items ever had special abilities like these. Easier to balance, yes, but definitely boring. However, it seems Stormherald went to the other extreme by having a crotch-kickingly awesome proc for PvP, with still enough stats to make picking it over a Merc Glad weapon a no-brainer.

*PvE-oriented - I say this because it requires Nether Vortexes to acquire. I can let the Deep Thunder's Primal Nether requirement slide because even the most hardcore PvPer is going to set foot inside a 5-man eventually, but if you're in SSC/TK, either you have an interest in raiding or you have enough clout/gold to convince 24 other people to let you tag along for your little toy.

I really feel blizzard could have avoided alot of this by leaving the old weapon skill in, and placing generously on PvE-aquired weapons; but less generously on armor. Now you can either use your T5 PvE weapon, or your T5-equivalent PvP weapon, but give up 50 ap on your armor because you have to wear [Old Armor with +Weapon Skill] to meet the weapon skill cap. Add in the varous "Reduces your targets armor by XXX" in the same way and suddenly you have a clear delineation of PvE and PvP weapons without having preventing either weapon being used in the opposite reigime.

Simple example with made up numbers:
PvE weapon of TX. 100dps, +10 weapon skill
PvE Armor of TX. 100 ap,20 stam

PvP weapon of TX. 100dps, +20stam
PvE armor of T(X-1). 50ap, 10WS

This would be achieveable if you made Weapon skill cost less itemization points when put on a weapon than on armor; and then only itemized weaponskill on PvE-Dropped weapons.

There's this word again. "Access." I have to remember to take a screenshot of our 4 rogues sometime; 2 of which wear mostly T6 level gear nowadays and all of them wield [Merciless Gladiator's Slicer]. We had 4 Twinblades, 3 Soul Cleavers, a Torch as well as Cataclysm's Edge. The trend from 1h weapon drops in SSC and TK continues.

Naturally, I'm very annoyed at the RNG screwover, even more than at itemization holes that should have been painfully obvious. ("Who needs an offhand sword anyway? Let's add some PvP rings!") Bad luck shouldn't coerce guilds into raiding instances that a majority of members doesn't like anymore. But it seems there is little to no plan behind items in PvE... they seriously need to fix the whole of it.

"If you can't hold an 1800+ rating in any arena bracket, you don't deserve an arena weapon. The fact is, anyone can farm a 1300 rated team and get weapons equal to SSC / TK level gear. There's really no reason people who fail that badly should have gear anywhere near that good."

Not sure I consider players who have a 1700 rating a failure, or those with a 1500-1600 rating. They would be in the top third or so, depending on the battleground. I am not sure why highend players feel they need a crutch over players they already likely beat to get there.

The whole low/high ranked player looks the same issue seems silly. IF you started in the arena on day one of the expansion(just because the math is about perfect), 35 weeks have passed. (using current point system)

1300 5v5 team 10500 points
1400 5v5 team 11830 points
1500 5v5 team 13160 points

8250 points to get 5 part arena gear
3750 2 handed weapons.
3150 main hand weapons.
1125 off hand/offhand weapons
3750 crossbow
1125 throwing weapon/wand

Full armor set and a two handed weapon would cost 12000 points. So a 1500 rated player would have finally had the parts three weeks ago, 1400 ranked team would be getting the last part this week. 1300 team would have 4-5 weeks to go. So basically if you horde points you can look good every other season. Once again the main problem seems to simply be lack of pve equivalents, and how the spell blade seems to have amazing pve stats.

Stormherald rarely if ever procs. Warriors prefer it because its just flat out better damage.

S2 mace should not be compared to blacksmith t3 items, they should be compared to t2 which they are equivalent to.

The DPS on S2/Stormherald says you're wrong. Blacksmith T2 is 8 DPS and 13 ilvls behind S2 arena weapons.

1500 is what you start at, are there really that many people that bad at arenas?

Someone has to lose for your team to win?

And how much point manipulation can you have at that level? I don't think we see Team <This team is losing to you so that you can't claim our real team only beat you because you don't have gear>. It's just team <afk> vs <dancing to our death for 100 points a week> vs <we try but we suck> no?

Yes? Seems obvious to me. Not everyone plays an optimal group, or has any significant amount of PvP gear to wear, has a PvP spec, or knows how to play their class at all well in arenas, or cares terribly much. My silly points-farming paladin/shadowpriest/mage/mage/mage team (the paladin and priest being mage re-rolls, hence we're all buddies) reformed once and starting at 1500 got knocked down to 1450 or so in a hurry, and more or less stayed there. As I mentioned earlier in the thread we never got above 1526, IIRC.

It would be hard to balance, true, but then again, so is balancing PvP against top-end PvE gear, and they've done a decent job of that. So is balancing 9 classes, 27 specs, etc.

Give them some credit, Blizzard's balance has gotten much better over time.

And the whole burst-proc idea (X% chance for your next strike to do Y% damage, where Y > 100, for example) wouldn't be hard to balance at all. Pick a maximum burst desired, which determines Y. Pick a likelihood of burst, which determines X.

Now (D is average damage on a base swing; this is your free variable):

D*(X*(Y*(1 + 2*c)) + (1-X)*(1+2*c)) = average damage on a swing modified for proc and crit
D*((XY + 2XYc) + (1+2c - 1 -2Xc))
D*(XY + 2XYc + 2c - 2Xc)

Now, assuming no proc and E as average damage on a base swing (the PvE weapon equivalent):

E*(1+2*c) = average damage per swing, PvE

D*(XY + 2XYc + 2c - 2Xc) = E*(1 + 2*c) is the equation you need to solve for. Pick the target crit rate for a given tier of gear (yes, resilience probably ought to be considered). Given your assumptions on crit, proc rate, and proc value, as well as your PvE weapon's average base damage, solve for D (this is easy).

It's not, as the kids like to say, rocket surgery. Solving a Rubik's Cube is harder.

Also, as has been pointed out repeatedly, the mean rating has to be 1500. So, even if every competing team were fabulous at PvP, someone has to lose, which means there will, by the very nature of the system, always be teams below 1500 rating.

More procs like the Dark Edge of Insanity. Glimpse of Madness wooooo. A pure burst-damage proc might make an arena weapon more desirable than intended for PvE...not that you couldn't balance it, but there's a lot of unintended consequences that get thrown around in this game. See: that Skull offhand that made you functionally immune to CC.

Exactly half of them, of course.

Personally I think the game has too many interrupt effects that cause you to lose control of your char. As a pvp healer, it's really difficult to function sometimes.
With mace spec, stormherald, blind, kick, pummel, cyclone, mind control, fear, etc. I find that the interrupts sometimes come with the same frequency as my fast heal cast time - meaning that sometimes I'm removed from participating for extended periods of time. For example, I've played a 5v5 where I've been unable to act for more than 45 seconds. And that includes breaking effects with DS and the trinket.

So yeah, creative weapon design is interesting and I'm all for it. But I'd really be unhappy with yet another weapon that procs heal interrupts.

Technically the arena point system isn't zero sum due to people entering and leaving the pool with different point totals. But it's close.

The problem is that weapons for a PvP player and weapons for a PvE player serve practically the same function, especially since defensive stats are easy to cap out now.

Gurgthock's current posit is probably the right one if they wish to keep PvE the way it is and adjust PvP for it... they need to introduce yet another stat (or something that can be attributed solely to pvp or pve weapons) to make them appealing to one side over the other. The other option (my personal preference) is to leave PvP alone, and fix the PvE side of things.

A third option is to introduce more proc-based effects, which are more useful in one side than the other, but it needs to be spread out more. Examples would include

Equip: Whenever your healing spells land on a target, they have a chance to remove a harmful magic/poison/disease effect
Equip: Whenever your healing spells land on a target, they have a chance to cause your target to become immune to movement-impairing effects for X seconds.
Equip: Whenever your harmful spells land on a target, they have a chance to gain X Spell Haste rating for Y seconds
Equip: Whenever you successfully hit an enemy, you have a chance to slow their movement rate by X%. This effect stacks up to Y times.
Chance on hit: Reduce target's healing taken by X%. This effect stacks up to Y times.

However, even some of these abilities would be huge in PvE as well. That's where the difficulty lies.

Adding useful defensive stats to PVP weapons has nothing which REQUIRES them to function or even be useful in PVE.

Cloak of Rogueslol
Equip: You have a 10% chance to avoid gaining the Mortal Strike and a 30% to avoid gaining the Wound Poison debuffs upon potential application.

Relentless Gladiator's Gavel of Healing
Equip: Every time you take damage, the attacker has a 5% chance to be stunned for 3 seconds.

Etc, etc. Defensive bonuses which have no benefit in a PVE setting.

Not to mention that resillience penetration is completely useless against anyone who rolls in with BT/Hyjal gear. They'll have to go without the burst protection from resilience, but so would anyone else not in season 3 gear, and their base stats will be higher.

Resilience penetration works well if you assume everyone's rolling with full s3 sets, but not well until then. I still like resilience-based weapon powerupping because it allows for PvP weapons equivalent to PvE weapons in every way, but only for people wearing PvP gear. (Thus making them meh for raid DPS because you need to wear a full PvP set and good for PvP use because you want to wear a full PvP set. It also makes it less desirable to use non-resilience pieces as filler.) Still, there are a lot of solutions that Blizzard could pick up from this topic and make work if they were so inclined.

That would be true if people got one single life-time rating.
But they don't. They can form teams whenever they want. They can leave their sub-1500 rating behind, and start at 1500 again. This causes a constant injection of points into the ranking system. The average rating of players therefor is above 1500. Also, you get to pick the best out of 3 ratings (2vs2, 3vs3, 5vs5). As a result, the individual player's best rating is going to be higher than the average of all teams in the system.

Well I'd assume the "800 res" he quoted in his post means that Res costs goes massively down in cost, if Res was halved in cost and doubled on every piece then res penetration added it would work and you could drop the Pvp weapons actual DPS by 5->10 to make them less useful in Pve, Of course a change like that would probably piss off anyone wielding Crafted weapons and would possibly also make all the 2 Hander Pve weapon drops useless(Idk if any spec actually uses them to Pve DPS).

Maybe they should just do away with Gladiator weapons entirely and add more options to obtain weapon upgrades besides raiding. They could add whole 8 piece sets to fill up the point vacuum and maybe some rings and other secondary equipment as well.

That kinda ruins the whole "Only need to Pvp to be able to compete in Pvp" thing.... I don't think any1 who actively participates in the arena wants to see Pve on any lvl become required to compete again,

And there are some who don't want to have to PVP to be competitive on the damage meter in a PVE setting. Keline's suggestion was a fine one.