I think this thread was certainly doomed to devolve into a bit of a flamewar.
The basic problems
1) Weapons make up a higher percentage of a players effectiveness than the percentage cost of buying an arena weapon compared to buying the full set (5 + weapoon + ranged)
2) PVE has better weapons than PVP
3) PVP has better itemization for weapons than PVE
4) PVE progression is significantly behind PVP progression
5) Severe itemization holes exist on both sides, but PVErs have weapon itemization holes as opposed to non-arena holes for PVP (see #1)
6) PVErs think PVP is easy because when they PVP in their PVE epics its easy but think its wrong that PVP epics should affect PVE in the same way (see #1 and #3)
7) PVPers hate dying to PVE epics like stormherald and anything from BT (see #1 and #2)
8) PVErs hate spending dkp for a weapon their guild mate got for 'free' in PVP. (see #1)
9) Choosing your gear is always going to be superior and faster progression than RNG
The big problem is #1. Weapons make up too large of players effectiveness to be easier to obtain from PVP or crafting than from a boss drop. They are also too important to have better weapons from bosses than are available from PVP. The ratings cap may help but unless the core #1 problem is addressed, its just going to be a bandaid.
Various changes to arenas that could help
1) Fix team selling
2) Add pvp procs to pvp weapons
3) Make pvp weapons better the more pvp gear you wear (bonus to AP based on resilance?)
4) Make sure all classes are equally able to obtain upgrades through pvp to fill out itemization holes (tanks get hosed)
5) Make certain that T5 of pvp gear is ~ equal to T6 of pve gear for pvping and vice versa
6) Give some sort of reward for winning more arena games (maybe a faction based system for trinkets/rings/etc)
7) Fill itemization holes
Changes for PVE that could help
1) Speed progression for guilds that are not in the top zone by nerfing/increasing drop rates/reducing trash whatever
2) Add token based or faction based weapons (if you get exalted you have earned a weapon if one hasnt dropped)
3) Add PVE procs to PVE weapons
Just as XI posted, there are some problems with this. As a warrior and paladin (my 2 arena classes), I would take top PvE weapons any day of the week. As a warrior, my job in arena is to do damage, so you want the best damage weapon. If you are getting targeted, a good chunk of the time you are throwing on a shield and 1h anyway, so the stam is often wasted on the weapon. More or less the same thing as a paladin, or any player whose team matrix dictates that he won't get targeted as much - just like in PvE, stamina/defenses are worthless if they aren't being actively used.
I actually have to disagree with this. In pvp one should always have the choice to equip defense-weak pve items for other stats. Given that pvp is a dynamic system, chosing to do so can tilt the tide of battle in your favor, but it can also make you a liability for your team if the opposing team catches on. Switching weapons is also not really important to this discussion since, as you say, if you're not focused you'll use max damage weapons and when focused you'll switch weapons anyway. Once you switch to weapons with higher stamina you only increase your potential health pool...not all that handy when already below 100% of your previous health pool (which we can assume since you're being forced to switch weapons). That tells me that you're switching for the additional armor/block/defensive stats--not stamina--which also exist on pvp items.
To add to your post, another major change that is intensifying slight balance issues is the change in raid encounter design. Granted, I have only seen Kara + gruul + mag and a bit of SSC/Void Reaver, but from that experience, along with what I've read here, there seem to be a lot more dps check style fights, putting more pressure than ever on a reduced number (40 down to 25) of raiders. In vanilla wow, if you had bad luck with weapon drops your relative dps would drop a few positions in the raid, but this could generally be overcome. This is no longer the case. There is a long discussion of this in the casual progression thread, but it's not just that guilds can no longer have lagging members, it's that members can't have lagging gear for the guild to progress. This changes the distinction from fun/exciting rng drops versus homogeneous pvp drops to inability to progress due to a few items not dropping versus th ability to progress, which increases the chance of a useful item dropping.
Doesn't all this simply boil down to the following statement?
It is far easier to get high quality weapons via PvP than PvE, irrespective of skill in either area
Now, there are three solutions to this.
A) Make PvP weapons undesirable for PvE, and vice versa.
B) Make weapons much easier to obtain via PvE
(A) appears to be difficult, if not impossible to do. Yes, you could make PvP weapons undesirable for PvE by removing damage, giving PvP-specific procs, resilience penetration etc. I can't see an easy way of making PvE weapons undesirable for PvP. However you cut it, hitting someone with a high-damage weapon will hurt them a lot. There is no PvE-specific stat on the lines of Resilience, so there's nothing you can use to force weapons to have solely PvE utility. Hit rating qualifies in part for some builds, but is capped by the time you get to the higher tier instances.
So (A) is not really an option. Yes, you could make the PvP weapons specialised for PvP, and thus cut off the arena -> raid gear funnel. But you can't cut thigns off in the other direction, and sooner or later people will complain about being forced to raid in order to PvP.
In fact, you could make the contention that gear specialisation is already part of the problem, in a way. If all the arena gear was desirable for PvE, then one raider might have the bracers, another would have the helm, and another the weapon, and so on. It would be clearer how small a proportion of their overall gear is coming from PvP, and how slow the gear influx for unskilled people with PvE specs actually is. As it stands, pretty much only the weapons are desirable, so you see every raider getting the weapons and then stopping.
To put a bit of perspective here: it still takes a reasonable time to get the arena weapons if (like me) you're crap at PvP. Several weeks for the offhand, and double that again for the mainhand as well (or if you want a two-hander). It's only because the weapons are the only PvP reward that raiders care about that the question even arises.
(B) thus seems to me the better option. Just make weapons drop more often in PvE, so people don't need to PvP to get them. This has two sub-problems:
B1) Itemisation holes. There's a lot of different types of weapon out there! There are 23 different Merciless Gladiator's weapons/offhands if you include the wand and the thrown weapon. 23 in one tier, and that's giving everyone a single choice of weapon (bit homogeneous, bit boring, no?). To even that limited a depth of itemisation, you'd need to add two or more different weapons to the loot table for every single boss in a given tier.
B2) RNG f*ckery. Lots of stories above to illustrate the problem. Arena rewards are just much more reliable than raid rewards, even if you lose. One "solution" could be to just make all the arena weapons cost 10 times as much, or restrict them to certain ratings. I don't think that's possible. The gear escalator in arenas is altogether different to raid progression. When Nihilum are conquering Sunwell, Karazhan doesn't magically disappear. By contrast, as Arena seasons turn over, the population as a whole becomes better equipped. New entrants need good gear just to stand any chance whatsoever - which means they need "free purpz" just to get on the first rung of the ladder. You can walk into Kara clad in quest blues. There is no way in hell anyone will get anything if they walk into Arena Season 3 or 4 in quest blues. You need to gear them up, fast. PvE progress is a ladder. PvP progress is a ladder where the bottom rungs are constantly being sawn off.
So Blizz can't just restrict arena rewards (including weapons) indefinitely. Restricting the top tier makes sense - e.g. when Season 3 comes out, a rating restriction on weapons. However when Season 4 opens, any rating restriction on S3 weapons will need to be lifted, for the reason outlined above.
An alternative solution is to have a badge system for raid instances, like Heroic badges (or like the Regalia in AQ40). These badge rewards specifically give weapons. So yes, you can grind your T5 weapon by killing Lurker once a week for three months - the equivalent of a 0/10 arena team slowly grinding a weapon. Or you get it from clearing the whole zone a couple of times. So everyone gets at least a basic T5-quality weapon comparatively quickly from doing T5 instances. You can of course put a few slightly better ones on the bosses, or from crafting by Vortexes, or what have you. Might even make the raid tuning guys' job a bit easier, as they can assume that everyone starting T6 has access to a full set of T5 weaponry, at least.
I actually have to disagree with this. In pvp one should always have the choice to equip defense-weak pve items for other stats. Given that pvp is a dynamic system, chosing to do so can tilt the tide of battle in your favor, but it can also make you a liability for your team if the opposing team catches on. Switching weapons is also not really important to this discussion since, as you say, if you're not focused you'll use max damage weapons and when focused you'll switch weapons anyway. Once you switch to weapons with higher stamina you only increase your potential health pool...not all that handy when already below 100% of your previous health pool (which we can assume since you're being forced to switch weapons). That tells me that you're switching for the additional armor/block/defensive stats--not stamina--which also exist on pvp items.
Not actually sure what you are getting at or what you are disagreeing with. Okay, if you switch weapons in combat you don't instantly gain the stamina, but with constant healing it's likely or at least possible you will get to max health then drop again as you are getting focused. Surely some of the time you won't, but sometimes you will. Anyway aside from that I don't see what you are disagreeing with. My point is that PvE weapons are often desirable in PvP because they deal more damage, and if you aren't getting focused raw damage/healing output is often your most important contribution.
PVErs are justifiably upset that they cant force bosses to drop weapons the first time they kill them, then other items as they need them with never a need to DE. PVPers get to choose what boss drop occurs and they always pick weapon because weapon is under priced.
Doesn't all this simply boil down to the following statement?
It is far easier to get high quality weapons via PvP than PvE, irrespective of skill in either area
Now, there are three solutions to this.
A) Make PvP weapons undesirable for PvE, and vice versa.
B) Make weapons much easier to obtain via PvE
You missed a numbe.. letter.. fuck.. you missed a bullet point.
I'm gonna throw this one out there:
C) Make arena weapons more difficult to obtain via PvP (such as by raising the rating cap).
Yes, players can buy their way onto teams, the same way a non-raider can buy his way into a raid to get a weapon upgrade. The two elements of the game don't really have to remain entirely seperate, and in fact I think he more interaction the better, provided it's reasonably equitable. Barring that, seperate the two entirely, disallow PVP gear in raid zones, and disallow PVE gear in arenas. That's a surefire way to fix it.
Doesn't all this simply boil down to the following statement?
It is far easier to get high quality weapons via PvP than PvE, irrespective of skill in either area
I don't think it does, although people certainly like to bicker about that issue.
The issue is more one that is summed up closer to this:
The majority of Arena/PvP gear has it's stats allocated in a way to make it inferior for PvE purposes and superior for PvP purposes then the PvE acquired counterparts. The Gladiator weapons are not, and as such, are highly desireable for PvE.
In most cases, using Gladiator gear for PvE is an acceptable, but not optimal, choice. The Gladiator weapons, by contrast, are an optimal gear choice for PvE for a large segment of the raiding population.
So why aren't the gladiator weapons itemized like the rest of the gladiator gear? Why does the spellblade have spell hit, and not spell penetration? I need spell hit for PvE. My spell hit is capped for PvP purposes when I am naked (mage talents). Penetration, on the other hand, is a stat that is primarily useless in raiding, but has PvP benefits.
Can they reallocate the itemization of the weapons so they are less desirable (but still acceptable alternatives) for PvE and still strong in PvP? Can they do it in a manner that keeps them more desirable for PvP then the weapon drops from the T5 instances? And if they can, shouldn't they do so? And why didn't they do them in the first place?
I don't care whether they are 'Free' or "Gaurunteed' Epics, or whatever. I don't care how easy or hard they are to get. I do find it troublesome, that they are disproportionately desirable for PvE then the rest of the gladiator gear. That's the issue.
Barring that, seperate the two entirely, disallow PVP gear in raid zones, and disallow PVE gear in arenas. That's a surefire way to fix it.
Forgive me if I'm missing something incredibly obvious here, but until you get your first Arena set, what gear are you able to wear, then? Or do we all just PvP naked until we've lost enough to build an Arena set, and then we can actually get on with our lives?
I would toss out there, mainly just to play devil's advocate, that if you want to re-instill the prestige from PvE weapons by making them clearly better than PvP weapons for pure damage/healing, you should probably also consider making high-rating attainable (maybe free or cheap) PvP items with unique graphics, cool names, disproportionately-sized phallic weapons, and whatnot.
I like it. Must have a current rating of over 2k, with at least 30% games played for the season. Make it trivially better then the normal one, but with a big flashy graphic, and a neat something extra that doesn't affect balance - maybe ports to Shatt on a 30 min cooldown, or the ability to make somebody grovel (like the item from strath) on a 5 min cooldown.
Originally Posted by constantius
We had a massive argument about this issue in guild chat the other night, and the only sensible suggestion I saw was price tiers. Rather than make a cutoff below which you cannot purchase the weapons, simply set the prices to scale with your arena score.
Total nonsense. For one thing, they have effectively already done this, when they changed the point curve. For another, you are just going to have the top teams fully upgraded and bored even faster. Then you make the people at the bottom even more desperate to play on a top team - one week at 2050 doesn't net you 700 points, it nets you 2700 (700 points and you save 2000 by buying at a cheaper price). Bored top enders + desperate people = shenanigans.
Filling itemization holes and removing spellhit from the spellblade would fix most of these problems.
There is a quiet implication in the "thesis" of this thread that PVP itemization is largely invariant compared to PVE itemization. In the end I'm not entirely sure how variant PVE itemization really is given that we spreadsheet out every stat to see what is and isn't optimal, but as someone mentioned earlier, the "optimal" gearpath is sometimes cut off by sub-optimal RNG for loot drops. Mild tangent, but for a while I was my guild's only holy priest, and I think I saw, over the span of ~3 months of raiding, 4 cloth healer drops, 2 of which were for the same wrist slot. That's life. Personally this doesn't bother me so much as long as I'm genuinely helping our guild's progression - my philosophy was (and I maintain it is the superior philosophy) that you loot to raid, you don't raid to loot.
Anyway, back on track. I would like to see additional itemization effects such as the PVP glove bonus (though an extra second on Psychic Scream is laughable), things that enhance the effects of your spells, things that maybe enhance your secondary class skills (i.e. a priest's #1 is survivability, and #2 is healing, so something that maybe synergizes the two), etc. The problem is that most of the suggestions I've heard are appallingly bad.
Reduced weapon DPS as a tradeoff wouldn't fly unless you grossly skewed the PVP stat:dps ratio in favor of stats, which would generate its own set of problems. Items that reduce a target's resilience would severely affect classes that require resilience, while completely neglecting classes that don't care so much about it (i.e. priests vs paladins).
On the notion of stat tradeoffs, I think a better solution is to simply add *more* to the PVP weapon, but make it relevant to PVP only, and then add *more* to the PVE weapon, and do the same in parallel. I'm going to throw out a pair of dubious examples just to show you what I'mt alking about - they're not "balanced" or even foolproof, but work with me. Think about a rogue weapon that gives 1 energy per melee hit when wound or mind-numbing or crippling poison is applied, or a healing weapon that increases +healing by 30 for every melee attack received, stacking to 300, for 20 seconds. I actually really like that one, in fact I'd like to see it stack even higher, to reward a priest for actually surviving against a Rogue long enough for it to stack ridiculously high. I think ideas along those lines are what this thread may be looking for.
Originally Posted by Vectivus
Forgive me if I'm missing something incredibly obvious here, but until you get your first Arena set, what gear are you able to wear, then? Or do we all just PvP naked until we've lost enough to build an Arena set, and then we can actually get on with our lives?
Heroic gear, Halaa/Soul shard gear, PVP honor gear, crafted items, the same as everyone did when Season 1 began. It's no different now if you roll an alt and start playing in arena. The gist of the idea is that items that drop from a 25-man raid and items that are bought from an Arena vendor don't mix, but most of the gear I stated above is fairly easily accessible even by the most pve-incompetent PVPer, and the most PVP-incompetent raider. I don't necessarily espouse the idea, but in terms of trying to solve the problem, it's a simple solution and it would clearly be effective. It's just a matter of what side effects it would have.
The issue of "fixing itemization holes" is on Blizzard's task list, unfortunately it's too far away still. Supposedly this stuff will appear in patch 2.3 - which has NO theorized ship date. It doesn't even seem that patch 2.2 is close, due to voice chat.
Now, buffing some PvE weapons is great (if you have them) but really, what I'd like to see is the PvP itemization team get a stab at re-doing the PvE weapons. I'm fine with having some PvE items simply be better than others; that's part of the game. But things like Stamina on the hunter bow from Vashj are both puzzling and problematic. If I want a ranged weapon with Stamina, there's a very nice Arena crossbow which has it. What I'm hoping for from the end boss of a PvE instance is a weapon tightly focused towards helping me kill the end boss of the NEXT instance.
Heroic gear, Halaa/Soul shard gear, PVP honor gear, crafted items, the same as everyone did when Season 1 began. It's no different now if you roll an alt and start playing in arena. The gist of the idea is that items that drop from a 25-man raid and items that are bought from an Arena vendor don't mix, but most of the gear I stated above is fairly easily accessible even by the most pve-incompetent PVPer, and the most PVP-incompetent raider. I don't necessarily espouse the idea, but in terms of trying to solve the problem, it's a simple solution and it would clearly be effective. It's just a matter of what side effects it would have.
If Blizzard made PvP items and raiding items completely seperate, all that would do is lower participation in both aspects of the endgame by some percent. That makes absolutely no sense from Blizzard's point of view. While some hardcore purists on either end of the PvE-PvP spectrum are of course in favor of this, from Blizzard's perspective it is always better to design from a more holistic viewpoint, and encourage participation in both aspects of the endgame. The top 1% of PvE and PvP players might play that aspect of the game exclusively, but the other 99% play the game for both PvE and PvP content.
If Blizzard made PvP items and raiding items completely seperate, all that would do is lower participation in both aspects of the endgame by some percent.
Adding rating requirements to arena gear will have a serious impact on the number of people doing the arens, too. A ton of the people who play arenas are doing it just because they know they'll have a weapon or piece of armor when they get enough points. I know 1900 has been thrown around as a cutoff and that it wasn't official or anything, but any kind of restriction will have the same effect. Roughly half the people who do arenas are below 1500 rating. Those people most likely know they have no chance of hitting 1900, or being in the top X percent, or whatever. They would lose that incentive to play, which for many players is the biggest draw to the arenas.
Why are PVE weapons so good for PVP? Many such examples as Stormherald, Torch of the Damned, Soul Cleaver, Cataclysm's Edge, etc are all very powerful. All have huge stamina, and armor penetration is a very powerful stat in PVP. Why do Nexus Key and Zhar'doom have higher stamina than their PVP alternative, while at the same time not wasting itemization points on spell hit? Also add in that haste/armor penetration items found in high end zones are something very powerful for PVP that PVP'ers don't have access to. Go look at a T6 raider/pvper and you will see 4-5 piece S2 most often along with BT/MH rings/bracers/belt/cloak/neck/etc.
Spell Penetration isn't even that huge for pvp unless you're playing against one of the few classes with resist buffs or playing someone using resist gear. But if the option of many is to load up PVP weapons with pvp only stats like that, then yeah it is only fair for raiders to have their pve items loaded up similarily. Which I guess means tons of spell/physical hit. Pulling 10% of the dps off PVP items (especially weapons) is just going to make late T5 and T6 raiders dominate even more. Like Xi said, most of the top arena players use that gear already.
You nerf their competition and it's back to what Elendril has said on many occasions. PVE'ers dominating PVP. Except this time with Tempests of Chaos, Zhaardums, Torch of the Damneds instead of Kingsblade, Menethil's Might and so on. I just don't see anyway to actually make S2 weapons better for PVP that will outweigh dropping their dps by 10%. Its not like in top PVP between matched teams that you drop the opponent instantly. Its long drawn out CC fights. What would I rather have in that situation? An extra 100 stamina buffer or 10% more damage on every attack I did for the duration of the match?
Given: Blizzard considers boss-drop raid weapons to be "trophies", and desires them to have a certain rarity/"Wow-factor".
Given: Proper-tier weapons are required for useful progression and contribution for a number of classes.
Given: Appropriate boss-drop weapons are either rare, common but subject to RNG screwing, or simply don't exist. (SPriests, rogue offhands, etc.)
Given: Arena gear is "welfare epics", per a panel at Blizzcon.
Given: Arena weapons are, in many cases, almost-but-not-quite as good as the weapons that drop in a matching tier of content. This is qualified by noting that some boss-drop weapons suck/are notably inferior, but that's a PVE itemisation problem, clear and simple.
Given: Arena weapons are anomalous when looked at in comparison to the rest of the Arena gear; thus this thread.
Conclusion: Arena weapons are the patch to make damn sure that even if the drop gods spit upon your corpse, your melee DPS can still function appropriately in their raid role, they just have to suck up some PVP for a month or two. (And really, a month or two isn't too long to wait for "your weapon", even if you are limping along in the meantime.)
Am I missing something?
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It's grossly inelegant, and not a "good" solution, but unless and until the design goal of "boss-drop weapons are rare and special" stops running into the "well what the hell do we hit the NEXT boss with, then?" problem, I don't honestly see what can be done. No, it's not going to make PVPers happy, as they see their toys handed out to anyone with a pulse. No, the raiders may not like it as not everyone wants to Arena, or they feel it wasn't as much "work". However, I can't see another method of getting it done. Nobody gets what they want, really, but you never have to worry about a guild or server being utterly stuck because they keep rolling snake-eyes on weapon drops for the duration of an expansion. And I think any player that's been killing a boss for 6 months, a year, whatever and never seen what they NEED drop kind of deserves a mercy epic at that point.
It's grossly inelegant, and not a "good" solution, but unless and until the design goal of "boss-drop weapons are rare and special" stops running into the "well what the hell do we hit the NEXT boss with, then?" problem, I don't honestly see what can be done. No, it's not going to make PVPers happy, as they see their toys handed out to anyone with a pulse. No, the raiders may not like it as not everyone wants to Arena. However, I can't see another method of getting it done. Nobody gets what they want, really, but you never have to worry about a guild or server being utterly stuck because they keep rolling snake-eyes on weapon drops for the duration of an expansion.
The problem is that in the current scheme of things, PVPers are at a disadvantage in PVP to those with BT PVE gear and PVErs are being forced to PVP for weapons that arent dropping in PVE.
I think the basic problem is with S3 the PVP team at blizzard wants to introduce PVP weapons that are and will remain better for PVP than the best PVE drops and the PVE team doesn't want the PVE weapon drops trivialized.
The problem is that in the current scheme of things, PVPers are at a disadvantage in PVP to those with BT PVE gear and PVErs are being forced to PVP for weapons that arent dropping in PVE.
I think the basic problem is with S3 the PVP team at blizzard wants to introduce PVP weapons that are and will remain better for PVP than the best PVE drops and the PVE team doesn't want the PVE weapon drops trivialized.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but S3, when released, should roughly equate to the BT/T6 gear? I'd say that if so, the number of guilds with significant/meaningful access to that level of PVE-gained gear is not yet large enough to warrant the PVP release, which will bump up gear level across a much larger audience, and run the risk of unbalancing in the other direction. Besides this, the imbalance is essentially restricted to weapons, no? I wouldn't think the loss of the defensive stats on the Arena gear would be made up with BT PVE armor.
I think, really, that easing PVE weapon availability is the way to go. Take a page from AQ40, and give the boss a unique, special-looking/slightly better weapon drop (Death's Sting, for instance, which looked like nothing in the game to speak of.) and tokenise "pretty good" weapons, with fairly generic-yet-impressive art, GOOD stat allocation, GOOD DPS/speed/etc, slightly better than the Arena weapons, with no defensive stats. There NEED to be reliable ways to get items. Tokenised set pieces worked well, but weapons are just as important for some classes.
Adding rating requirements to arena gear will have a serious impact on the number of people doing the arens, too. A ton of the people who play arenas are doing it just because they know they'll have a weapon or piece of armor when they get enough points. I know 1900 has been thrown around as a cutoff and that it wasn't official or anything, but any kind of restriction will have the same effect. Roughly half the people who do arenas are below 1500 rating. Those people most likely know they have no chance of hitting 1900, or being in the top X percent, or whatever. They would lose that incentive to play, which for many players is the biggest draw to the arenas.
Actually, in some battlegroups, like 70-80% of the teams are 1500 or lower. And I totally agree with your point, many of those teams would just not play at all if they didn't have access to the weapons, much like they didn't play the old honor system if they knew they could never hit rank 14. Also, by those teams not playing, there are less available points in the system, making it so that getting above 1900 or whatever the required rating is that much harder. By implementing a rating requirement for weapons, it could easily create a situation where very, very few teams can get above that rating.
My thoughts, some of which have been said already:
I think of weapons as DPS and armor as mostly defense. I expect to see my weapon provide a considerable portion of my offense. Of my 1000 damage in PvP gear over 1/4 of that is from my weapon offhand combo and that seems about right to me. My second thought is, what to do with more stats if I loose the DPS on my weapon? Most people that are in the Rival on up category, are capped or near capped for resilience. If my sword had 40 resilience, it would just give me more options to replace other peaces of PvP gear with PvE or not getting the PvP weapon and getting the PvE with more DPS. I don't see how removing DPS (at least from a casters perspective) on the weapons helps. I don't care if my +damage comes from my weapon or from my armor. I would prefer it to come from my weapon though.
I think if the weapons weren't PvE good they wouldn't be bought in the upper tiers of PvP. And in the lower ranks if the weapons weren't PvE good, people wouldn't even sign up for the arenas. The weapons are the candy of the PvP system.
I know the discussion is on the itemization of arena weapons and their effect and or necessity for pve progression and I'm truly not trying to go off-topic but hoping enlarge the picture. My former guild was a progressive raiding guild but we also had quite a few high warlords. I'm going to use the two warrior hwls we had as an example. Their weapons are clearly much better than nearly every weapon in mc/bwl minus nef, it wasn't until aq40 and then naxx that those two began to see clear upgrades. If SSC/TK = MC/BWL then MH/BT would be were raiders see clear upgrades to season 2.
My main point is that this is really just same old same old. PVP weapons were as great then in PVE they are still to this day with the exception they are much more readily available to the masses without the enormous amounts of time required. There are some positives in this, it can reduce the demand/competition for weapons between primary and off-classes for weapons (what a relief, I was resto enhance thru vanilla wow).
My thought/question is will Blizzard change this and itemize the two so extreme that they are in fact worthless on opposite sides of the coin, and would this be a good thing for the overall game?
I think, really, that easing PVE weapon availability is the way to go. Take a page from AQ40, and give the boss a unique, special-looking/slightly better weapon drop (Death's Sting, for instance, which looked like nothing in the game to speak of.) and tokenise "pretty good" weapons, with fairly generic-yet-impressive art, GOOD stat allocation, GOOD DPS/speed/etc, slightly better than the Arena weapons, with no defensive stats. There NEED to be reliable ways to get items. Tokenised set pieces worked well, but weapons are just as important for some classes.
The funny thing is, I've never played with anyone thats actually seen a Death's Sting drop. RNG screwed every, single, time.
The solution really needs to be to increase the number of raid drop weapons available. As it is, 95%+ of the loot you get is armor. Every end-boss of every major raid instance should drop 2 weapons every kill, one of each tri-class armor token piece for whatever slot that boss drops, 1-2 other items and/or a head-quest. Then there could be a half-way or wing boss (or for large dungeons, multiple wing bosses) in every dungeon that always drops 1 weapon, 1 other item and three pieces of tiered armor tokens. As you might notice, I also take issue with the randomness of the armor token pieces, it was much better in AQ when you always got one of each.
While it would be great for each end-boss to drop weapons, guaranteed...
Blizzard wants players to keep running old content. I think this desire is one of the reasons the RNG for weapons hasn't been scrapped entirely, the way the RNG for set armor was.
What the devs need to realize is that guilds trying to progress can't afford to spend valuable raid nights farming old content in the hope that THIS time, those rare items show up... and the players who need them are in the raid... and that the rest of the drops aren't a shard-fest.
I still think weapon tokens for good weapons/RNG for great weapons is the change that should happen. Keep the "oh man, you have THAT??" factor in, which can be accomplished with different art and a few ilvls, but let PvE raiders gear up in a sane fashion.
The funny thing is, I've never played with anyone thats actually seen a Death's Sting drop. RNG screwed every, single, time.
Well, the whole weapon drop thing was far more screwed up during mc/bwl/aq40 times then it is now, just due to the final boss loot tables being so ridiculously big. We had a dude saving up dkp for askhandi and ending up buying dark edge of insanity with that dkp and we were generally not that far behind the progression curve, so he was waiting a loooong time.
It is not that bad any more, just some loot tables are totally fucked up. 1 spelldmg weaopn for spriests (while they clearly intend that every guild runs 2 per raid or their class designers are just totally clueless) in all four raiding instances along with four high end hunter weapons (vashj, archimonde, supremus, illidan), just for example.
Of course weapon tokens would be the easiest solution, but then having tokens drop is kinda a lot less cool then the actual weapon. Just thinking over the loot tables a bit more would be helpful. A normal guild has 1-2 hunters per raid, very, very few run with 3. All our three hunters have at least three of the mentioned weapons banked.
Also every guild has runs about 8-9 spelldmg based casters per raid. As is widely known, 1h weapons are the preferred item for all of those. So for over a 3rd of a normal raid composition, all of tk/ssc/hyal/bt offers three drops altogether, two of them being swords. Which is even more brilliant when you consider that of the three spellcaster classes, two can happily use 2h staffs with stats like crit/hit/haste instead of the heavy spelldmg that 1h+oh offers. Sadly, those two classes are also the only ones that can use the swords.
Well done, gents.
And as someone mentioned above, S3 will make stuff even worse. I suppose it will be released within 2-3 months, maybe just 1-2. My best guess is with the Zulaman patch. If the weapons scale the same way S1 to S2 weapons scale, the guilds that enter BT/Hyjal around that time will have superior weapons then those instances actually drop, baring orange stuff of course.
The S3 spelldmg mace/dagger will surely stomp the current version of the najentus dagger into the ground, given that the S2 version is already just slightly beind.
I think that is what the suddne weapon buffage in SSC/TK is about. They are modelling T3 gear atm, adjusted itemlvl for the weapons and realized that no one is gonna use the raid drops cause the S3 weapons just overpowered them.
So the normal raid drop weapons need to get buffed to stand a chance. Also another reason why the bt/hyjal weapon drops will 100% see the same kind of buff the tk/ssc drops got on the test realm atm.
08/29/07, 1:27 PM
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