The official WoW forums are bustling with posts supporting and refuting the classification of PvP rewards as welfare epics. The previous seasons saw plenty of noise, but Season 3 seems to have brought out a new level, since the iLevel of the new PvP rewards are equivalent to the best gear in the game, and a large number of moderate to low play-time, mid-to-low rated teams purchased 3 pieces of T6 iLevel PvP gear on the first day of the season.

I’ve heard and participated in various debates over whether PvP rewards as they are today are good or bad for the game overall. I’d like to not discuss the risk v. reward aspect of awarding loot for PvP v. PvE, since it has been discussed in depth in countless threads. Instead, I’d like to discuss whether people find it to be a good or a bad thing that we have 2 very separate gear paths in the game.

In vanilla WoW, T3 & GM/HW gear was king in the battlegrounds and world PvP. A player decked out in T3 could PvP quite effectively in their top-tier gear in-between raids, and a player decked out in GM/HW gear could PvE quite effectively in their top-tier gear in-between battlegrounds. The gear was quite transferrable.

In TBC, the value ‘resilience’ was added. Players found that resilience happens to provide a level of longevity that raiding gear of equal value does not provide. Prior to Season 3, a player in MH/BT gear could make up for the fact that they lacked resilience just based on the fact that they had plenty of stamina on their pieces. However, in Season 3, PvP players now have gear that generally has more stamina as well as the all-important resilience stat on their pieces. In Season 3, more than any previous season, players who choose to follow the PvE progression path, even though they have the best PvE items available to their class, are at a disadvantage to PvP geared players unless they supplement their gear. Additionally, PvP players cannot effectively use their PvP gear to raid a similarly iLevelled instance to the gear they’re currently wearing. I feel that the resilience stat is mostly to blame here, since it takes from the item budget, and generally isn’t found on PvE gear. If *all* gear in the game had a resilience value associated with it, (perhaps a ratio of armor type against armor value, with results between different armor types being relatively equal), then the gear would be far more transferrable.

Do people feel as though this is a good direction for WoW? I personally feel as though the game remains freshest when players can enjoy a broad spectrum of activities in the game. I’d like to hear others’ opinions. I would have posted this topic in the PvP forum, but since it affects PvE players quite substantially, I wanted to open it up to a more broad audience.

PvE gear isn't supposed to be ideal for PvP. It's still good, though, just not ideal.

PvP gear isn't supposed to be ideal for PvE. It's still good, though, just not ideal.

Resilience helps make these statements true.

The additional armor on most PvP gear for healer/dps classes is along the same lines. It helps make PvP gear ideal for PvP, but serves absolutely no purpose in PvE, which makes that gear less ideal for PvE without making it completely useless.

It does and it doesn't. S2 weapons in particular were better than all the weapons available in T5 content for many classes, and S3 is largely the same, despite having item budget used up on Stamina and Resilience they still come out ahead of weapons that have pure PvE stats. In fact for an Enhancement Shaman in T5 content, not a single T5 weapon is better than the S2 weapons. Jump to T6 and if I had a S3 in my hand right now, it would be a hell of a close call as to whether any weapon in T6 content would be better either.

Resilience single-handedly makes several classes viable in arena where they wouldn't have been before (look how things changed from early season 1 until now). The gear separation is also quite excellent and healthy for the game, I think. Battlegrounds at 60 were essentially glorified pigeon-shooting matches for raiders (who may have been poor PvPers) to see off and compete on the scoreboard. Now they actually have a marketable, competitive PvP system where the players who only care about that aspect can just focus on it. It's certainly not perfect, by any means, but it is still excellent.

I actually think the next step may be to create a new PvP servers where players can make pre-made and pre-geared characters (essentially like guild wars) to PvP against in a controlled environment which would let them more accurately analyze classes' strengths and weaknesses, since flavor-of-the-month combos would be so much more obvious without the large opportunity cost of rerollling/regearing to compete.

The main thing the "gear transference" problem you mention has done is really highlight a few design problems with WoW:

1) Melee classes are too dependent on their weapon and not their armor, which makes arena weapons too good at PvE.
2) Token-based buying systems are inherently superior to most players because of the elimination of randomness (arena vendors have really high-lighted this over time.


These arguments have been rehashed dozens of times in other threads, though (see the various Arena Weapons threads), and I'm not sure there is anything new and exciting to be brought up at this point.

Weapons are the sole exception to my statement, and that's because I seriously can't think of a way you could make a PvE weapon bad for PvP, or vice versa, without mechanics changes beyond the simple. Maybe if PvP DPS could be sacrificed from the weapon at a higher trade ratio than normal for resilience it'd help, but I'm not sure even there - if you sacrificed 10 weapon DPS but picked up 60 or 70 resilience how many people would use it and how many would just use a PvE weapon instead?

If you downgrade PvP DPS to upgrade PvP resilience, PvE weapons will be better for PvP because DPS (slash DPS traded for +dmg) is worth losing a small amount of resilience for a large amount of DPS, especially in the presence of armor-based resilience.

If you give PvE weapons some mechanic that makes them detrimental in PvP, it probably hurts their PvE uses as well. The closest things I can think of are giving PvE weapons stats like expertise that are generally PvE oriented with relatively low PvP value (+skill in 1.0 was actually the best example of a purely PvE stat), but those stats are hard to find and might lead to PvE weapon itemization being boring. Procs are another options here - PvP oriented procs can increase the value of a PvP weapon in PvP without completely overpowering them in PvE (see: Stormherald).

Removing PvP weapons entirely isn't an option either. In the end, Blizzard probably did the best thing - put a requirement on them such that you can't be terrible and still get a weapon. It does make loot a little bit easier to deal with, knowing that weapons are no longer the be-all end-all items because you can usually count on people to just come with an arena weapon.

The real problem is how much of your output comes from your weapon. My weapon is close to 25% of my +dmg. No other single piece of gear contributes as much to my output. This is even more true for melee. Since that one piece is so valuable to output, it's worth a small resilience sacrifice in order to keep the major output upgrade. I can't think of a good way around it unless the game suddenly changes to make weapon DPS/+dmg less of a factor in your total output.

They are never going to do that. Blizzard has stated they want people who do both sides of the content to be the best prepared for it. Someone who does PVE or PVP only can be great at their sphere, but someone who does both to the top level of content should be a bit better and be able to bring stuff across both ways. Hence you have weapons, certain rings, offset items in T6, etc that all go either way. There is never going to be dps only vs pve/pvp.

That being said, everything this thread has brought up has been brought up before and argued to death on this board previously. I don't see a good reason to start the bitching about PVP being too good in PVE and PVE being too good in PVP all over again. Weapons (which are really the items that provided the most advantage for raiders from PVP) have requirements on them now, a requirement similar to difficulty in raiding reqs.

I'd agree that it's an intentional change, and I understand why it's there - the weapon is a showpiece item, a focal point, and people naturally *want* it to assume more importance.

I'm just saying, in this particular circumstance, it's a change that fights the whole idea of PvP gear for PvP, PvE gear for PvE.

I think that the mechanic of resilience has been generally good, but I think that the implementation was poor to only itemize it on PvP gear. I suspect that some of the angst between PvE players and PvP players would diminish if players couldn't simply purchase several pieces of epic gear which are better for PvP than anything that can be acquired through a PvE path. I'm also not convinced that the gear separation is healthy for the game. As a PvE focused player, if I want to PvP in my off-time & be competitive at it, I need to go buy pretty much the same exact gear that every other similarly spec'd player of my class in buying from arena and honor vendors.

It would certainly be interesting to see how popular this option would be for many folks. With the extremly narrow set of gear choices for PvP players, and the method by which the items are purchased, we're nearly there today.

As a concept, yes, I think it's good for the game. As with anything else it has flaws (weapon balance etc.) but IMO level 60 PvP in 2.0 was proof positive that crits and overgeared raiders were getting out of control.

I strongly dislike the idea, the ability to create 'premades' was what convinced me never to try GW.

Resilience is good for making PVP good for PVP, and PVE good for PVE without completely eliminating the usefulness of an item in the other gametype. This is widely regarded as a good thing. It has also increased the duration of pvp fights to a more enjoyable level. I think most can agree to this.

Weapons are an exception to this. Personal ratings will help, but ultimately they may want to make a 'resilience penetration' stat that just appears on pvp weapons and lower their dps so that they're not the best for pve.

I think that pretty much summarizes the threads we've had on this before and just about any post that might appear in this thread

It was actually started by Praetorian, I think it's locked now. Weapons have always been the flashpoint, especially when there were no alternatives to the Nathrezim Mindblade ingame beyond the S2 weapons and players essentially were forced to Arena if they wanted to upgrade. (ZA finally gives players alternatives to it)

I can see where you are coming from, but being a feral druid, I have to disagree with you. S3 PvP Feral gear is amazing, do you realize that our S3 gear is possibly the best end game gear we have? Hell, our best end-game weapon ([Vengeful Gladiator's Staff]) comes from PvP, which is far more superior to any thing in MH/BT.

Our S3 set offers high amount of stamina, hit rating, crit, agility, strength, armor penetration, and resilience. It makes it the 'perfect' feral druid hybrid set because we can not only put out high sustained raid dps with it, tank with it too since resilience can make feral tanks crit immune. I personally wouldn't mind just doing PvP & Arena myself, since my T4/T5 gear isn't even worth the time to get any more.

Arena Weapons

And I agree with Beef on this one.

Ah yes - I think I've read that post in the past.

I'm coming at this from another angle. The core of that post was more along the lines of, "Why is the best PvE weapon in the game acquired by doing PvP?"

Instead, I ask why PvP gear & PvE gear should not be equally as effective in the other sphere. If I've completed the PvE progression path, why would I not have an equal gear advantage to a player who has completed the PvP progression path, and let it come down to skill alone?

Hmmm OK. I'll go read through that thread again. I clearly must've missed something when I read through it previously.

Sorry for the duplicate post.

If only that was true.

In my opinion, and it seems the opposite of most opinions here, Resilience is a blight on the game and has had an enormous detrimental effect on it. Its quickly killing my enjoyment of the game.

Someone raised the issue that at 60 Tier 3 raiders, the few that were deep in Tier 3 anyway, were dominating Battlegrounds. This is not the situation we wanted to be in and its good Blizzard recognised this and made efforts to change it. But all they've really done is replace one warlord with another. Now its the full merciless (or full Vengeful in a couple of weeks) player who is the king of BGs. He is the one who goes there and destroys the lesser geared players 1v3. The only difference is in the old days a rank 14 player would still be able to compete vs the full tier 3 raider. Nowadays the Full S3 player absolutely anihilates the full Tier 6 player.

The effect resilience added is very much a one way exclusion for many players/specs. Most cannot PvP with their PvE gear, yet they can both PvP and PvE with their arena gear. It sucks already that my PvE items for my class are so damn poor, yet now I feel Blizzard is interfering with my fun by adding these amazing items to Arena.

By seperating the gear into resilience and non-resilience they create a barrier to pve players entering arena yet at the same time for many classes put the best items in the game for pve there.

I can see some people may say that I just want to be able to own noobs in AV with my raid gear again or whatever. Thats not the case. I despise PvP and Arena in wow. They really highlight the worst this game has to offer for me. Its dull and repetitive, in AV at least you're forced to wrestle with idiots the entire match. It serves as a show case for the class and spec imbalance in the game. Were they tommorow to introduce in Hyjal and BT a feral equivalent for every honour/arena piece thats currently the best in the game, I'd literally never pvp again. Yet as it is I'm forced, if I want to stay at my absolute best in PvE, to run hours and hours of BGs and Arena to get items for PvE.

This isn't just the S3 items, theres such a lack of defense items in general for druids, and a lack of non tier items for bears that I have to use PvP bracer/boot/belt in some combination of the 3 to boost myself to uncrittable unless I want to hold back and use much lower tier loot. Only the VERY best geared feral druids, and I mean the ones with every BT/Hyjal shared tanking drop, are not gonna be using Honour gear, or lower tier gear. So thats another way that resilience is killing my fun of the game, its Blizzards solution to poor feral itemisation.

Personal rating is the new thing. Rather than fix PvE itemisation they simply added the rating to try to get it harder for pve raiders to get these weapons for pve. Its a crazy kind of backward logic.

Blizzard say they want people to experience both spheres of play. Well I'd say why are they interfering so much to force players into both. Is it harming their bottom line so much if a pvp player solely wishes to pvp, or if a pve player solely wishes to pve, and both wish to be at maximum potential in their chosen fields from only playing in those fields?

I don't understand the problem. Putting time and effort into PvP begets gear that is suited for PvP. Putting time and effort into PvE begets gear that is suited for PvE. Put time and effort into both and you'll have no need for gear to "transfer." It is in fact very easy to acquire both types of gear because PvP just isn't the time sink it used to be.

As previously stated, weapons are the exception. Because the class is so weapon-dependant, arena weapons have been Blizzard's greatest gift to Rogues whose talent choices are no longer slave to the RNG. Arena weapons are the best PvP --> PvE transfer items I believe we have seen since the honor system was launched years ago.

This isn't really the end all be all solution, healers don't need resilience penetration. Hitting the resilience cap is already quite achievable (especially since the priest/druid talents don't stack with resilience past the cap) so I don't think adding additional resilience to healing weapons would be suitable either.

Sigh. This is the same stuff that was brought up before. Not all the best items for PVP are from PVP.

DST, Cataclysm's Edge, Glaives, SR BT gear, many different dps trinkets (Tsunami, Madness, Skull of Guldan, etc), Soul Cleaver, Torch of the Damned, Stormherald, Illidan staff, etc are all great for PVP. Many of those are not upgraded from anything that currently exists in PVP.

I repeat that no one, not anyone who is serious about WoW wants a return of T2/1 with a bunch of useless resists smattered over your gear. You want the stats you want and only those stats.

Not really, however what was harming their bottom line was raiders coming in to PVP and smashing pvp'ers with superior gear. They needed to fix that. Now sure, some classes such as feral druids have more to gain from pvp gear for pve than others, but other than weapons it is hardly universal. Most non weapon PVP gear is quiet inferior for PVE. My pieces of S3 pvp gear for example are a bit worse than my T5 gear for the purpose of raiding.

To balance weapons and encourage people to use PvP gear in PvP, (as opposed to using PvE raid gear), all they have to do is introduce a sliding scale on weapons. There needs to be no personal requirement, but if you have 0 resilence your season 3 mace now has the same dps/spelldmg/healing as a season 1 mace would. As you gain more resilience the weapon gets better until you reach say 400 resilience, then it is a season 3 quality weapon. It encourages people to not use PvE gear in their PvP slots, and while it doesn't completely nerf the items in PvE, it makes the items found in raiding more desireable for... raiding.

To better prove my point I'll use a [Vengeful Gladiator's Spellblade]. At zero resilience it starts out with the same stats as a [Gladiator's Spellblade] but every 50 resilience you have it gains 6 spell damage, until you reach 400 resilience and it gains the full 48 spell damage a ilvl 146 item would have.

I have a feeling that T6 weapons will be buffed to compensate for the 103.1 DPS on Arena 1-handed weapons, putting them slightly above PvE weapons (except for Glaives, of course). This is what they did to Serpentshrine/TK loot when S2 was released.

In regards to resillience, I would argue that it is very fairly balanced between endurance teams (such as my warlock-druid 2v2 or a 3-healer 5v5 team) and burst teams (such as the rogue-warlock/spriest-warlock/etc. teams in 2v2 and 4-dps teams in 5v5). If resillience were much stronger or much weaker, either endurance/drain teams or burst teams would be too obviously superior. Blizzard has done a fine job with the stat.