The baseline player I would estimate is me circa two years ago. Wanting to destroy with shiny epics in pvp but having nor the time nor the understanding of my class to do so. I make no illusions about where the majority of WoW players are in terms of gear progression.

You seemed to have understood it best so far but my stance is simply the placement of HWL/GM gear in terms of availability is really not a major issue because the gear in question is not especially useful to anyone. I call attention to the qualifier "especially". At a price of "free" it certainly has some use. But people will be trying to replace it as soon as possible and it's not like the availability or lack there of of HWL pieces is really going to make or break the ability to arena. Exceptions to every rule of course.

Most people don't walk around refusing to BG. Most people in fact do BGs eagerly. It's the hardcore arena people who loathe the fact that they have to sully themselves in BGs to participate in arena.

No I said the people who opt for HWL show poor itemization choices because they can get more milage with different gear choices they are effectively doing almost twice the work for inferior stats when all is said and done and they start replacing HWL. How is that not a poor itemization choice? To get specific most of the people I see in HWL gear also wear the pieces for pve purposes.

Finally, an items value is directly proportional to the effort one is willing to take to get it. If most knowledgable players won't touch HWL gear it's defacto value is very low. As the price goes down of course the value rises. That is basic.

I also never used the term worthless I believe I said important. If it really matters how accessible HWL gear is where has the outcry been for the past year? I haven't seen one thread, post, PM here, official WoW forums, or anywhere else complaining that they want HWL gear but it's too expensive. Not a single one. How can something that is an afterthought (if that) be of monumental importance when it wasn't worth so much as a whine on the official forums where everything gets whined about?

I must say having played in two completely different server environments and differing groups of people (with a night and day contrast in gear and skill) -- the majority of players who play the game for any length of time (not just ~2 hours a week) absolutely do BGs and absolutely get the S1 gear. As much as the regular arena audience hates the grind for honor gear, do not discount the vast pvping majority who consider that level of gear a goal they strive for (and do). It's not even necessarily about gearing themselves for arena, it's a baseline level of gearing they can shoot for. To bring this back to the point of the thread (2.4), I think the blue HWL gear will be a nice interim stop-gap but the bottom tier honor gear will remain the goal of most people who do regular pvp.

Just a built in note system in general would be good, luckily I caught onto the fact that there were notepad addons rather fast, or otherwise I'd have had used a ridiculous amount of paper on various notes I tend to take by now.

Though the note taking has decreased a bit with increasing the quest limit from 10 to 25 back in the day, I used to write down the location and approximate level of quests I'd cancel if they turned out to be too high level when I was initially there, which as you can imagine adds up over time. It would still be something that'd make for a good overall feature in WoW, as there's other things I frequently take notes for too.

Ya I cant help but think this is something that would be easy to implement that has been overlooked for far too long.

How about coordinates for the world map? No one has ever needed coordinates, right?

If this is turning into a 2.4 wishlist, something I've always wanted which I thought would be pretty easy to implement would be the ability to rearrange the order of your characters on the login screen. A bit anal retentive, possibly, but I'd like to have my 70s at the top of the list.

While I love my coordinate mod, my impression has always been that Blizzard ideally wants navigation to more organic than:

"Where is X?"
"24,31"
"Ty"

And that they would prefer it to be more along the lines of "Take the road south out of town and keep going till you see a stream on the right. Cross the stream and keep heading west until you see a cave - the guy's in there"

So while they certainly won't outlaw coord mods, I think their intent is to make a player's initial experience with navigating through the world more organic and less "videogamey". At least, I can't think of any other reason they've not included coords in the default UI.

For RP servers, coordinates seem to go against the idea of roleplaying. You get more value out of the "Take the road south out of town until you see a stream on the right. Cross the stream, keep heading west until you see a cave - the man is in there." than "The man is at the coordinates 30,45."

One thing which could do with adding which would make sense on RP servers as well is notes on the (mini)map, and possibly the ability to share such notes with other players.

That way you could even point people to coordinates, but it'd be indirectly (By adding a note to their map), as opposed to directly (By telling them the coordinates).

Maybe I've completely lost the context it was originally presented in as I work through this thread, but I'm confused by the discussions of purchasing hwl gear being a waste of honor compared to getting s1 pieces. As far as I can tell (from wowhead and checking the npcs a while back) but the blue hwl pieces aren't even obtainable now (having been removed as season 1 gear was made available); a fresh 70 getting these with honor prior to s1 is a completely moot point.

If it's being insinuated that they would require honor to purchase the pieces from outland rep vendors, wouldn't that defeat the purpose of putting it on pve-related vendors in the first place? Or was the original poster actually referring to the level 60 hwl/gm gear?

Yes, they are obtainable right now -- and at prices comparable to that of the S1 gear. The issue being raised was that this set of gear would be moved to being purchasable with reputation+gold in 2.4.

I don't buy it. They are implementing a threat meter and an itemrack into the UI. That's a lot more "videogamey" than some coordinates. Coordinates are a basic method of identifying anything on a grid, and surely could be implemented in a world of teleporters and death rays.

Were they readded recently? They are still marked as "No longer available to players" on wowhead's database, and blue posts in the past have stated that as new sets entered the honor price range, that previous pvp sets would be removed.

You aren't referring to the lv 60 hwl/gm sets are you?

The PvP gear on the rep vendors is a major improvement given the dire state of pug PvP, at least for horde.

The reality is that if you are horde, you cannot gain honor from AV in any reliable manner. The queues on my Battlegroup are 30 minutes on a good day, 1-1.5 hours on a bad day. No premade will take you without 250-300 resilience. And pugging AB / EOTS / WSG while you wait for the AV queue, ironically, is less honor over that hour long queue than the 15 minute AV match you waited for in the first place.

So since it's extremely time consuming, and a complete catch-22 to get s1 and s3 bracers / boots / belt, this ability to gain resilience from other avenues is a great change. Sure, most of the people on this forum wont care about this nor probably even understand why it will help. But I've seen it first hand for a while now on one of my alts and this will help. People would rather have s1 but s1, at least on my server as a fresh 70 alt, is almost harder to get than s2 or s3.

Because not everybody had the chance to gear up their toons during season 1 arena when PvE gear completely dominated (warlocks with full corrupters set > warlocks in full s1). There's no reason for S1 or HWL gear to be easily availible like it was during season 1. It evens the playing field somewhat for those just getting into arenas (this is a good thing) and promotes more people doing so (this is an even better thing, especially for YOUR RATINGS, unless you suck). This is a good change and benefits everybody from the lowliest 1100 green-geared arena playing scrub to the mightiest 2500+ rated players as it expands the points pool. It's unfortunate that they didn't do this in 2.3 already.

?

High Warlord's Chain Armor - Items - World of Warcraft

*
Level: 115
*
Costs 13,219 30
*
Set: High Warlord's Pursuit
*
No longer available to players

That's interesting -- I didn't look at the wowhead entry but I thought those were readily available from the vendors when I was there last week (shows how much attention I paid to those pieces I guess).

The point is still that if these are in circulation as rep rewards they are pretty handy -- both for those people who don't want to grind honor but still be somewhat viable in PvP as well as people who just need to fill some gaps in their gear till they replace them with better pieces. Either way I don't think it's going to change how the majority of people gear up.

Given X amount of time, wouldn't you rather have 3 pieces of vindicator and 5 pieces of HWL, rather than 2 pieces of S1, 1 pieces of vindicator, and the rest being level-up or dungeon crap with low stam and no resilience?

Are you seriously trying to tell me that as a pvp character, without the benefit of "free" t4/t5 (or even maybe t6 these days, depending on your guild) pve gear, you would rather NOT have +140 resilience, and a significantly higher amount of stamina, even if you are still mingling in the ~1400 rating?

Seriously, think about what you're saying.

I think we can all agree that having the 5-pc blue HWL/GM level 70 sets be available to fresh 70s for a gold cost is superior to the current utter lack of PvP gear available to said fresh 70s. If you can't agree, then perhaps we aren't playing the same game?

I got really good at these kind of descriptions during the beginning of TBC because half of my guild apparently didn't have coord mods. *sigh*

I think it's a pretty substantial change. I recently hit 70 on my warrior and the process of gearing up in arena and BGs was laugable. I had questing greens/blues and just exploded if I got attacked. If I had reasonable blue gear with resilience instead, I'd have been able to be at least marginally effective in situations where I'd previously blown up. I'd probably still have ground out honor for S1 pieces until I got s3, but I'd have had less immediate need to do so, and it would've made the process less painful (especially in the early arena weeks).

Four pages of irrelevant argument about HWL gear later, I didn't see anything except two new cooking recipes that just barely bore mentioning.