My 30 resil, 9k hp hunter alt is sitting at 1564 rating in 2's, on a relatively large battlegroup, with a fire mage for a partner, on her first week of arena. Five of our losses were to outgearing by SL/SL warlocks. I am by no means an amazing PvPer, but those of you whining that you're completely nonviable in arenas without 150+ resil really need to consider what else you're doing wrong.

That said, the current PvP grind is stupendous - I can't take grinding over 1k honor a day, so being able to sub in the blue PvP pieces until I slowly gear up via a mix of arenas and casual BGing is a great design decision, and it'll certainly help with being stunlocked 100-0 by rogues with s1 maces.

On another note, has it been specified which pieces are available for purchase? If I'm not crazy, there was a blue neck and ring in s1 as well, so if those are buyable, that'd bump up available PvP gear still further.

People need to stop bringing up andedoctal evidence about their experience at low resilence levels. Even the slowest player in the world can work out that some classes have escapes/immunities from damage while others have to tank it.

That and battlegroup level vary a lot, and you might end up facing not so good pvpers, or people who don't care because they're in the 1400rating 10games a week thingie, and so on and on. The fact is, if you have crap for resilience, there's good chances you're going to get your ass handed to you for a decent amount of time while you get your gear.

Farming honor is rather fast, but extremly boring and annoying. You're forced to do BGs for marks even tho they're extremly inneficient in terms of honor(WSG pugs mainly, but AB or EoTS can be pretty bad too), and then you're "forced" to do the same old AV for honor, which barely involves any pvp to win anyway. Easier to get gear, or at least gear you can acquire solo, or while doing something else, is a good step in the right direction in my opinion. Sometimes, you just don't want to do AV, and playing more arenas won't get you more points once you hit your "cap" for your gear/composition.

That quote is *potentially* dishearteningly depressing, I'm really hating the over-large patches with so many changes that it takes forever to adapt, amend and quantify them all to allow it even on to the PTR which is likely to take atleast a month of testing to release onto live servers.

As I understand it, this will never happen: HWL gear being put on reputation vendors will most likely mean that they will cost gold instead of honor, provided you meet the reputation levels.

Ergo, there's no honor being wasted.

Even then, you can question someone's gear choices all you want, no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy this readily available gear.

As someone who cannot be arsed to grind up some 100k honor for a Ret set that I'd just use to have some fun on off-days, I'm welcoming this with open arms. Non-zero resilience is always better than zero resilience.

That's exactly the point. Say they put HWL shoulders buyable for 20g from the Scryer/Aldor quartermaster at Exalted. Now, you're going to have to do the Exalted grind anyway for your shoulder enchant.

Then, say they put the HWL helm (for casters) buyable for 30g from the Sha'tar quartermaster at Revered. You're going to have to do the Revered grind anyway for your caster head enchant. The same thing would apply for the HWL Warrior helm being buyable from Cenarion Expedition Revered.

So, given that you know that you can buy a PvP helm and shoulders from reps that you cannot avoid grinding for regardless of the HWL availability, what would be the first thing you might consider spending honor on? S1 Chest, pants or gloves. Personally, I'd grab the gloves first for the glove bonus, since even the pants (and a belt) can be acquired from one night of Halaa PvP.

Depending on how Blizzard structures the availability, it will be a perk, a great perk, for something that you would have to do anyway.

If you check the "How to make BGs fun" thread in the PvP forums, there has been a lot of support for giving people a free set of PvP gear as soon as they hit 70. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard got the idea from there (not necessarily free, but much easier to acquire nonetheless).

And no, you haven't seen a massive outcry on the WoW forums about the exorbitant cost of HWL gear because HWL gear is not buyable anymore. Instead, there has been a massive outcry about the exorbitant cost of S1 gear, which is the new baseline.

I guarantee that if S3 came out without making S1 buyable through honor, that the outcry would have directed to HWL gear instead, in much larger volume and with much more vehemence;

Instead of:

"200k honor for 5/5 S1 and full Vindicator's is a soul-sucking grind that makes me want to destroy my eyes with an icepick"

We would get:

"Why is Blizzard making me do a 200k honor grind for ilevel 115 blues that will still get me instagibbed against a Vengeful Gladiator anyway?"

Except you won't be PvPing with the fresh 70 Mage with full (and I mean full) greens, 6k HP and literally gets cleaved in half by a single autoattack and one MS. Part of the irritation in BGs comes from having to play with people who are drastically undergeared for their role. The other part comes from finally hitting 70 and experiencing that undergearedness yourself. This change alleviates that.

On a final note, I can't believe people are railing against getting free stuff.

It's from http://elitistjerks.com/623372-post258.html which is a complete rumor. There are a few guilds on Tichondrius with strong Blizzard connections. I know of at least one instance of a leak coming from one of them, so there's enough credibility to take it seriously. Not enough though to be anything but idle speculation.

Could it be because we are intelligent people who realize that this is worthless tweak whose value will be zero exactly one second after players get their HWL gear and go "now what"? With the extent of mudflation in TBC HWL gear is a joke and a poor one at that.

Also we don't know how much rep is required for these, so stop with all "free stuff" phrases. Did you(?) or someone else say in their post something about exalted rep for these? If they put in Exalted requirement for HWL gear then I KNOW that the devs are just laughing their ass off at the playerbase.

It's difficult for me to see how putting blue PvP gear on rep vendors can be criticized; the worst thing I think you can legitimately say is "nice idea but it won't be effective", and we won't know THAT until we see stats, price, and rep requirements.

There has been a huge amount of complaining over the "bootstrap" needed to become competitive in arenas. Again and again we've seen people suggest that what is needed is gear that is much more obtainable than S1 (that is, without the mind numbing BG grind). Unstated - but implicit in the suggestions - is that the gear wouldn't be as good as S1. (Although once S4 starts, I could see S1 gear on rep vendors - but it'd almost have to require exalted then. That won't help rerolls looking for a "starter kit" for arenas.)

In short, the announced change is exactly what multiple threads on EJ and other forums have been asking for. And the response is... "Nobody will want this." Um, sorry, you couldn't be more wrong. (And no, arguing that you meant the current blue honor gear costs too much honor doesn't help, since nobody else is even talking about the 2.3 solution.)

There are no decent non-raid/non-heroic plate healing shoulders outside of the HWL gear.

There are no non-raid/non-heroic 2.60 speed Shaman off-hands.

A 93.2 DPS HWL weapon is still better than a Crystalforged War Axe.

There are quite a few more examples out there, depending on the kind of rep needed, such as the HWL's Shiv (1.40 speed dagger offhand).

Yes, I did mention Exalted rep, although that was pure speculation on my part.

My point was that even Scryer/Aldor Exalted would be perfectly acceptable given how any serious player would still grind that out for his shoulder enchant.

Revered would probably be fine and dandy with most people: Either it's something like Cenarion Expedition/Thrallmar where you'll need a head enchant anyway or it's something like Mag'har/Consortium that can be grinded solo.

I think it's worth noting that there are no "blue" PvP belts/boots/bracers - those are actually the Marshal/General's gear, and it's doubtful that they'd be included since they're ilevel 123 epics.

I'm with you in hoping that the blue jewelry gets included too though.

Legendary Ranged Weapon from Sunwell confirmed by a French rep to be a drop like Warglaives as opposed to quest based like Atiesh or Thunderfury. I'm a little dissappointed at that, once more we're thrown at the mercy of the RNG.


Forums de wow-europe.com -> Arme Ã* distance légendaire (in french)

Figured blizzard would learn their lesson, its a shame when guilds such as Nihilum face the wrath of RNG when they deserve warglaives more then any guild out there. Maybe Im bitter as well because weve only seen 1 in 23 kills, however its a horrible mechanic to have items that are that powerful be on a random loot table. A pair of warglaives adds around 200 personal dps, thats a pretty decent advantage going into new content with say a couple pairs in your raid, adding to the already horrible rng of getting the 1 or 2 offsets you need out of BT... 40+ najentus kills and weve seen 1 halbred, 30 something archimonde kills and we have never gotten the healing staff.. the drop mechanics are way to random.