WoW Forums -> Season 4 Requirements and Arena Changes

"While Season 3 is still going strong, we wanted to announce ahead of time the rating requirements that will be present for arena items once Season 4 begins. We also wanted to give everyone a heads up to some changes that will be in an upcoming patch, altering how points are gained and players are matched in the arena system. The patch with these changes is scheduled to release before the start of Season 4.

First though, the rating requirement changes:

When Season 4 begins, Season 3 items will be reduced in personal and team arena rating requirement to:
Shoulders: 1950
Weapon: 1800
The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:
Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none
In addition, some of the Season 4 quality items that will be purchasable with honor will also carry a personal and team arena rating requirement:
Boots: 1700
Ring: 1650
Bracers: 1575
Belt: none
Necklace: none
Trinket: none
The Season 2 items, which will move to the honor system when Season 4 begins, will continue to have no rating requirement.

The changes to the rating requirements for these items reflect the nature of the items, their power, and the relative difficulty that should be had when attempting to obtain them. These items are comparable to those found in the newest 25 person raid zone, Sunwell Plateau, and should therefore also feel very challenging to obtain.


To help ensure that the challenge in obtaining these items stays true to those achieving these ratings, we'll also be implementing new rules with an upcoming patch to curb practices that undermine the core concepts of the arena system.

These rules are as follows:

"If a character’s personal rating is more than 150 points below the team rating, they will earn points based on their personal rating instead of the team rating."

This means that a player cannot join a highly rated team and begin earning points based purely on the pre-established rating of the team before they joined it. They'll need to compete, improve, and gain a personal rating worthy of the points they would receive.


"If the average personal rating of the players queuing for a game is more than 150 points below the team’s rating, the team will be queued against an opponent matching or similar to the average personal rating."

This means that players cannot join a highly rated team and immediately face highly rated opponents, easily and quickly bringing their personal rating up. Instead they'll need to again compete, improve, and earn their rating.


We're excited to see these changes implemented, which will continue to emphasize the strong competitive nature of the arenas, and the challenge in obtaining the highest end rewards available for PvP. "

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Offhand, I'm not seeing any easy loophole in these rules. You can't join a 2000 rated 5v5 team to get the points from it, as you'd only get the points from a 1500ish 5v5. It also looks like it will prevent some of the smurfing (if that's the correct term) where people join a highly rated team that isn't their own in an attempt to drag town opponents before returning to their main team. I do expect a massive flood of crying about the new rating requirements, though, 2200 for shoulders and 2050 for weapon. That should reduce some raider complaints about "welfare" weapons, however.

This is amazing. I'm honestly excited for Season 4.

The concept of putting rating requirements on honor gear is interesting. I wonder what the overall impact this will have on the arenas will be? I would bet that the lose 10 games/week crowd gets their few available items and is done for the season.

My other thought is that wont these changes make PR rating selling even more lucrative and easy. Their wording doesnt seem to prevent 2 gladiators from powerleveling you on a 3s team up to the necessary rating. Seems they will have even more demand in S4.

I personally think these are some great changes, though I do see some issues with it in regards to class balance. Ive been able to break 2k several times this season in 2s (War/Sham) topping out 20 points or so below 2100. I feel that certain specs/classes will have a hard time reaching 2200 for the shoulders.

So good work on these changes for season 4, now get to balancing!

To all of the 2K rated players cheering these changes, I was wondering how these changes will impact you if at all.

My 5v5 hasn't broken 1850 yet and I fully support it. If you can't win some games, you don't get to wear a full kit of the most recent set of gear. I mean really all this means is that people have to buy some prior season stuff, start winning some games, and then replace them with current season stuff as they win.

Setting the weapons at 2k is also going to be a big barrier to people snatching S4 weapons for PvE right away.

I think though that if they're going to add arena ratings to belts and boots that those items should be moved to purchase for Arena Points and removed from the honor system entirely.

I can already see a major issue. Obtaining a high rating is going to be even more difficult because there will likely be 1) less people playing for free points and 2) almost no one creating new teams to sell points. Point inflation will be significantly lower. Getting to 2200 for the shoulders is likely going to be as hard, or harder, than getting to 2400 right now.

I don't see how that's a bad thing at all.

As someone who hates arena, I have to say that this is a relief simply because next season I won't feel obligated to queue for the betterment of the raid.

I hate arena. I don't want to lose 10 games a week, but they put gear on the vendor that's totally accessible, and in many cases is "best in slot" for my progression level. With this no longer being the case, I no longer have to queue!

Depending how drastic the drop in point inflation is, you may have battlegroups where no teams can even break 2200 rating under non-collusive circumstances. If you go from a population of 4000 active 5v5 teams in Season 3 to 1500 active 5v5 teams in Season 4, you are going to have significantly lower available points in the system and therefore a trend of significantly lower ratings.

Another way to look at it: Blizzard has a target X percentage of arena players they want to see getting these rewards. That percentage is based on current participation. If less ability to get rewards leads to lower participation which leads to lower ratings overall, the real percentage of players getting these rewards will be much lower than Blizzard's intended percentage of players getting these rewards.

Did they mention anything about "tank and switch"? It's where you use alts to tank a team's rating and then use mains to get a better personal rating easier. It seems this is one of the most blatant abuses around. I admit I haven't been following arena much lately.

I am very excited for these changes. What interests me most is that blizzard clearly put a lot of thought into the range of requirements. Oh you're just starting? Here, have some gloves. Oh, you won a few more than you lost? Take some pants. Good call IMO

You are missing something.

Essentially if you join a 2000 rated team and play 10 games, and your personal rating is just 1500 you'll only earn like 200ish arena points instead of 900ish.

It's talking about the gear points, not the rating points.

What is wrong with it? It is just the same as 2 skilled friends helping out a not as good friend. Except you are paying them to be your friend.

How would you stop it? You won those games fair and square. You might not have pulled your weight on your team, but you won the games anyway. Your team has the rating that they deserve.

Except, you also need the team rating to buy the items. You only gets points/matching on personals if you are 150 below the team.

Exactly. This sort of point selling is incredibly hard to combat, but also takes much more time, effort and skill on the part of the people doing the selling. It is much harder to level up a new team effectively going in as 2.5v3, since the buyer can hardly be expected to pull their own weight, as opposed to playing with three sellers, and then letting the buyers play a few games afterwards.

All told, this will hurt the point selling that takes just an hour or two to reach a very high rating, and just selling the team or letting people get in three games per week, but won't hurt the type of selling that can take multiple days of grinding, and will severely limit the maximum attainable rating. Not to mention this will be, for example with a 3v3, two people selling points to one buyer, instead of three people selling a higher amount of points for less time spent to three buyers.

I must say, I'm quite impressed with all of the changes Blizzard has made to the Arena system. It's not perfect, but it's a vast improvement over the last three seasons.

I think rating requirements on high-end items make a lot of sense. I'm a little concerned that they may extend this a bit too harshly in the future, and provide even greater obstacles to arena participation for classes/specs that already drastically underperform (like Prot warriors!). But with any luck, they're already thinking seriously about how to close the gap between PvE and PvP, such that it won't be an issue.

I like the idea of more ratings to enable a sort of progression, but they certainly could have evened out the curve a little more.

At 1500 you get five pieces of loot. Once you get to 1700 you've unlocked 6 more pieces of loot, roughly one piece every 25-50 points. Once you hit 1700 however, its a 100 point jump to get last season's weapon. And then a 150 point jump to get last seasons shoulders. And the steep curve remains up to S4 shoulders. Those will be significant stumbling blocks for teams without ideal composition. They should have used S3 Weapon/Shoulders to even out the curve between 1700 and 1900.

And by using the average personal rating of a team for matching purposes, Blizzard is now pulling more highly rated players into lower tiers, which is my biggest problem with arena. I want to be matched against teams with players at my level, not a team of four 2k players and one 1500 player.

One of us has this wrong. Not all matches are being done by average rating that's ONLY when most of the team has a personal rating way lower than the team rating (from buying a team usualy) your 4 2k people and 1 1.5k person = average of 1900. 1900 isn't more than 150 points less than the team rating so they would continue to match against 2k teams you would need 4 people in the 2500 range taking on a 1500 rated person to even make the rule kick in and then they would still play a 2300 rated team (which i assume point gains for the win would be 1-2 ponts at most)

Yeah, my example using a 5's team wasn't clear. If all the players on that team reroll, what should have been a 1900-2000 team is now being matched against 1500 teams. The problem with the new average rating mechanism is that it is pointed in the wrong direction.

However, ignoring rerolls, a 2's team with one 2k player and one 1500 player, that averages out to 1750 (coincidently the glass ceiling a lot of people bump in to). So that argument applies too.

It just seems like the general wrong direction for Blizzard to move. On one hand, there are new impediments to my gear advancement in arena, but on the other hand I can expect to face even more people with the best gear.

As someone who doesn't PvP (hello prot warrior FTL) I still continue to see the current Arena reward setup as horribly flawed. As the seasons pass, the PvP gear is far outweighing the PvE equivalent in many categories. Worse, is that outside of the arena setup, people with this gear are virtually impossible to kill for someone without the same PvP gear level. Even in full PvE dps gear there is little you can do against someone even in just half season 2 gear. I think that at some point they need to make certain stats only active in Battlegrounds or Arena's.

What I would LOVE to see is that the gear is only wearable if you currently have that rank... and to prevent people from hitting their goal and stopping, your rating should decay with inactivity. This would force people to actually try to maintain their ranking and virtually halt the current point trading and farming system.

I just hate how they are forcing this down out throats because they so desperately want esport acceptance.

You must not have been around during the HWL days.

...No. I can't agree. PvP is PvP is PvP. Whether it's World, Arena or BG PvP, you can't have PvP gear not work in PvP. Congratulations, you've attained 2.4k personal and team rating in Arenas. This gear is not active in world PvP.


If PvP gear had 20% reduced stats in a raid/instance environment, I wouldn't mind. But you can't have PvP gear not work in PvP.