• frmorrison

I doubt Blizzard will change the Sunwell island vendor's badges gear ever. IMO it is better to get a badges weapon for your desired spec before other gear.

Know Thy group function; Thy DPS shall avoid aggro, Thy tank shall not attempt to DPS (Fixed in WotLK!), and Thy Healer shall not go AFK without notifying Thy group.

 

Cainman

Related to that same question but about the token side not the badge side, if S1 is no longer going to be available from honor will you still be able to turn in T4 tokens for it, or will t4 tokens maybe be turned in for s2?

 

sadistic

I think its reasonable to assume that you will get ses2 from t4 etc

Or worst case scenario, t4 dont do jack, t5 gives ses2, t6 gives ses3

 

Liquid_Vision

Right now T6 along with T5 both give S2 gear, correct? So why would Blizz bump T6 gear up to giving S3 gear? Seems odd. Also, I doubt you'll be able to use T6 shoulders to get S3 shoulders considering there's still the rating requirement and whatnot.

 

Vaeys

On the PTRs when S4 was up, T4 tokens still gave S1, T5 to S2, etc.

Only the vendors which sold pieces for arena or honour points changed in any way.

 

Krellian

I have seen several posts here with the same basic premise; why should bad players be allowed top line gear (pvp). Think about it this way. A bad player in full s3 will still get stomped by a good player in s2(much less s3). Aside from point selling or boosting, the "prestige" for good players are titles and specifically shoulders. Let the bad players have 10 games a week to get an item every two months, they still wont be able to beat a good player, which is reward enough. (keeps both paying...er playing).

 

Krellian

what you are looking for here is a system that uses percentages instead of fixed ratings. For example instead of a weapon being 1850 rating, it would be you must rank in the top 1/3 of teams in that bracket. That way inflation has no effect since it is a moving target that adjusts for any amount of points in the system.

 

madman

I have only been doing arena for gear that can help me in PvE. First the S2 daggers, then the S3 chest and the S3 helmet. If I don't have to do arena in the future because of the rating requirements, I really don't mind much. I've been wishing for a long time that the PvE and the PvP gear would be further differantiated so that you are not forced to to arena for the best possible upgrades to your raiding gear at a certain point.. just make the arena gear less viable in PvE.

 

• Jacimo

The problem with that would be Blizzard looking to maintain a partial level of duality between the two 'playmodes'. Adding on the rating requirements, specifically to the weapons, meant that you didn't suddenly see a bunch of Enhancement Shamans, Fury Warriors, Hunters and Rogues suddenly pop up in Black Temple with BT ilevel weaponry. Those that did have it were the players of noticeable PvP skill, but it was not a blanket situation that your DPS suddenly looked like they had strolled in from a picnic in Blades Edge Mountains.

Gurg surmised this best when referring to Thori'dal after its original data-mining. It's a PvE weapon, with PvE speeds. Its usefulness in arenas vs Season 4 was expected to be marginal at best. But ultimately, as many players participate of both genres of game-play, the over-lap is going to be accessible to many and is not something you can tune out of the realms.

What the ratings requirements across the entirety of Season 4 reflects is Blizzard attempting to impose an elitist edge to the 'welfare epics' that Sunwell Plateau items enforced on the PvE aspect of the game prior to Wrath of the Lich King. When you see somebody fully decked out in Season 4/Tier 6.5 as you both make your steady ways through Northrend's content, you'll know that the player earned it and didn't necessarily sit back jumping around in Alterac Valley or from starting a Badge collection.

"Playing card games is a lot like making love to a woman: it usually happens on a table, you feel great shame when it's over, and it gets less fun as you get older."

 

Enova

What you brought into discussion here is what will happen after Season 4. Basically, on every PVP realm in the world, for some time, between a month and half a year, Northrend will be just one massive killing field, where PVP will flourish. Now, occasional PVP happens nowdays too, but flying mounts being readily available for everyone somehow change the dynamics of PVP. Take those away for a few levels, AND mass a great deal of characters into new zones, and you've instantly revitalized PVP.

During this leveling period, gear will give a lot of people an edge. The hardcore raiders (man, I hate it when I have to use these terms) as well as top rated arena players should, by default, have no trouble going into Northrend with stuff that a level 80 player would have. Now, I'm not sure how many people have the foresight to actually take this into account, but a close to full set of s3 will still be a worthwhile investment in the context of walking into a battlefield. Ideally, if people know what to expect, there should still be a steady demand for arena points, be it the 10 matches a week kind of points.

Realistically? I have no idea; depending on what kind of items will sport resilience in the new content, and how attainable they'll be, you could simply stay in s1 and be just fine till you get s3 equivalent blues.

However, in the context of having to actually level in that gear, I'd say the ratings on s4 are quite a good way to keep world PVP fair.

 

Onomatopeizator

Maybe on some servers where people are really committed to PvP. But this didn't happen at TBC start on the realms I played on. Remember, each minute spent pvping is a minute not spent leveling, and most people probably will want to rush to 80 and only then think about killing something.

 

Enova

This is exactly what I mean... people will be in a rush to level; however, a herb, a rare mob, a quest item, are all damned good reasons to engage in PVP. My PVP realm experiences around BC launch seemed to indicate that it was far preferable to kill someone that was doing the same quest as you than to wait for him to be done. Hellfire was hell, when you got to the Purified Hellboar Meat quest, and a pretty much every other quest with low drop/spawn rates. (Overlord, the Drillmaster, etc)

(Never managed to level from 60 to 70 on a PVP realm to this day, actually, mostly because I couldn't be bothered to farm stuff I couldn't send over from my main, not because of the PVP scene)

 

Xaev

This is actually the exact opposite of what I experienced on my PvP server - there was extraordinarily little PvP going on in Hellfire and Zangarmarsh for the first week or two of BC (excluding fighting around the towers). The only other time that I've seen so little PvP is during the truce that was called while we ground our AQ gate open. People used their shiny new PvP epics to level and I suspect much the same will happen with the S3/4 gear that will be prevalent when Wrath finally arrives.

 

Akka

Same here.
It was practically a PvE server during leveling.

It was to the point where you COMMONLY saw eerie scenes of whole groups of people, Alliance and Horde, waiting politely in line for the repop of quest targets without stepping on each other toes.. Even the famous gankers avoided fight to not start battle and lose time.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Spork

This is how Mal'Ganis was as well. Occasionally the random horde/ally would fire off a shot starting a small brawl, but a lot of times, other horde/ally would just watch as their ally die to a rush of players from the other faction.

I'm guessing that this is how it will be when WotLK hits. There will probably be a few hot spots, like the road near ally base in Hellfire that passes next to the PvP spot, but I doubt it will be much different. People want to hit 80, want to spend their stockpiles of gold on what ever blizzard puts in and want to get their DK.

 

panny

Wow, it wasn't like that at all on my old server (Spinebreaker). The unspoken PvP truce lasted about halfway into HFP before PvP started up again (not without exceptions though).

 

Riallatar

I think the reason there were so many truces on PvP servers levelling initially in TBC is that - with so many people from both factions present, once a fight starts over a rare spawn, it could literally take hours to stop. You were better off behaving and waiting your turn than starting a huge brawl which resulted in nobody getting anything done until everyone got tired of corpse running.

 

• Beliandra

Haha yes that was the case on Daggerspine as well. If you started something expecting your faction-mates to help out you were more likely to see them /clap and let you die.

Of course once the people at the front of the curve hit 70, the violence began in earnest. Levelling my second character in HFP was perhaps the most brutal experience of my WoW life.

 

Zarabeth

I think the thing that bothers me most about this change is the complete and utter dichotomy between how Blizzard continually changes PvE and PVP.

In June '07, I worked my ass off to kill Nightbane and Gruul to become attuned to SSC. 6 days later, the attunement was lifted. This basically ruined raiding for me, proving that hard work in PvE would eventually go unrewarded if enough time passed. Sure enough, in early 2008, the attunements for Hyjal/BT were lifted, but I didn't care. Long before that I had stopped working hard on Vashj/Kael. I'm assuming that these types of changes were to allow more casual players to enjoy more of the end game content.

Why, then, is Blizzard taking the exact opposite approach to PvP?

 

Pheus

season 4 is supposed to be the sunwell of pvp, and i'm very confident that there will be thousands more people with season 4 arena gear of any variety than people who see the inside of, let alone get gear from, the sunwell

 

Enova

All I can possibly imagine is that Blizz sees the optimal effort to reward ratio somewhere between hardcore raiding and PVP. Raid content was deemed too hard to progress through, so they 'fixed' it. PVP content was deemed too easy to progress through (well, progression is a relative term, I suppose... most people only look at gathering a full epic set, obviously), so they fixed that.

Now, the question is who ultimately decides this? The designers or the marketing team? Pretty much irrelevant as there's nothing we can do about it, either way, but you'd have to be blind not to see how the game adjusts itself constantly. All in all, the rating requirements for gear don't seem too far fetched, and are miles ahead in terms of PVP gear progression compared to the old Rank 13 sets, as a competitive ladder system, because they reward effort rather than time investments.

 

Zarabeth

I agree entirely with this statement.

There is a different social setting and requirement between BGs and arena. BGs are something one can do by himself, for 20 minutes if that's all he has, in between classes, before work, before parents get home, etc. And they don't require you to know anyone in-game. Arena, on the other hand, forces at least a small in-game circle of friends, schedules, and voice over IP for maximum and best results.

From a strictly social standpoint, it makes no sense to merge these two concepts. Forcing social interaction in all aspects in-game is just not a good model.

 

whysoez

This is some pretty decent straw man...you're comparing the bare minimum of BG wit