Battlegrounds are the equivalent grind for pvp that heroics are for raiding.
I think that puts it into some perspective. you wouldn't expect to jump into (and perform in) a 25 man raid as soon as you hit 70, you need to grind gear up. is just the same in pvp.

BGs are more repetitive, but on the other hand you don't have to pug 5mans which can be painful, and you get a helping hand start from the buyable blue battlegear sets.

I'm a feral druid, did S3 as feral with a rogue. am now building a heal set to arena as resto for S4.
Prior to S4 starting, I had the S3 heal ring and bracers, the kharmaa resil/heal cloak, 25k honor, 1600 arena points. I got the S2 mace, grinded another 17k honor for the S4 belt, bought the S4 gloves and S4 offhand, so within 3 weeks i'm on 362 resil, +1540 heal.

I am not disagreeing with you, although I think you can, depending on situation and your guild, jump right into 25 mans and be carried and get some gear. You can not in PVP.

Of course, the main factor that makes the entry into the PVP scene so daunting and unrewarding right now is the age of the current expansion. When everyone is a newly minted 70, people are on a somewhat even footing. PVP is far less painful than it is as newly minted 70 facing people in Season 3-4 gear. Additionally, the world pvp gear from Halaa and elsewhere had a touch of resilience, and i used them for a good while before purchasing Arena season 1 gear. I am not sure how it is on other servers, but there is never anything going on in world pvp on any of the servers I play, whereas at the beginning of TBC world pvp was quite frequent, as we all wanted to attain those entry level pieces.

And, of course, Blizzard recognizes this, which is why they put the level 70 rep blue resilience gear in the game, which does help smooth the transition, although not in any meaningful way.

Meh, that's like saying if your 2 friends wanted to play with your class you could jump onto their team and get 'carried' for arena points, they'll want to start playing with you to gear you up and to get used to playing together. You'll be dead weight for a while.

I don't think you should disregard the blue battlegear sets so much. they are definitely more useful than going in your pve gear, not least because you can gem/enchant them specifically for pvp (eg +15 resil to chest, 'steady' gems)

I think there is a bigger gap between the average player's pve gear and S3, (previous situation) than there is between S0 battlegear and S4 (current situation) so blizzard have made it easier for people to enter than it was in S3- particularly so if you disregard the 2.4 badge pve items when comparing to S3, and if you assume new players will be low ranked and so competing against people who don't have rating for most of the S4 gear anyway.


In short, I think its easier now in S4 to get started (at low rankings) than it was in S3.

No, absolutely not. I could roll my face across my credit card in S3 and buy arena points or use my main's ratings to feed my alt points. In S4, neither of these options exist.

There's no way it's easier to get started in S4. It gets harder each and every season. Especially at the beginning of the season, when even the top teams start at 1500. Prepare to be crushed, because you're going up against experienced AND geared teams.

I'm unclear how's there is anything akin to us bringing back a warrior from a 4 month hiatus and getting him 3 pieces of Tier 6 in one raid in the arena scene as far as catchup. And regardless of whether Guild XYZ has Illidan on farm or not, they have >>something<< on farm. Clearly, in Season 4, someone playing catch up can do nothing but grab those blues and go lose badly for a while. Even if they happen to be skilled, they are facing 300ish points per week in the arena in all likelihood (maximum) and a tremendous amount of time (and suffering) in battlegrounds. So let's end the useless discussion of how easy it is to catch up there. It's nigh impossible versus previous seasons for the reasons mentioned and because quite frankly honor grinding is really horrible. The fact that people are willing to sit there and do it for 15-30 hour sessions doesn't make it good. It never has and it never will. Call me when they start rewarding time spent in other BGs as well as they reward the AFKers in AV.

As for arena, it's really over for the casuals at this point as reasonable people would've expected. At least from what I've seen. The only people I know left playing with any hopes of pushing beyond 1600 are quite serious and they are there as much for the ego as for the gear which, other than the weapons, is pretty minor on the upgrade curve. So be it.

I guess the only thing left to muse about it is whether in Lich King they'll return to a modified version of what existed early in TBC or whether this is now the norm, i.e. basically weapons are not available to the vast majority of the playerbase until they are fairly uninteresting.

This is really where the issue of honor grinding comes to play. I could find a warrior and run around dropping wf totem and healing him in wsg for a few hours a day, but get half the honor i could if i had done av.


Right now, s2 weapons are so far behind s3/s4 its not even funny. Stormherald is almost mandatory for warriors who dont have s3 yet, and its not exactly cheap to level bs for 1 weapon. They really shouldn't make a 2 season difference between arena weapons with ratings and battleground weapons, because it really discourages new people to try. Its not so bad for casters and healers, but melee get screwed from that deal really (and theyre not the rogues you complain about, because they have s2 weapons which really only tickle a little bit when they hit you).

Selling 2k PR to blue geared warriors in 2's? Let's not get carried away with over-exaggeration. While this may be very possible in 3's with 2 very good and well geared players carrying a 3rd severely undergeared player and certainly is doable in 5's there is such a small chance of a Resto class carrying someone who cannot do any damage at all and takes obscene amounts himself that it's laughable to even consider it.

Especially if the 2 people are complete strangers.

Comparing the barrier to entry this season to other seasons is almost pointless. The barrier in previous seasons was mostly gear which took longer to grind because there was no blue entry level set. There were a lot more casual teams playing just to get points for gear. This meant that a ton of people would look for a teammate in trade chat, get their 10 games and leave the team and they would do this every week. So even in terrible gear there was still a chance to get to 1650+ and get a decent amount of points over and over until you could get every piece other than weapon and shoulders.

If you'll allow me to be anecdotal this season is much different thus far. The barrier is skill to a much larger degree. Putting rating requirements on almost all the gear means a lot of people are getting together to see if they can achieve their 1650 for ring or whatever else, failing a few times and then just giving up.

Being a duelist last season with a 2038 rating I could restart a team and skate to 1850 with any s1 warrior with some semblance of skill. This season (and I know it's still early) I've played with 3 quite skilled and well geared warriors and we are having trouble breaking 1700. Part of that is because I'm playing worse than I'd like but the other part is that we are playing other duelist teams. Good matches against good teams you'd never expect to see multiple times, seemingly stuck in the 1700-1800 bracket. It's enfuriatingly frustrating.

It's a completely different scene this season than past seasons.

I am inclined to agree with what I'm seeing so far. It may be that the ratings have not 'evened out' yet, but I'm definitely leaning toward the idea of 1700 being the new 1850-2000. As much as I hate to admit, it seems like a lot of the fears of lower-rated people just dropping out (or maybe they can't break 1600?) are actually coming to fruition. I can see both sides of the implications here, while it means that it will be harder to achieve the better gear, it also means those that have it have truly earned it.

I'm not going to say I'm representative of anyone, but I basically quit doing arenas in Season 3 when the information that the system would be worsening from what it was in S3 was announced.

The ratings requirements on the S3 gear were a major slap in the face to start with, but I figured I'd give it a go since I had a 2k+ rated team in S2. However, the team that made it to 2k+ broke up and I was left looking for new partners. I moved around, got to ~1800 with several teams, but either had people quit or had teams backslide down from there. Back in March/April I realized I wasn't even going to be getting a good enough rating to get the S3 weapon. Soon after this I saw what blizzard was planning to do in S4 and I was done. I haven't played an arena game in months, and couldn't be happier. Arenas were making me a miserable person.

When arenas were something fun for 5 friends to do together to eventually get some gear is when blizzard had things right. I don't pay $15 a month to be in some kind of e-sport. I also don't pay $15 a month to be the stepping stone/punching bag for other teams to get their weapons/shoulders.

I figured that S4 would probably end up making a lot more people feel like I do thanks to blizzard cutting out the support system that even allowed people to balloon their ratings so absurdly high to start with. Teams that played below 1500 and people that sold teams were what was artificially inflating the ratings so absurdly high, and now blizzard cut the knees out from the system. What incentive is there for someone to play at below 1600 rating? The difference between S2 and S3 isn't much, and if you know you're never getting over 1600 even with S3 gear why bother?

Have to agree with you there. I played on a 5 man team in our guild that was only in it for fun and points...we hovered around the low 1400s and sometimes even lower and re-making. Few of us take PvP seriously, and we'd play with whoever was online at the time...so running with no healers or prot pallies, things like that.

Now, I also don't bother to arena. I have about 4500 points saved up, and no idea what to do with them. The arena items I can get aren't any better for PvE than what I have. Actually, I wonder if we'll see a season 4.5 because of this. I can't imagine we'll have a new set of PvP gear before WotLK, and I don't see that coming before late this year. Seems like a long time to stay in S4. Would be cool if they had a "casual" season after giving out S4 rewards, and dropped all the rating requirements entirely.

At that point, with WotLK coming so soon, there's no need to be concerned about giving out gear that isn't "earned" since it will all be replaced in the expansion. You could always rename the items (Bruised Gladiator instead of Brutal?) so those that got the ratings in S4 would still stand out. And this could give a final boost to raiding...people looking to clear just one more raid boss before WotLK makes all lvl70 raids obsolete would get a bit more gear to help them out.

It'd give people a reason to play for the last few months before the expansion, a couple last goals to shoot for. Also, Bliz could announce that they are resetting arena points and BG honor with the release of WotLK...so buy your items now! Would let everyone start on a level playing field when S5 items become available (assume they will with the release of WotLK?). Heck, the hardcore PvPers would need no more points and so would largely drop out of the PvP scene, letting people go back to arenas without getting stomped by fully-geared teams.

It would be cool, but I just am not that into PvP. I wanted some of the rewards and so got some guildies together and ran some matches for fun. Now there are no rewards for it, so I do other things in WoW I find entertaining that also give rewards.

So I didn't play just to lose, we didn't just /dance or anything. But we didn't seriously try to win (meaning didn't stack the right classes, grind for honor gear, etc.), it was just a way to get gear to help with raiding. And it was fun. Just it was fun + rewards, and now it's just fun, and there are other things I can do in the game that offers fun + rewards, so I do them.

Edit: and I did try a competetive 2v2 team for a while. It ended up feeling more like work: we argued with each other over who should have done what, etc. All in all, I find not worring about rating just more fun...that and I find BGs to be a terrible grind (how many countless hours have people spent in AV?), and you pretty much need that PvP gear for the resiliance to be competetive (insert comment about how rogues don't need it to be successful here...I would need it, I'm not good at PvP and don't claim to be).

Of course they don't, at least not all of them. And I never said that's why everyone PvPs.

But many, many people PvP for just that reason. You are just being argumentative here...no one seriously thinks BGs would still be this active if there were no honor points awarded and no BG rewards. And we already see a decline in arena teams in S4 as people see they will never get the rewards and drop out, so those competing for the rewards find higher ratings harder to achieve without scrub teams filling the bottom half of arena ratings. All I'm saying is that Blizzard should consider continuing the nerfing of content they have done throughout BC and nerf ratings on arena gear as WotLK gets close...and I think many people would enjoy and benefit from it. And those who are serious about PvP will have gotten the rewards they want by that time anyways (or hit a wall they just can't climb), so it hurts no-one. IMO of course.

I really don't think you can make a judgment yet, so early in the season. There are still casual teams are just starting to reform after farming up the honor for the new s4 pieces, and (for example) in 3v3 you'll see everyone from Warrior/Rogue/Hunter in blues and s1 to full s3 RMP in the 1500s and 1600s. In a month or so, once things have stratified, you can check out the first two pages (Top 40 teams) of any given battlegroup and see if they are hovering around 2300-2400. If they are, ratings are pretty similar. If they aren't, there was a shift in what a 'high end' rated team is.

Also, forgive me for being a bit snide, but when I look through discussions on Sunwell Plateau, I don't see posts stating "Blizzard completely ruined the game with Sunwell. I don't take PvE seriously but I still want some rewards, and this Brut strict gear-check is ruining the fun for me." Yet this sort of discussion makes of the *majority* of this thread and all other PvP threads like it.

If people, by their own admission, don't want to take Arenas seriously, it's not an indication of a broken system. Casual raiders are working through nerfed tier 5/6 content right now, and casual pvp'ers should be working through (equivalent) nerfed s2/s3 content.

Your casual pve'er doesn't zone into SSC, clear to Hydros and instead find Brutalis there. That happens (and may continue happening even after stratification if the matchmaking gets strained) now all the time to your casual pvpers when they hit the S3/S4 decked out uberteam: be it due to rerolls, be it just pure bad matchmaking.

Personally, I keep having the odd thought that: What if Blizz fully expects s4 normal realms pvp to tank; to drive up participation on the arena realm. The Arena realm is a far more structured and balanced thing, pvp wise (no pve, no pve rewards, etc).

I don't know, but my priest in blues and greens (and the guardian belt) (Nurafor on EU-Antonidas) constantly hovers around 1420-1500 in 2's and that is together with another alt. Soon when we get SOME gear, we will move up to 1550 and get the next item. Then 1575, then 1600. It's perfectly fine in my opinion.

edit: To clarify: I sometimes get the impression that people want to have to much in way to short time. Maybe you have to fight for the 50 points increase in the rating. Or even the 25 points. But you can fight for it and after all 25 points is like what? 2 Wins in arena?

I don't think there's any nefarious plot underway, but I do think that the only way to avoid the huge barrier to entry by new players into arena PvP is to just have them on their own arena-only servers. Hell, I'd love it if there was a arena(or arena & battleground) only server with a "smoothed" PvP gear progression and no PvE at all. Unfortunately, Blizzard seems dead set against that sort of thing.

Short of that, what about having the arena matchmaking system track the highest personal rating of a character in the previous season into the new one, and use that as a hidden variable when matching teams? Or just let a portion of high ratings carry over. Is letting a 2200 team start the new season at, say, 1700 really going to do anything but prevent the incoming teams from getting squashed flat as the veteran team rolls up the rankings?

Rating resets defeat the entire point of ELO matching. There is no point in having 2K+ true strengths fighting 1500's (true strengths or new players) at all, let alone for full points. It's never been a good idea, the S4 PvP changes and some of the truly broken scaling at the top end of gear for some classes in this point of Burning Crusade are just exacerbating it.

Even if I do get the rating I won't be using the brutal shoulders on my druid... they are so god awful ugly, at least i can turn off the helm.

Your feelings are quite rare, and many people think the shoulders look fine on Druids.


Anyway, it is bad that people can tank the rating, so even fewer people can use Shoulders.

I've had an incredible amount of fun 2v2'ing with a friend and working for each piece of gear in turn, slowly climbing our way up to 1700 (and getting better as we do). If there was one thing I could change about the system, though, it would be to have more gear in the 1700-2200 range, because the 1800 S3 weapons aren't upgrades for us, and 1700-1950 is quite an uphill climb. Shooting for each incremental 50-point upgrade, though, has been very fun, and felt MUCH more streamlined and polished than the tacked-on feel of the S3 weapons and shoulders.

This is not exaggeration or rumor. It's a fact. My old GM (a Resto Druid) sold 2k PR to warriors for 8k (this was before isle inflated gold).

That very well may be true. The point I was making is that there is utterly no possible way a Resto Druid can reliably get to 2k rating with a blue geared random warrior. Which is what you said was happening. You were exaggerating the point.

He was most likely selling to warriors who had gear to begin with. After all most people aren't going to buy shoulders before they have gotten the pieces they can get themselves first. And 8k gold is steep. Your normal casual player isn't going to have that much gold. He was selling to more serious players.

Regardless, This season is not last season. It's safe to say the brackets will even themselves out and teams will return to their true ratings. But how long before it happens and will it cause people to quit before it does?