As a former rank 12, all I can say is.....

And where's the NPC to trade my bloodfang for bonescythe. Why would you bother to PvE. Time, effort, consumeables, etc. And you have to repeat it again every 3-4 months. Or you can just PvP once, and get free upgrades for the rest of your WoW days.

Personally I think a better model would've been to add all-new items rather than modifying the old ones so that former Rank 12-14s have to grind back up if they want the items. Of course, the whole PvP needs to be overhauled, but that's what 1.12 is for.

On the other hand, if you want to play the game to PvP, you shouldn't have to be a bleeding-edge raider to be competitive. The problem is really just that when it comes to pure DPS classes, there's no difference in the gear you want for one task versus the other.

One option would be to tone down the PvP items' base stats a bit but instead buff them by adding Equip: modifiers that increase damage against other player targets only.

http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/9...arcanum0vi.jpg <-- Blue set
http://img238.imageshack.us/my.php?image=magepvp3nc.jpg <-- Epic set

Personally I'm happy I'll rank up to 9 this week and just slowly hold rank / move up rank till 1.11 so I can buy upgrades over my current epic set from raid content.

The problem with Gurg, is PvP takes 0 skill. None. It's all about time commitment. Which they admitted, and said they wanted to overhaul the PvP system to make it more "skill-based". And then they upgrade the PvP sets, rewarding people for queueing up 12 hours a day. If they revised the PvP system, and then revised the sets, and made you regrind, I'd be happy with that. But to upgrade people who got their sets months ago, with free new items, in a system that's still a joke, is like giving a vendor who upgrades tier 1 from MC, to our tier 3 sets.

Is there 100% conirmation that PvP armor upgrades will be retroactive ? And yeah, this is a slap to all raiders.

Not 100% I don't think, but I can only assume that the way these were discovered was generating item links using the known item IDs, and the server will allow that since they're sitting there on a vendor and thus "exist" for purposes of the datamine-prevention tools. So if it's using known item IDs one would assume that the existing items were retroactively updated.

The weapons haven't changed, and the armor looks to me like ilvl ~75 across the board, which puts it right around tier 2, but people with AQ and obviously Naxx gear are going to be doing much better for themselves.

It's a thorny area, really. I dislike the idea of giving people free rewards for stuff they've done during their 2005 summer vacations. But on the other hand, PvP gear does need to improve and remain roughly one tier behind the cutting-edge raid gear. It shouldn't be better (and this stuff isn't better than Naxx gear), but the same items that used to be amazing when introduced last July or thereabouts are pretty lackluster 10 months later.

Much agree with what Gurgthock said. While it seems unfair to us raiders to retroactively reward a few players like this, it will benefit a much larger number of future players who cannot raid for whatever reason, but can PVP. This is a pretty good way of leveling the playing field and appeasing people that (sort of) have a legitimate complaint. It's Blizzard's way of giving so-called casual* players access to epic loot.

*I still throw up my hands at people who play 40 hours a week and claim they are casual. I play my main maybe 15-20 hours a week as a "hardcore" raider.

Only lack lustre on realms that are killing C'Thun.

On my realm, where's there's only 3 horde guilds in total who have gotten past Razorgore, this new PvP gear is going to blow the water out of the gear that's currently available. We're an old realm as well, been up since day 1 of the euro launch.

I guess they were trapped in a corner over how to upgrade the armour sets and keep them competitive etc - it's just a shame they are being handed out for free ffectively. It's not like the old armour sets were necesserily that bad until you get some deep AQ gear.

There's also the issue for guilds that aren't cutting edge - guilds that are just starting to farm Nefarian, or learn BWL, or just venture into AQ, would actually be better served by the PvP ladder now, given the automatic upgrades available. Why raid now, when you can PvP, get the same gear and have it upgraded in 6 months time?

It's a thorny issue, and I look forward to seeing what they do to the PvP system in 1.12 and BC.

New r14 weapons. Which word is you do need to regrind to 14 to buy.

Yeah, brand new items added means you must be rank 14 to buy, so only new rank 14s can get them. If they do the same with PvP armor, it wouldn't be nearly so bad. There is definitely something very distasteful about someone who used to be a Marshal in August 2005 and is now a Sergeant suddenly getting free upgrades across the board.

This might impact Elitist Jerks because you're always on the bleeding edge of new content. Majority of the PvE guilds across the board just open a guidebook for each fight and use proven strategies. After the guilds manage the fight it's just basically punching the loot clock once a week. If a guild overtakes you as best guild on the server it doesn't really matter, you'll get the items one way or another.

If a PvP group overtakes my group I'd lose months of work forever. Add into this fact that PvP teams are self destructive, once a person hits their desired rank they generally stop PvPing except for a few games here and there. PvPers are getting rewarded for the extra competition and chance of losing all their work. There might be servers where everything is predecided and there might be servers where competition is so cutt throat that Standing 1 would be three million CP. You can't draw a line across the entire game like you can with PvE. Each server has a different amounts of geared people and stronger and weaker competition.

I doubt this is gonna be something PvE'ers and PvP'ers will EVER see eye-to-eye on. PvE'ers think that Pvpers are having an enjoyable time doing their grind and PvPers believe PvE'ers are lazy for just doing an instance for 5 hours a day.

Yeah, it's a valid point that I'd meant to add in my reply to Xi.

Yes, trailblazing new content requires skillful play. I don't have my Stormcaller Hauberk because I play a lot -- I have it because I play well, and the 39 people alongside me do as well, and we're good at developing and executing strategies.

But in terms of it being "hard" to get PvE epics, tell me you've never seen a shitty, awful player who has a lot of tier 2 pieces. Now say it with a straight face. If I were a new player on a new server who could play 6pm-midnight all weekdays and noon-2am all weekends if needed, I could join a raid guild pretty easily. Maybe not the best raid guild on the server. But I could show up to every raid, do my simple job, get DKP quickly, and get an epic every other week on average. I'll never see a server first, much less a world first, and some things like world spawns may be off-limits to me, but just by logging on every day I'll get my loot. Don't tell me that it's particularly "hard" to assemble a set of ilvl 70+ epics via PvE content if you are a very active player. That's just a disingenuous argument.

I guess it might be a Lightning's Blade exclusive thing, but then again we're home to idiots like Ming.

It is server (and faction) dependent though. On my server (Cenarion Circle which has been out since release), there are only 2 horde guilds that kill Nef. I've been raiding for about a year and have 6/8 tier 2. So depending on the state of end-game raiding on a particular server, the PvP upgrades are significant. There have definately been more high warlord's horde side with the epic set and weapon than people walking around in 8/8 tier 2.

I orignally wrote this with more profanity, but I decided to tone it down.

Please, Jesus, just shut the fuck up. Every single upgrade to PVE gear has been retroactive, why should PVP be the lone exception? When the original tier 1 and tier 2 gear was almost total shit did you have to get the items a second time when they got upgraded? When Deathbringer and Vis'kag were shitty 45 dps weapons did you have to kill Onyxia again to get the 55 dps version? Look at this patch. They upgraded all the ZG gear and you don't have to do anything to get them.

Blizzard decided the current PVP armor was not good enough, so they changed it. Just like they've done in the past with other items. If you are against "free" rewards I suggest all you god damn hypocrites delete the shit you got over a year ago and farm it up again.

Slap in the face to raiders? I'll tell you what's a slap in the face, that people this god damn stupid can get tier2/tier3 gear. I hate all of you.

Oh, hello.

I think the PvP scene on LB isn't as grueling as it is in some other places (at least, to the extent which is possible in the system that we have). I've only seen one person, Reso, actually grind to 14 within the guild (the rest joined post-GM--Ming, Draega, Eztoonv, etc.). He had to put the hours in, sure, but didn't have a massive amount of competition within the Alliance. As far as I know there are never more than 1-2 serious groups, and they always coordinate with each other. And sometimes there isn't even that, and things like the "10-mage team" running around yesterday have success. I can imagine it being a heck of a lot worse getting to R14 if someone else is trying just as hard as you to take your 1st standing each week.

At the risk of stepping into a narrowly collimated beam of invective, this part isn't really a great argument. It seems like these PvP upgrades are being done specifically to provide progression. You may say I'm splitting hairs, but that's never been done for PvE gear. Those PvP sets lasted for months, presumably because people thought they were appropriate for the time investment to get them. Now, the time investment hasn't changed, but PvP'ers need a way to keep up with the game advancing around them. Since Blizz hasn't worked out a better PvP system yet, they're handing some of it over for now.

This is one issue I'd like to address also, the PvP system is also riddled with a political system. Teams one upping eachother by any means possible. Two of the GM's in that quote were handed their rank. (Reso and Eztoonv) I was part of a team that handed them 5 caps in Arathi Basin. Now picture yourself trying to compete against a team that plays 18 hours a day and gets free wins. On top of this Alliance had the long queue so the other teams had to face us and generally lost compounding the CP gap between those teams.

Then what the hell do you call making Might useful for tanking? What the hell do you call taking the spirit off Nightslayer? Cosmetic? ANY CHANGE that makes something better aids progression.

Falicy. You assume it was within the players power to change the sets. I can't speak for other sets but the only significant piece of warrior gear were the legs. Everything else was eclipsed or equaled when BWL was released.

That's what personally upsets me most - basically, if you've grinded to rank 14 sometime in the past year, you're now getting a huge gear upgrade just because the new Tier 3 sets out that raiders have to work for are a lot better. I'd have no problem with these changes if it required people to regrind those ranks to get their armor.

Pve sets have been upgraded yes, but never like this. The old old wrath was half dps half tanking, they didnt upgrade the set at all. they just respent the stats in a better way for tanking. I dont know if the ilvls jumped up a bit but it was nothing like this. The changes to the pvp sets are huge increases in power. I know warrior who will have dps gear nearly as good as mine that has only raided a dozen times since aq came out. I dont have a better system but free handouts for work done 6 months ago is stupid.

One more thing about the pve vs pvp time and effort. I know for a fact that ive spend enough time raiding and farming consuables to have gm 3 times over on my sever. So that whole "getting gm is harder work" thing is bullshit. For every pvp server with 24 hour botted chars there is a pve server with almost dead pvp that isnt that hard to get gm on.

I didn't mean "aid progression." I meant, actually provide the advancement of your character. For PvE players, the progression of your character sheet from one tier to the next is always effected by replacing most of the items. Might didn't morph into Wrath for free. For these PvP players, progression from one tier to the next has been provided with a buff to the existing gear.