Well, granted, my experience is limited to only two servers. On Hellscream, 90% of the rank 14s were complete jokes at PvP. They were barely even efficient at farming honor. On Dalvengyr, I'd say it's closer to 70 or 80% of the rank 14s that are mediocre. I don't mean that they're horrible and lose every fight, but they're not good players.

I agree that the new rank 12/13 gear should have some prereq to upgrade it, as for warriors, it's so close to conqueror's, which is the best gear in the game right now, that getting r12/13 or conq is 6 of 1, 1/2 dozen of another. Hopefully naxx will have even better gear in the same vein as conqueror's to compensate, i'm hopeful after seeing the gloves and neck off kelthuzad.

Anyway, from the hints i've seen blizz dropping, here's my theory of what they're going to do for the xpac for pvp.

They've talked about having multiple factions in the xpac for various cities, and that having rep with that faction changes what npc's will talk to you and what vendors you can talk to and so forth... so my theory is this: What if these factions make it so that you no longer function as alliance to other alliance? Or horde to other horde? What if having rep with a certain faction makes you friendly to ANYONE else who is also friendly with them? Horde or alliance... Also, having friendly rep with one faction means you're automatically unfriendly or hated with another, similar to bloodsail/booty bay rep now.

This would introduce a whole new dynamic to pvp. People could make alliances with whoever they chose, and pick and choose who they were going to be friendly or hated with. The thing gurg mentioned about the aq farming event where he couldn't do anything to someone on his faction who was acting like a douche would go away... someone pisses you off, you can just get another faction's rep and go and kill that person who pissed you off before. With enough different and opposing factions, this could get very interesting, especially when you throw in the objectives that they've hinted at. This would be akin to setting up warring tribes or fiefs (guilds) with members composed of anyone and everyone. Nonstop conflict and action and back and forth... would be so awesome :)

Both statements cannot be true. Either you can steamroll the best geared people in 8 minutes, which is basically straight running back and forth with no slowdown, steamrolling their carrier in the middle, or you can't. Teams that can supposedly steamroll C'thun killing guilds in 8 minutes, cannot be beaten or cockblocked. It can't happen. I played WSG all weekend, and I don't think I lost one game. You want to know what happened when people tried to turtle up on us? 2 DS rogues, 1 rounded their priest, and then 2 AP trinket mages blew the face off their carrier. Thanks for the cap.

They deserved to get their gear ONCE. Which they did. The complaint is about the free upgrade of items in ilvl's to the latest tier of raid content.

No, people who grind to GM/HWL now either:

a) Are part of a dedicated CP farming team, in which case gear really could matter less (coordination>cc+heals>gear).

b) AFK out to farm lesser geared opponents.

People who genuinely try to grind to rank 14 against organized AQ opponents will never make it past rank 11.

What if the new PvP sets were upgraded in similar ways to how the tier 0.5 sets were upgraded? Pay a sum of gold, hand in your old item and do some quest. Could even see some farming requirements like turn in stacks of Free Action Pots or some other PvP related consumable. Or could be a turn in of a set number of honor marks. Hard? Not really, but at least time consuming to an extent.

Could spread out the gear quests over the three current battlegrounds. Gloves/Boots from Warsong. Legs/Shoulders from Arathi. Chest/Helm from Alterac.

Could even make it world PvP related. Not necessarily, kill Thrall for your chest piece, but could easily be another NPC target that would required an organized group behind enemy lines.

Could even add something simple like bring the head of a rank 14 and three heads of rank 13s along with the head of the battlemaster in Thunder Bluff.

Or toss in a new contested NPC in Alterac that drops a requirement.

Not necessarily on par with clearing BWL for full tier 2, but at least something more time consuming and intuitive than just retroactive upgrades.

There is no mutual exclusivity or "supposedly" in what I said. I've spoken pure truth without exaggeration. WoW BGs can be a bit deeper than most people realize and it doesn't boil down to such simple comparisons.

It would be pretty simple for blizzard to fix this Pvp problem... simply remove De-ranking/Rank Decay.... if you don't get enough CP to Move up in rank you would just stay the same instead of going down....requiring the same amount of CP earned to Get R14 from a straight grind now.... It would also allow people to take breaks and allow adding New ranks with new gear, since people who earned R14 would still have it and would be able to rank up to the new lvl of gear.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...hreadID=514666

Given that CP has no fixed value except in relation to the advancement of others in your faction, this would basically be like honor mcnuggets... with mudflation. Brilliance.

By the way, cross-linking your thread in the wow boards will get you physically violated by the owners of this place.

well, at least they are not increasing the item levels of existing hgh warlord and grand marshall weapons. I am very happy they finally decided to add one handed and off handed casetr options, as well as a two handed hammer for paladins/shamans/druids that can be used in Pve (to an extent). I'm just miffed blizzard lets them upgrade their old armour but not give them access to the new weapons.

New WSG legs are also a very nice addition. But the reason the pvp items are going to see godly compared to tier 2 (not looking at ilevels) is because they do not recquire points spent in resistance. Tier 3 completely slaughters the PvP sets still, and as long as the PvP honour system remains broken alloowing one off free upgrades of armour seems fine to me. I mean if i was rank 14 in October 2005 and hadn't pvp'd since, but had been in a raiding guild for discussion's sake, i'd be thrilled about the free changes as it also helps my guild to progress as i'm one less person they need to gear up to increase raid dps. Therefore theoretically faster progress.

Comparing the effort spend on PvE versus PvP rewards just does not work. Assuming you can find a few hours in a row and a get into a friendly guild that will let you join in on raids during those consecutive hours you will over time get better and better gear from the raid instances. Nobody will ever get to rank 14 by PvPing for a few hours with the current system. The other problem is that PvP progress is based on how much everyone else from your side PvPs, whereas PvE you are only limited by what your raid can accomplish with the raid lockins.

How to fix it really depends on what Blizzard wants to accomplish with the PvP system. The PvE raid progress seems to be overall very good, bar a few tuning problems here and there. Small scale PvE could use some better progression, and Blizzard seems to be claiming they will solve this in the expansion.

For PvP they haven't really come out with any hints as to how they will change it, just some mentions that PvP changes are coming. Personally I think they need to remove the big item rewards from the ranking system, just have the ranks as a weekly ladder with some minor rewards. Instead move the rewards to either a reputation or token based system. The problem with reputation is that those who have time to PvP as long as the BGs are up will earn the reputation probably faster than raiders, unless you make the rep grind so long that those who PvP in smaller doses will never see the rewards before they are obsolete by two more tiers of gear. With a token system you can cap how many tokens a person can earn per week pretty easily, and hence add a raid lockin like system for progress. One way would be to have two tokens, Yin and Yang tokens. What token you earn alternates every week. During a Yin week you can hand in the Yang tokens you earned the week before and vice versa. The tokens could a lifetime of 14 days so you can't save them up, as well as having a limit of how many you can hold. You could then tune the tokens and how many needed for a new item to be close to the time it takes an average raiding guild to earn their next tier of gear.

For example if earning one new item takes about 2 weeks for a raider then you could require the PvPers two weeks of max Yin&Yang tokens for each reward. If you don't reach the limit of the tokens it will take you as many weeks as needed to hand in enough to get your item, balancing it out with more casual raiding guilds. Tuned right it would let the hardcore PvPers earn their rewards at a same rate as the raiders, but still let more casual PvPers earn good rewards at a slower rate. Tokens could be earned in a variety of ways, like the current win/loose tokens, or for outdoor objectives or even new quests inside BGs.

Then just make the rank system have more symbolic and bragging rights attached. Maybe with some minor benefits like free flights, better purchasable potions, instant teleports between major cities, etc. People will still go to amazing lengths to be listed as the top10 on their server/cluster on some ladder posted on the website.

Really I don't care too much about the free upgrade as long as it’s just this one time, although I think they could have at least put some effort into making them require a minor effort to obtain them. If this turns out to be the way the PvP system works then hell no, but my hope is they have a better plan. Ideally you will have several paths to progress your character based on your play style, large scale raiding, small group/raids, solo, PvP that all have rewards that are based on how much time, effort and skill you have over a longer term instead of how much time you can dump into it on a shorter term.

The most important aspect is that it should have some level of fun to it, and not requires you to make it a full time job to progress.

[edit: spelling]