Its simply not good enough if your a pvp player with top skills in what you do, and can beat anyone else who comes your way, except for those rare days where the uber raiders decide to come have some fun in pvp and blow off steam by rolling everyone else, even the people who spend their entire game time trying to be the best in that setting. Why should raiders merely by virtue of beating the current 'end dragon' somehow have the right to dominate PVP when one thing has nothing to do with the other?

Your argument makes sense but not on a practical level. On a practical level it kills any incentive for the pvp base (which is indeed quite large and prefers not to raid seriously). The investment needed between running the arena and making a top notch raiding guild is not the same. Raiders can easily just for kicks and giggles dabble in pvp and own up everything. A pvp guild who spends all their time creating group strategy and in arena, cannot nearly so easily say lets go raid Naxx when they have probably only cleared through MC when their bored.

I think the answer which Blizzard was once on the right track for was to make raiding gear good for, you know, raiding? Put resists on top of stats dont make seperate resist sets, which is dumb anyway and marginalizes all the things you have just won in the previous dungeon and now is useless. Put mana regen, put health regen, put aggro generation for tanks, aggro reduction for dps, whatever. When I first began raiding and acquired my Tier 1 I was suprised that for PVP my blue armor set pieces were just as good and in many cases superior to my Felheart. I quickly learned that the Tier 1 was much better for raiding. But now that balance is entirely shot as their are raiding sets largely the best for both sides of the game.

The raiders that will PVP "just for kicks" wont be ranking that high in the arena, meaning that they will not go against the "high skilled" PVPers very often.

As soon as people hit 70, they aren't suddenly going to be wearing Illidan gear. They might be wearing Nax gear which may or may not be all that much better than 60-70 socketed instance gear (and if they don't retroactively change the stamina budgeting, 70 blues could easily be better for PvP). So if people are starting their arena teams soon after TBC is out, they're not going to be hitting walls of PvE players decked out way better than them. Especially when the PvPer can work specifically for what item he needs and the PvE'er is hindered by droprates and trying to split loot across 25+ people, etc.

Now, if you start a few months down the line, then yeah you're going to have to work your gear up before being able to compete with the highest ratings -- but it's not just because you're fighting people with PvE gear, there will also be teams who geared up through PvP who are also going to outgear you. It's the nature of MMO's that starting later always puts you at a disadvantage, getting significantly larger as more time passes.

Well, again, if gear is equivalent there will be such little difference between raiders and pvpers that the, "raiders will dominate arenas," argument is moot.

This is, of course, unless Blizzard doesn't provide equivalent gear through the arenas, but I think this thread is under the assumption that they will stay true to their words and provide equivalent gear at the start and continue to update pvp rewards as pve rewards improve.

Lanky, glad to see you back on Bleeding Hollow, assuming you did leave at some point.

I changed the title up a bit. I don't mean to assert that we can only get so much PvP equipment up to a limit. I wanted to say that the rate at which we can get PvP gear will be akin to the rate you could get PvE gear in a raid. Since that is the case, we can improve the level to which we're equipped by doing both PvE and PvP.

Said another way, the people who do both PvP and PvE will have better gear than those who do one or the other.

Yes, that's sort of the way it's been for a while. That is, for some classes at least, a mixture of PvP gear and PvE gear tends to be the best loadout for PvP.

I actually left BH to play my 60 Enhancement shaman on Dalvengyr with RL friends, thus making me a traitor to all that is good and just.
Non sequiters aside, how many people besides me would like to see an Arena gear system where you did not need to PvE much / if at all, in order to get an excellent total gear setup? And I am talking with the same time and skill invested in PvP versus PvE.

To me, that is fixing PvP itemization. It is extremely hard to do, since you are dealing with two radically differing methods of gameplay, and must balance the rewards of each versus the other, but hopefully that is what Blizzard shoots for.

Going naked and weaponless into your first wsg ever because you can't use thrash blade makes perfect sense.

Resistances on pve gear was almost pointless for raiding as well as pvp. The tier 1 sets ended up with 34 FR and 24 SR the tier 2 sets ended up with 40 FR 10 of the minor ones and 30 SR. Now these stats made a minimal difference on a handful of fights after proper resist gear came in. Before that they still weren't very good because if you 'needed' resists then you needed a lot more than they provided and the rest of the time you didn't need them they just decreased your damage/healing output on pve fights that needed it. Not to mention that resist fights are lame and just make you more likely to get full 18 slot bags in every slot.

Well, now you have insights into the Shaman class that no one else on the Alliance has. Besides, these are all fictional rivalries anyway, a story to dehumanize the other side.

I LOVE such a system as you mention. And, what you're talking about, might be quite possible in time. But the two game types aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, with the dramatically lowered time requirements - every single day all week now versus 10 games in a week in the expansion* - the PvP gear will be far more available to PvE raiders.

So what you're saying might entirely be the case; you might be able to gear up entirely with PvP. However, you'll be outgeared faster by PvE'ers who also PvP. The reason why is that past the 10 game minimum, you can convert time into points with any reliability. The marginal benefit of that 11th game is so low, other options become more appealing.

I asserted at some point that PvE guilds would be silly not to take a night and send their members into the Arena for the loot available there. Essentially, they should treat it as another instance. Assuming a comparable return on investment in time, do you think that is a valid statement?

*It was stated in one of the articles that a character will be able to participate in a team in each bracket: 2x2, 3x3, 5x5. So it is possible you'll be able to get points from the standing of each team you're on. Assuming each bracket's award points go into the same pool, you may be able to treble the amount of points you can get. This is speculation, but is plausible if not likely.

Warning: This is a slight digression, but I do get back to the point of the argument eventually.

I'm always a little confused about people who seem to be advocates of a PvP system that is purely "skill based". There's always a group of people who ultimately want to either remove gear from the equation or limit it as a factor by having a system that matches up groups based on their relative gear level, but I don't understand why. What game do these people think they've been playing for the past nearly 2 years now? This is not CS or UT, it's an MMO with some PvP elements in it. Gear is (and always will be) a factor in determining somebodies success in this game in both PvP and PvE. That is the nature of this game, and it's a large part of the motivation for people to participate in the content of this game, whether it's PvP or PvE.

Like it or not, a big part of the reason many players spend large amounts of time and gold wiping on bosses is so that they can have a chance at gear that helps them in PvP. And I've seen plenty of PvP gear being used in raid instances as well.

But there's a group of people who dislike PvE, they find it boring and/or frustrating and either refuse to participate in it at all or only do so because they feel they have to to get gear for PvP. I can understand and somewhat relate to their feelings, but I also think they can be a unreasonable and/or unrealistic about their demands for absolute gear equality, or put another way gear aquisition equality.

I think there's an unspoken presumption that these players have that since they only PvP, they are better at PvP than people who participate in both PvP and PvE, and as such should be rewarded more for it. It annoys them when they see people in BGs with full raid gear because they're convinced that these players are bad at PvP (granted, in some cases they're right) and don't deserve to have an advantage over them.

What is your idea for an ideal PvP reward system for World of Warcraft? Do you want a PvP system that negates gear from the equation or limits it's use in PvP in some way? Well, right there you've killed a large motivation for people to participate in the system at all, you might as well go play Counterstrike. But what I think many people in this thread are looking for is a system that will reward those people who refuse to raid in some way that either favors the pure PvPers or penalizes the PvEers. I can't imagine how you could have such a system though. People who participate both PvP and PvE will always have an advantage unless you limit either the use of the gear aquired through PvE or penalize PvE players somehow, and if you do that, you've just killed a large part of the motivation for people who raid to raid and Blizzard would never do that. That is the nature of this game, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

This is funny that many people tend to think raiders are less pvp-skilled than "hardcore pvpers".

This isn't a FPS or RTS game, guys.

Pvp so far in WOW has been easy, requires much less energy and concentration than the pve aspect of the game.