PvP has changed a whole lot from WoW 1.0 to BC. Some key notes in which upheaved old school PvP and brought us to where we are now.

Stamina Buff- Higher Health in general. Those who favor stamina and stack it can end up with over 10k Health.

Damage gain- Overall Damage buff helps to mitigate the higher health everyone has. Still health outstrips the damage gain.

Burst Damage- This is the one really revolutionizing PvP. Many classes got some form of burst pvp to quickly deal damage. Most players can do thousands of points of damage over a short period of time now. If you don't have enough health to stay at an acceptable health level so you can do something productive back against them, you're dead.

Gear- The gear most people have now are unsuited for PvP. If you want to PvP now and live you Should have at least 8k health. Less then that and you are going to be hurting and dying very often very easily. Many of you right now are thinking 8k HP is a ton of HP. Wrong! 10k HP now would be like my mage running around with 6K (or more) HP before WoW 2.0. I could live for a very very VERY long time. Right now those wearing normal gear (dmg gear, non stam gear) can utterly annihilate anyone else with normal gear. I tested this out on my mage with the following results...

WoW 1.0 PvP gear- This gear has nice damage and normal stam (or less) compared to the new BC gear. I found I died pretty quickly to almost anything. If anything got the first shot off on me I was toast. What happened was more classes would burn al of their Quick Bust damage on me and take off about 4k of my health leaving me with 2k left which normal attacks/next round of cooldowns torched me. If I saw something first they were toast. burning down a players 6k HP is pretty easy for a mage to do (Espesially a fire mage).

Stamina Gear- This gear I tried out was mostly green gear of stamina mixed with some of my Best PvP pieces. I had approx, 9k HP unbuffed. Stam + mark gave me another 1000, plus mana shield and if i was speced Ice at the moment( I respect about 5 times a week usually) You could call that approx a 12K Health Pool. Pretty freaking big for a mage. I found that most people could not bring my Health under 50% with this. I found I could even let the opponent get the opening shot now and have a pretty good chance to survive the encounter or kill my opponent. Although when I got the jump on my opponents now the fight lasted a little longer, approx 6-8 seconds longer I would wager (cooldown of fireblast/FN with icelance or whatever).

You can see where Blizzard is taking PVP if you look at the PVP sets. Chest pieces with the possiblity to get approx 750 health is really good. Craftable Hats with base stam of 50. Blizzard is trying hard to push stamina into PvP. I imagine they want more skill based into PvP. More stamina = longer fight= more cooldown juggling= more mana conservation = more skill = less dependance on cooldowns.

Once people start realizing that stamina is key and king. You are going to get alot less whining when they figure out if i have enough health and live through the mages/hunters/feral druids/ class burst damage I'll be in a much better situation to win.

TLDR: People are doing lots of and lots of damage. When you start stacking PVP stam gear you will live twice as long as need twice as much skill.

I took it to mean that damage only items won't really help as much as they did before, since you'll have a hard time burning people down.

for example:
I use [Pendant of Cunning] as a 66 hunter while grinding, however, if I wanted to pvp at all, I'd be better off with [Choker of Bloodied Feathers]

As a mage I know that if I want to go heavy stamina I need to gimp my +dmg by a lot, so I decided not to. Right now at 70 after doing almost all quests and every instances, my crit% went down from 15% to 10.5%, and my dmg went up from 620 frost to 759 or such. My hp is around 6400 unbuffed.

As a frost mage, my damage is slightly higher than it was at 60, but not by a lot. My normal hit is around 1350 (instead of 1200 at 60) which means if I want to kill a typical melee 1 on 1, I need to cast 6-7 spells (or 3-4 if I get crits) without dieing. It's doable since I have several survival skills, but it's pretty damn hard when a typical hunter or rogue does much higher hits without having to stand around for 2.5secs. And they don't have that stamina issue, based on the gear I see, since it's not rare to see gear with high sta and high AP.

In the end it's based on luck a lot, like if I can manage to keep him rooted so I can at least do a couple of ice lances then I have a better chance, if I get a lucky crit, and so on. In a BG if a hunter or rogue targets me first and my ice block isn't up I know I'm going to die, I just don't have the HP to survive the first set of hits. I have no idea how fire mages are doing but I can't imagine them living long.

Note: This is for 60, I've not had experience at 70, and with the new stat of resilience

When I had my warrior, I was really big on PvP. I had originally juggled crit, AP and stam and I had found that I had much more success with more stamina. While having 30% crit, 1000 AP and 4.5k hp was decent, I found that I could make a lot more mistakes during PvPing if I was loaded up to around 5-6k hp. While I'm not exactly sure how resilience plays into PvPing (I've been releveling a Priest), I expect that stamina will probably be one of the stats I'll be maximizing.

Also, has anyone had any experience with an "armor priest"? I've heard those were rather effective back at 60, and wasn't too sure about 70. From the looks of the loot tables, I really haven't seen much itemization for them...

No we don't >_>

Only thing that'll *hit* for that much would be aimshot, which is a 3sec cast.

All of the other shots can't hit that hard with current gear. Steady Shot would need more than 3000rap to hit for that.

I'm more interested in how the changes affect classes that previously replied on a a few short cooldowns to hold an opponent at a short disadvantage, and try to kill him with applied burst before being neutralized by positioning. By and large, from 60-70 the cooldowns or their efficacy hasn't changed, so the duration of keeping your opponent where you want him hasn't changed. The burst has gone down (lower crit rates across the board, but harder more predictable hits).

The class I'm thinking of most of course is the hunter. A 70 hunter has the same tools to keep an opponent at bay as a 60, the same attacks, more health, more AP, and less crit. So when facing an opponent who is aware of the hunter, the hunter unloads. The opponent tries to close towards the hunter, and the hunter responds with cooldowns to keep his distance (Concussive shot, Scatter Shot or Intimidation). The hunter runs out to get some range again, and unloads again. The opponent closes again, the hunter uses a trap to slow him and get some more distance, and unloads again. The difference between 60 and 70 is that at 60, the opponent may die here. At 70, the opponent should only be at 30-50% health. At this point, the hunter's tricks for keeping range are all on cooldown, and he's likely snared from the previous times the opponent closed in, and also at less than full health if his opponent isn't a melee class. This 3rd time the opponent closes in, the hunter is stuck in melee range, doing trivial sustained DPS while his opponent can do full DPS. If the hunter is lucky, has a lot of health, or his opponent can't DPS hard enough, one of the hunters tricks cooldown and he can try to get to range to try DPS again. More usually (based on the small sample of BGs i've done where people bothered to wear stamina gear) the hunter just dies in melee range without ever getting out again, since the opponent had the sense to keep him snared.

I'd imagine rogues and warriors may have similar issues against casters - if they can't kill them on the first close and the caster manages to get 15 yards away, they just get kited to death.

I'm not really all that upset, it's just a change in class matchups, and does make the fight as a hunter a bit more interesting than seeing a mage running at me and having him reliably explode before he reaches me, but I'm not really sure what skill I'm supposed to bring to bear to the problem when everything I have is either a cooldown I've already used, or an ability that isn't usable in melee range. All I really need to do is stack enough stamina to survive 20s of DPS.

By and large, I'm of the opinion that just inflating health pools isn't a very good way to try to make PvP require more skill. Reducing crit rates in PvP on the other hand would have been a better option, forcing people to deal with predictable damage instead of sudden death from full health.

Well, I've just hit 70 and am trying to fill out my gear with more stamina without sacrificing too much +damage/crit, but I must say that more health is MUCH more important now. I'm sitting at 8k and I have to not make any mistakes to survive a stunlock/Cloak of Shadows/etc. sequence, let alone mixing in vanish/blind. The amount of damage rogues can do now even while stunlocking is crazy.

I've been seeing fireblasts for 2.4k, multishots for 2.5k, ambushs 3k+...

Honestly, I don't really know if I believe health has outpaced damage. I certainly need to get a LOT more stamina though.

I look at it like this:

In PvE there is generaly a point for every class where more stamina becomes pointless, as only the tanks are taking heavy damage and if you can survive ok otherwise then it is in the best interests of the group to get out as much damage or healing as you can. This point is higher in TBC (I'd suggest 8k+ for most classes at 70 - and rising with encounters) and can be reached easily if people take the gear on offer. Once you reach that point you go back to hitting your upper limit of damage/healing.

PvP is different in that you are not going for specific health targets but are instead juggling the demands of longevity and damage. Longevity does not always mean health, and so different classes will have different ideas of what kind of balance they want between stamina and other things. Too much stamina and no damage and you just die slowly, too much damage and no stamina and you die quickly. You want that point where you can last long enough, and do enough damage, to make a difference in the fight.

There is no point in PvP where stamina ceases to be a concern like there is in PvE, but there is a point where simple maths dictates you stop stacking it. If I have 15k hp and 600 spell damage, and could choose to get another 2k hp or another 300+damage then damage becomes the option to go for.

TLDR: So umm.. people will PvP the way they always have; getting the best gear for their class that means they die less than they kill. This will *not* mean stacking stamina, it just that there is more stamina around.

Did you get the memo about this nifty new thing they added? It's on pretty much every piece of PvP gear if you want it or not; and aims to do exactly what you want it to.

My point was that the effects of the stamina changes aren't quite as direct for everyone. For some it increases survival, and hence provides more time to DPS, in a situation where their DPS was already high enough to challenge everyone else's, if only they could stay alive long enough to do it. For others, it means the brief burst DPS they had is no longer enough to kill their opponents. When your opponent gaining an extra 2000 health is the difference between killing him before he cuts your DPS to 0 and failing to kill him and being stuck at 0 DPS for 10-20s, affecting the outcome of the battle by modifying your own stamina is out of your hands. You won't be able to put on enough stamina to survive those 10-20s of being DPSed.

Resilience is huge and if stacked does make incoming damage a lot more predicable, so much so that it can be noticed empirically. The paradigm has shifted from stam to resilience as the PvP stat of choice. This thread would be far more relevant if retitled "PvP: The Necessity of Resilience"