This has nothing to do with casuals getting epics.

1. The arena was advertised as skill-based item progression. Currently, you can still get all the items you want, just takes longer. I'm still going to crush these people even with their glad weapons, so thats not the issue.

2. The real issue as gurg has pointed out, is that it happens too quickly, even to those that lose their way to items.

We agree it shouldn't be a grind, but at the same time, spending an hour a week 2 boxing your way to a 1400 rating shouldn't give you as much as it does. Its poor design for all the other methods of progression to be extremely costly and time consuming.

Its great that pvpers have competitive items now solely through pvp.

I mean, think of it this way, its harder to get the level 70 honor rewards in terms of time and effort then to get the arena rewards. Does that seem right to you?

I say 12 weeks, because people seem to think that people can just tank and AFK out every week (making their rating drop, and drop) meaning it'll take longer than 5 weeks. If someone maintains a .500 win percentage, then that would indicate they've at least put an effort into their games.

As for depersonalizing the debate, it's tough when so many answers are of the "but they'll get what I have and not work as hard as I do" variety, by their very posts they've made it all about them, not the system. That being said, I shouldn't respond to people who make posts like that, because they've made up their mind already that the system sucks and some post from a random bloke they don't know isn't going to change that.

Personally, I think the system could use some tweaks, but it's hardly poor game design. The old honor grind, THAT was poor game design. People only seem to be upset about the Weapons, so up the price so there is a real opportunity cost for getting them (make the 1H cost 2.5 pieces of armor for example), so people on bad teams (1300 and below) will have to make a real choice, either get one or two armor upgrades, or wait the entire season to get a 1H weapon...in that scenario, the people who just /afk out of games will take longer than 12 weeks to even get a 1Her. To combat the quit and rejoin problem, make it so someone can only be on 2 teams per Bracket a season.

I did read Gurg's other thread about how long things took to upgrade (espeically people who were GM/HWL had to wait until the Twin Emps to see upgrades), but we have to remember the game is different now. If it's true that they are going to be releaseing an expansion every year, that means people need to get through the TBC in 12 months...now, that's being a bit optomistic, I think it'll be summer 2008 before we see another Xpac (my opinion of course), but it does show that there are pretty clear "start" and "finish" lines for TBC.

There needs to be some tweaking, I completely agree, but I think the system is at least open to every player. Remember, we're only talking all these points for 5v5, the 2v2 hit you with a 40% tax right off the top (2v2 is the Canada of WoW it seems), and a 20% for 3v3, so it'll still take some effort to get full value.

This isnt about me and them.
But I do care that -I- will be able to get an item myself that will surpass anything -I- will get from raiding (because my guild isnt Nihilum or DnT) by doing nothing.

Will it make me grind faster? - Yes
Will it make me better in PvE? - Yes
Is it good game design? - No, its most certainly not.

I have nothing to loose on getting a free epic because I wont be getting anything similar from raiding by the time I will get it from the Arena.
But this isnt about me or about everyone else, its about these weapons being to easy to get or to good.

You make another good point, but remember that it's impractical for the mediocre player to get a full suit of arena epics in a reasonable period of time. They can get that one item in 5 weeks, but to fill out everything, they'll have to reengage with those other paths.

Quite honestly, some of the Karazhan weapon drops are (for PvE purposes) better than the Gladiator Weapons (Gorehowl http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28773 vs. The Decapitator http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28298 for example).

By the time your run of the mill, average players would have gotten Decapitator in the Arena (at 500pts per week, that's 7.5 weeks), I think most decent PvE guilds will have taken down the Prince In Karazhan...or not far after anyways. True, you'd have to get a drop (so far a 16% drop rate with a limited sample size), but to say that the Arena weapon is leaps and bounds better than that Axe from Karazhan just isn't true.

It was just the first thing that popped up when I used WoWhead. Yes, it definitely seems that 1H aren't as easy to come by in Karazhan and non-existant in Gruul's Lair.

The 85.8 DPS Axe with the On Use might have some potential, depending on the cooldown of the On Use, still not as good as the 1H Axe from the Arena, but not terrible.

Gruul's Lair really needs at least one melee 1Her in there too.

Arenas giving unreasonably good rewards for the effort may be entirly intentional. Right now, playing one game a week for a month could give the best item in every slot for every role, and a month or two from now a huge number of players still wouldn't have the items, because it isn't Puggable. The swarms of people getting GM weapons right before TBC wasn't as much because of the fairly low time requirement as that you could just solo-queue for AV, afk for a bit, and be guarunteed a great item before TBC came out. Arenas have the guarunteed part down, but not the solo-queue and afk part. However, if people realize how easy it is to get items, in theory you might start seeing PuG Arena teams, where each week you grab 4 randoms from Shatt, spend 40g each to play your 10 games, then disband after you get points. Once you have people used to doing this, the rewards can be tuned back to reasonable levels, and people may continue doing it.

Blizzard seems to be trying very hard to make it possible to succeed in TBC without a standard group of people to play with, and if arena rewards aren't accessible to everyone in some way, all of the careful work at avoiding mudflation from raiding is pointless.

Achieving a 2000 rating in 5v5 Arenas has been far more challenging and stressful than Prince Malchezar could ever hope to be.

All Blizzard needs to do is add point depreciation of some kind , or a minimum rating required for purchase for certain slots i.e. shoulders/gloves required 1750 rating, legs require 1800, chest/helm requires 1850, weapons require 1950 or 2000. Problem solved.

That's what HWL weapons and HWL gear are for from the honor point vendor.
Arena gear is Ilvl 115 (On par with Serpentshrine), and shouldn't be available to people that don't work on making a successful team, period.

Well, that would certainly "solve" the "problem" of average players using and enjoying the arena, yes.

Aren't arenas supposed to be fun in themselves anyway? You want to offer rewards, but they need to be within some sense of proportion, no?

It's like saying that all 5-man instances should also drop nothing but ilvl 115 epics, because otherwise, why should people bother running them?

PVP should be about fun, right now the system is almost "forcing" people who have no interest in arena or pvp in general to join and get it over with. I dont find arena PVP in WOW fun, the class are unbalanced and the game are too fast. If I feel like PVPing I play Guildwars.

If people dont join arena with no rewards attach to it its because they were poorly designed (not fun). I dont see how "forcing" people to play in them solves anything. Sure that arenas will be popular but whats the point if the game experience they get out of it is bad.

You play your 5 weeks go 12-38, and get that shining new epic, where is the sense of accomplishment in that.

If that's what it took for people to do 5-mans, then yes. It's way too soon to come to any real conclusions, but so far very few people are doing arenas. The last 10 pages of this thread are about how you don't even have to do well to get some incredibly powerful items... and yet there's still been more people in EotS than both arenas combined every time I've checked. ELO matchmaking only works with a healthy pool of teams, and I expect Blizzard will do what it takes to get that pool.

Here is some interesting news from blizzard on how Arena ratings are calculated:


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...eNo=3&sid=1#49


I think this is a good thing, makes competition very challenging.

Wow, so many topics in this thread! I'd like to bring up an earlier point, that the ease with which arena loots can be acquired negatively impact crafters. While the general concensus seems to be some variant of "Nerf arenas!" (speaking generally, not just as concerns the crafting issue), I'm more of a fan of changes that are rewarding rather than punitive. So let me give you my pitch and you all can tell me what you think:

Introduce patterns for each of the crafting professions for BoE items of comparable quality to arena gear. For Tailoring, LW, Armorsmith these could be boot-belt-bracer 3 piece item sets with higher ilvls than the honor epics from battlegrounds. Something along the same lines could be applied to Weaponsmithing, Engineering, Jewelcrafting.

Additionally, patterns for BoPs could be introduced that are significant (though not massive) upgrades from arena gear, perhaps chest slot for the armorcrafters, weapons for the weaponcrafters, trinkets/ranged weapon for engineeers, you get the idea.

Lastly, in addition to the standard world-farmable mats that can be had by anyone with the will to farm them or cash to buy them from the AH, each recipe includes BoP epic materials that drop in PVE raid content and are purchasable from the arena vendor for arena points.

I'm in favor of an approach like this for two reasons: it rewards crafters and it is more in line with the approach Blizzard seems to be taking with the availability of gear. Crafters deserve rewards (in terms of gold and items) for the time, effort, and money they put into mastering tradeskills. WoW is incredibly open-handed with gear compared with EverQuest, its predecessor, and TBC even more so than vanilla Warcraft. Would the majority of players really want a reversal in that policy?

But the problem is, even if some of the suggestions mentioned were implemented - say you can only buy 1H-weapons with at least a 1700 rating that you maintained for at least 4 weeks, and they cost twice as much as they do now - meaning that only people good at PvP could get the arena weapons, there would still be a LOT more - not as many as under the current system but still a LOT more - people with the arena weapons than with comparable PvE weapons.

The problem is simply that currently the arena weapons are too good. Someone here suggested to tone down their ilvl such that they become 81-83 DPS weapons, and maybe add an extra pound of stamina and resilience.

Maybe Blizzard will slow down their upgrading of available arena weapons, so that by the time a significant number of guilds are progressing through SSC and TK25 the numbers even out, but currently the only real solution for me is to tone down the quality of the arena weapons.

So in short, your solution is to make everything else better, so the arena weapons are relatively worse?

That sounds a lot like "don't nerf class X, buff everyone else instead!" to me.

Well, shouldn't Blizzard then nerf the arena rewards and make them somehow easily upgradable during the next season? Something along the lines of "turn in your 1h Axe of Doom and bring xxxx arena points and you'll have this shiny new Axe of Dread".

Perhaps I am alone in thinking things are fine exactly the way they are right now. Don't want to sink tons of time raiding but still want to slowly upgrade your character? No problem, arena PVP and 5 man. Have tons of free time every night? No problem, raid, heroics, and arena PVP. The amount of time and group coordination you put in determines how fast you can get new stuff, but everyone can get new stuff on a regular basis. Seems fair and fun to me.

Plus its a lot easier for alts, I'm not touching Karazhan/raids with my alt, instead I will just arena PVP once in a while with friends and we'll have small upgrades. We won't beat any good teams or such, but it'll be nice to swing a big weapon when swooping in on halaa!

Not exactly. The complaint my post addresses is that arena gear, which is clearly superior to crafted gear for pvp, indirectly shafts crafters. After all, who's going to spend hundreds and possibly thousands of gold on inferior gear?

My proposal was to bring craftable BoEs in line with the quality of arena gear, thus giving players an incentive to buy them ("Hey, I can save my arena points if I spend x gold on this 2h!") and possibly make the BoPs slightly better than arena gear as a sort of bonus for taking the time to master the profession.

This solution isn't meant address the "problem" of 1h arena weapons being too easy to get/too powerful in pve/ill-conceived game design. I'm addressing the concern that arena rewards make craftable items obsolete, and I think the crafters have a legitimate point.

Well, looks like they were reading this thread carefully, based on their change to weapon prices.