Epic 1h weapons are 1875.

The problem is not that I somehow fear that a legion of idiots with 88 DPS weapons are going to crush me, or that I can no longer look down on noobs for their lack of epics. I am approaching this from a game design perspective. If you give a player a free (yes, basically free) ilvl 115 epic weapon, where does he go from there? The only upgrades for him are going to be from tier 5 raids and I guess future arena rewards well in the future when they bump everything up, neither of which are remotely accessible. That's not a good thing. It's completely short-circuiting any sense of progression, and it obsoletes a lot of the game's content before its time. It worries me more as a blacksmith than as a raider, actually. As I said above, no one in their right mind is going to buy epic weapons from me when they can get far superior for putting in 20 minutes a week for a couple of months.

This isn't a discussion about devaluing raid loot in particular, nor am I a "casuals suck" raider with a bone to pick. This is about devaluing all loot in the game. When you give away an 88 DPS 1h weapon or a +187 dam 1h weapon, it makes every other 1h weapon in the game more or less useless or irrelevant. Why bother raising my lower city rep, or running heroic crypts, for a good +dam 1h? Why should I spent 1k+ on an Eternium Runed Blade? Why should someone else pay me to combine their Eternium Runed Blade with my Nethers? And so forth.

edit: Gurg beat me I hate him.

To be honest, I don't see a problem with getting a single epic weapon after participating in arenas for over 2 months when we already have people that have equivalent weapons that have dropped off Prince Malch. From whats being said here, the better arena teams will get these weapons within a month while the teams that play just for the loot will have to wait approx. double the time.

If you're looking at non-raiders, I don't think getting exalted with Lower City is harder or more time consuming and you'll get access to more of the exalted items, gold and a chance at the items that drop in the instances you run. I just find it somewhat stupid that people are actually considering just signing up for a 5v5 team and playing those 10 games per week for nothing but just getting a single one-handed weapon 2 months down the line when there are many alternatives that would be more enjoyable.

At the end of the day, this doesn't really affect me all that much. Like the casuals used to say, what do you care if we get epics? As long as they have to wait an extra month or two, I'd rather them have decent gear so we don't run into the whole tier3 vs dungeon set in BGs.

The only possible issue that I see with this is that the crafted weapons may become devalued but that's to be expected as more gear becomes available through pvp and raiding and regardless of whether these one handers cost 1800 or 3600, I think in 3 months most of the crafting stuff will be at least partially obsolete.

Here's a question: What would the game have looked like for non-raiders if the v2.0 honor system had been in from the start, and everyone who put in the time (whether with good rolling BG groups, or afk'ing in PUGs for months) got a full set of HWL/GM gear by fall 2005?

How many of those people would have still been playing by the time fall 2006 came around, do you think?

Just to further illustrate the crafting issue...

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=23542

Fel Edged Battleaxe
Binds when equipped
One-Hand Axe
128 - 239 Damage
Speed 2.20
(83.4 damage per second)
Durability 105 / 105
Red Socket
Socket Bonus: +3 Stamina
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves hit rating by 14.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 21.

Materials : 10 X Felsteel Bar, 8 X Primal Might, 2 X Primal Nether

vs.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28308

Gladiator's Cleaver
Binds when picked up
One-Hand Axe
183 - 275 Damage
Speed 2.60
(88.1 damage per second)
+21 Stamina
Durability 105 / 105
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves hit rating by 8.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 14.
Equip: Improves resilience rating by 9.
Equip: Increases attack power by 28.

Now if I'm looking to pick a 1H axe, and I've got the choice between paying a crafter for two nethers as well as providing expensive materials and pvp'ing for an hour a week for a few months, that's not a hard choice to make.

GET OUT OF MY BRAIN.

Anywhere the basis of Gurg's question relies on the fact that there's 2 basic facts about MMO's. People will take the easiest path to a given objective, and once they achieve that objective, they'll bitch that there's nothing left to do. If people can get a full set of gear by in less than an hour per week, they'll rapidly complain that there's no content left to be completed in the game.

The point is it's great that you can achieve rewards through many different avenues, but at the same time you should have to work for all of them.

Probably not too many, I know a lot of people barely lasted the few months between Naxx and TBC with the lack of motivation to gear up knowing everything will be replaced. I realize the game is built on progressing your character, but what did all the "non-raiders" do when they got their full devout or wildheart by Fall 2005 and had virtually no chance at getting anything past the blue pvp set, which is basically sidegrades. The pvp system in vanilla wow was a disaster for casual (or non-raider) players, it completely eliminated one way of progressing for them.

The point that I'm getting from this is that all the casuals will get their gear too fast and they'll run out of things to do to improve themselves? If it takes them 3 months to get a single item from arena and they want to eventually get the full 7 item (I think?) set they'd have to do their 10 game, 20 minutes per week fiasco for ~2 years.

As I said though, I think the whole mentality of looking at teams that will literally just queue up for a ticket to a weapon 3 months down the line is off base. The way I see this whole thing is Blizzard trying to give the casual players more options. I don't think they planned on people making teams and not caring about winning/losing just to get a piece of loot. Rather, they looked at it in a way where the casual players that aren't as good, for lack of a better word, will be losing most of their games. From here, instead of discouraging them to the point where they think they'll never get anything for putting time into the arena and giving up on it, they give them marginal points and encourage them to participate and have fun, win or lose, rewarding them with something at the end of the season for their efforts.

From the previous posts, it seemed more of a "the one handers cost as much as the gloves, when they are clearly superior" type of argument, which could be valid. I'd personally take the gloves first even if they were the same price and I wear blues in both slots. Sockets are pretty important if you want to have a functional meta gem in your helm.

As in real life, there's a price you pay for time.

If you had a 20" TV in your living room and were planning on replacing it with a 50" LCD, would you pay the full price and have it delivered now? Or would you take a discount and have it delivered to your house in 3 months? Some people would pick option A, some would pick option B.

It's not "2 months", it's "10 hours". Yes, those 10 hours have to spread out at 1 hour per week, but it's still a ridiculously small time for such a good reward. It devalues, or at worst, makes all other content obsolete.

Gladiator weapons are the path of least resistance.

The point is, you can very easily 'suck' your way to an amazing weapon in <2 months. You might as well remove all other weapon itemization from the game, because nobody will need or want them. Just delete the blacksmith profession as well, since nobody will pay 1000g for a sword they can get for 5-10 hours of work.

The players that take 2 months to get them, would not spend 10 hours straight to farm gold/resources to buy Blacksmith weapons, even then it wouldn't be enough investment of time to get them.

Weapons are the most valuable single slot upgrade anyway. I think its rather silly that they price 1H weapons the same as a part of gloves, and that is much of the argument essentially.

Supposedly there will be upgrades to Arena gear as time goes on. Still doesn't change the value of the BoE epics and Primal Nethers from being awesome stuff to junk.


There's a lot of other stuff being tied into this though. Raiding and heroic 5-mans is resulting in a lot of loot being disenchanted. Either the item is going to a class' spec that isn't there or it's a sidegrade at best to a blue item. Then there's the consumable/difficulty requirements of the two gateway mobs for Coilfang Reservoir. I look at arena gear, I look at Gruul's drops, then I hear about the consumable, raid stacking, and other stuff going on into this. I like raiding for the sake of raiding, but it's really difficult for me to tell everyone to spend 100s of gold on consumables so we can kill a boss to kill another boss to loot void crystals.

Basically. As I said, I have two objections:

1) Weapon cost relative to armor seems out of whack. This has other ramifications because weapons are pretty much always equally useful in PvP and PvE. My epic arena resto pants are nice for arena healing, but they aren't going to make me a better PvE healer. An 88 DPS 1h is an 88 DPS 1h, and there's nothing more to it. PvP weapons will replace PvE loot in a way that armor cannot (for most classes -- for some pure DPS classes, this line blurs a lot more).

2) The curve gives far too much reward for complete mediocrity. I don't object to rewarding PvP skill without a massive time investment, and I don't object to making really good rewards available via that avenue. I do object to making really good rewards available to people who are in the lower percentiles of the population in terms of skill/effort.

The same number that we have now.

How is not having said gear and knowing for a fact that you cannot acquire said gear any more an incentive to keep playing? At least with the gear the match-ups wouldn't be so ridiculously lop-sided and therefor a greater incentive to keep playing.

People do nothing, but bitch about WoW, yet they keep playing. Why?

I don't know, but I think the sacred-cow status of commonly held "truths" about MMO's should be reevaluated.

I agree with Gurgthock's assessment of the consequences but I think you are looking at the problem the wrong way:

I *want* the bad/lazy players to get good gear - good *PvP* gear. I long since got sick of my gear being able to kill players with no semblance of skill involved in the fight, and I think the arena system is doing a great job at providing good PvP gear to even the scales. I think you are right that 1H weapons are a bit underpriced, but not dramatically so, in my opinion, and changing the price won't fix the problem, as I see it.
For the most part, Blizzard has succeeded in creating sets which own for PvP but which at best have situational use in PvE (exception being the PvE itemization hole for feral tanks). I wouldn't even be using my PvP armor in raids, but the weapons stand out here because Blizzard haven't managed to emphasize their PvP focus enough, and I think that's where the real issue is.

I think PvP weapons should have their item budgets spent more like this:
- Nice (but not extreme) DPS.
- A ton of sockets to focus them on either PvE or PvP
- High stamina
- Decent amount of resilience
- Useful PvP proc/passive
- Some new attribute which is the inverse of resilience: Basically a budget-efficient crit rating which only works if the enemy has a resilience rating to reduce (AKA utterly useless in PvE).
- No PvE-focused stats such as hit rating

I disagree with this. Yes, the inaccessibility of some of the gear drove people away, yet there was a different, slower, progression in place. All sorts of people did do MC and BWL, and pay to go on BWL runs to loot epics. People crafted Arcanite Reapers, then did AV to get TUFs, then did ZG to get Hakkar's 2h. People saved up and crafted Titanic legs and Strongholds and Lionheart Helm. People bought BoE epics off the AH. And so forth. Was it out of step with what real raiders could get? Well, yeah. There were problems there. But there was some form of progression still. Let the person go straight from Arcanite Reaper to HWL/GM 2h, and suddenly there's no motivation to do any of that other content anymore.

If you took most people, and gave them their ctprofiles "wish list" set of gear in its entirety, an epic flying mount, and a couple of other toys, they'd have fun for a few days/weeks messing around like people do with premades whenever they're available on Test, but boredom would rapidly set in afterwards for the majority. It's like using a cheat code to beat a video game or skip to the ending. I guess I can't provide proof of that statement, but do people seriously think otherwise?

How fast do you think people will be acquiring their wish list?

Let's assume it all pvp stuff.

Gladiator Weapon + Gladiator Ranged Weapon + Gladiator's set + General's set + Sergeant's Heavy Cape + PvP reward neck/rings/trinkets

Given that we're talking about mediocre players let's assume a rating of 1300-1400.

For the gladiator's set, they might acquire it in 1 - 1.5 years. The other stuff is just grinding for marks and honor so it depends on the amount of time they have to play. That strikes me as an equally slow progression.

By the time they've decked out, the new tiers will be out with the matching upgraded pvp gear that they will want to get.

It looks like an effective hamster wheel to me.

^^^ Yes, that.

I was using the "wish list" as a separate reference point, not suggesting that people will instantly get every piece of arena armor available to them. My point is that people don't need to be able to get full sets overnight for there to be a harm to the economy and to gameplay. Weapons alone provide the simplest and clearest example, so I used them for that purpose.

Fair enough, but I just don't see it playing out that way, at least not to the point where people start leaving in droves.

The primary difference I see is that there will be MUCH less incentive for people to raid if they did not care for raiding, but did it out of necessity to remain competitive in PvP.

That imo is a good thing. That means more people can play WoW the way they want to and not be forced into a single viable means of progression.

That also means that the people in your raids will primarily be the kind that enjoy raiding and take great pains to push their toons to the bleeding edge of gear and content.

People that raid for the love of that playstyle and the accolades that come with such feats, will raid regardless if there is another viable means of progression.

Now the effect on the crafting community I do see as a problem. Unfortunately it's the same problem that WoW has had since release.

I think alot of people are over estimating the "unskilled" crowd. Fielding even a mediocre team requires some effort, knowledge of the game mechanics and friends. Most people will just join an arena team, go 1-7 and then quit.

Fielding a mediocre 1200 team with the same people over 2 or 3 months on a consistant basis is alot more effort then say the 2.0 honor system.

In my opinion, a team that goes under the starting rating should never get access to high end gear. Still it's ways better then solo queueing for AV, "participating" in 10 or 12 AV instances then collecting GM weapons.

This is not even close to be on the same scale "of effort" as fielding a raid group every day, 4 hours a day, for months and months.

Your evaluations of the time investment is completely incorrect. You can play your week's worth of arena games in the time it takes to play one average AV, and you don't need to keep the same group together - you just need 5 people to play each week, and you can boot some and reinvite others if you're having trouble getting games. Not to mention GM weapons cost boatloads more honor than you're implying. In the arena, you can literally queue, sit down and wait for the opposing team to kill you, repeat ten times and you're done for the week. Eventually you'll get your one hander that outstrips anything available to you otherwise.

This is partially why I don't buy Kalgan's response about having to re-price items based on people getting points for every bracket - fine, make them more expensive, you are better rewarding good players. What is more deserving of more points, the good player in a 1900 5v5 team, or the good player in a 1900 5v5 team, 1900 3v3 team, and 1900 2v2 team? The second player should be able to earn more points. He or she has put in more time (albeit not necessarily a lot) and is still clearly skilled in PvP. That isn't to say all brackets should give the same points - but they should all give points.

This would do a little to fix the progression problem, if not much. I mean, it would slow your 0-10 PvPer, since he/she would now need to go 0-10 in every bracket, and thus put in more time and effort, in order to achieve the same pace as now.

But of course it does nothing for the problem that he/she is still getting rewarded for suckiness.

Gurg's point on wish lists is valid. However, for many people the wish lists will begin and end with a big weapon. How many people PvP'd just enough to get their GM Sword, then stopped? I would bet it was quite a few.

It's giving away the biggest and most desirable prize as the 'thanks for coming' gift basket.