As someone who has played nearly every PvP multiplayer games out there except for shooters (Anarchy Online, DAOC, Lineage 2, Rising Force Online, Guild Wars, WoW, Matrix Online), I'm interested in the arena. Does that mean I want to spend my PvE resources (epic flying mount money, respeccing gold, gold for leveling up professions) on the arena system which is quite skewed at the moment? Because Guild Wars offers the same style of play completely for free, and a far lower barrier of entry (I have thousands of plat in GW sitting there because I don't need them to PvP)? Because PvP is hopelessly unbalanced in this game for certain classes (like our lovable prot warriors) who may just want to fool around in the arena rather than pay to see others rise to the top not by superior skill, but by the sole virtue of the class they play (see threads about 5v5 setups, see certain 2v2/3v3 compositions that annihilate other setups)? My question was asked on their behalf, so that maybe our prot warrior has a chance to get some weapons that might help him tank without having to tear his hair out farming primals with his spec. Just a thought.

Why exactly would a penalty be needed for people to PvP? That's the thing that escapes me about these arguments that you need to "pay up" in order to PvP and need to be "elite" to get rewarded. I play on a PvP server, and I don't pretend that everyone wants to PvP, but pretty much everyone on a PvP server has done so at one point or another without going into a queue or signing up for some team. If I truly believed I'd actually have fun in the 3v3 bracket without a paladin on my team I'd sign up in a heartbeat, but the way things are going currently I have very little incentive to start. Another thing I love about the barrier to entry being gold is people who buy gold with real life currency (which to date I have never done, even in such a farmer-infested game as L2) just to PvP -- i.e. purchase more PvP gear in the pre-2.0 system, purchase pre-leveled characters, powerleveling services, etc. The whole hardcore PvP scene disgusts me, and maybe that's a bitterness leftover from L2 where the top PvPers bought an exorbant amount of real life money to be the "best."

Free or not, I don't frankly care. I asked a legitimate question about whether the amount of money is needed from season to season, and I get some condescending remark about how "everyone is looking at arenas as just a source of loot." I quit WoW a long time ago because of the stupid loot craze in raiding. I came back with friends I met in other PvP games, because the MMORPG market is quite barren at the moment. That doesn't mean everything's peachy with WoW. The frustrations of WoW PvP has made me sour ever since the 2.0 patch -- yes, after the supposed "casual craze" to get PvP gear. I don't give a hoot about the gear. The system itself is flawed, and the arena system doesn't bode well for "competitive play" or "skill" either. I'd love to see some skill and friendly competition involved rather than what is currently in place, but in every PvP game I've ever played, it's all about gear, luck, in some cases levels, and class composition (What was that in DAOC 8v8? Oh you need speed buffs or you're dead. Where's the bard?). I like both PvP and PvE content, and I want to see both balanced and fun. Somehow that makes me a loot whore? Okay then.

That's an excellent idea. PvP gear should be clearly superior in PvP while PvE gear should be clearly superior in PvE. The cross-over in either direction should be limited.

That does mean that all PvE acquired high-end gear should have what are considered PvE-only stats or modifiers to create the same effect.

We have the same problem on our Vindication battlegroup. I really wish they would merge a few of the battlegroups to allow for more diversified and challenging arena matches. I could see this being an extreme problem at the top tier rankings in weeks to come, especially in the 2v2 and possibly 3v3 bracket. Some X vs. Y combinations are just innately tough.

Overall however, I'm really enjoying the arena system. I enjoy the competitive aspect of the ladder and I'm assuming Blizzard will, over time, balance each class properly. Hell, look at Starcraft, it's been through so many drastic changes and tweaks. I'm confident that eventually, classes will be balanced. We can only hope the specializations of those classes will be balanced as well.

I didn't mean for my post to come out as "you're a loot whore" and it wasn't meant to be directed at only you either, a lot of the issues that people have brought up tend to deal with people that are just entering arenas and queuing up for their loot ticket. As for the arena cost... do you also disagree with people having to pay repair bills for raiding? Even then, its 40g over a 3 month period... and like I said:

I gave you a good example of why it's necessary to have the team cost, people would be able to just reset their score after losing games with no penalty. There would be no teams under 1500.

Do you really think PvP is that hopelessly unbalanced? Yes, there are some classes that counter others and yes, some classes are better than others in different scopes but that's the nature of the game and it'd be pretty stupid if every class had the exact same abilities. I run with a rogue and a druid on my 3s team and we've yet to come across a team that we think is impossible to beat (Priest/Pally + 2 frost mages is pretty tough tho) so I don't really know where you're getting the paladin requirement from.

As for protection warriors... they're not really a "class", the actual class behind that is actually one of the best pvp classes that does well in any of the brackets.

I don't really like the idea of making PvP gear PvP-only, because as a warrior my bank and bags are already extremely cluttered and I like the mechanic of PvP gear being useful in PvE and vice versa. I think the best way of doing things is to slow down arena point gain a lot, especially at the sub-1500 rating level. a terrible arena team shouldn't get a free TK-quality epic for all 10 players every 3 weeks

they should just make it so any team about 1700 gets significantly more points. Make it take the whole season for a 1500 team to get weapon, and let anyone 1700+ get a majority of the gear. Or, simply award points based on ranking, and not rating.

Well, the old calcuation is thus:

The cost to buy arena items: (2handers and bows cost 2 items)
Items Cost
1 1125
2 2625
3 4500
4 6375
5 8250
6 10125
7 12000
8 13875
9 15750
10 17625
11 19500
12 21375
13 23250
14 25125
15 27000
16 28875
17 30750
18 32625

Total Arena Points earned over a Season(12 weeks)
Rating 5vs5 3vs3 2vs2
0 1188 713 475
100 1435 861 574
200 1682 1009 673
300 1930 1158 772
400 2177 1306 871
500 2424 1454 970
600 2671 1603 1068
700 2918 1751 1167
800 3166 1899 1266
900 3413 2048 1365
1000 3660 2196 1464
1100 3907 2344 1563
1200 4154 2493 1662
1300 4402 2641 1761
1400 4649 2789 1860
1500 4896 2938 1958
1600 6046 3628 2418
1700 7398 4439 2959
1800 8957 5374 3583
1900 10716 6430 4286
2000 12651 7590 5060
2100 14721 8832 5888
2200 16871 10122 6748
2300 19036 11422 7614
2400 21150 12690 8460
2500 23152 13891 9261
2600 24995 14997 9998
2700 26647 15988 10659
2800 28093 16856 11237
2900 29333 17600 11733
3000 30377 18226 12151

So yes, you basically can lose all of your games and still get a 2h/2 1h's by the end of the arena season.

Well, now I am making an arena charter then. I thought as a protection warrior it would be entirely pointless for me to even try.

Thank you very much for the information. =)

Yes pretty much, my guess is that a month or 2 you will see those arena weapons everywhere much like the 2.0 GM weapons. While the raid boss that drops similar weapons presumably in Tempest Keep or Coilfang raid instance wont even be killed.

Well, 1700 rating team will get 51% more points than 1500rating team. I'd call that significant difference. Joe the average will earn 3 items and have very little leftover for next season. Clark the Competetive will have 4 items and still has enough points banked to get first piece of T2 arena gear after just 1 week of arenas.

I wouldn't call a 3 items per 12 weeks exactly a super fast progression gearwise. Normal raiding is actually faster usually.

I however agree, that the weapons are a bit stupid atm. 88dps weapons for 3-4weeks of fooling around for fun, well, dunno. Not that fast actually, but they still are a bit overpowered. Increase a bit stamina / resilience in gladiator weapons and make them ~82-83dps to match the PVE-quality of crafted BoE epic's to keep both as viable choises and it should be ok, even with the current price. You might actually end up with a good tanking weapon by making it so, but it'd still not be overpowered compared to Karazhan / Gruul weapons. 3-4 weeks is not that short time actually, considering that average persons attention span in a game like wow is nowhere near that...

For people who just join to loose for 6 consecutive weeks in a row to get their epic weapon... I don't see it as a problem either, if someone is willing to take 6 weeks of beating just to get a new weapon, I'm willing to give him one. By the time he has the weapon, 1500 rating people have weapon and a piece of armor and 1700 rating people weapon and 2 pieces of armor. I'm ok with that. Why should geardifference grow faster, when it just would emphasize the already apparent skilldifference. Giving bad players a steady but slow access to decent gear just levels the playground a bit.

Making pure PvP stats isn't a bad idea, but if they start engineering the reverse it could cause problems. Still, everyone seems to agree the problem is with the weapons. So is there simply another way the system could award weapons rather than just pure points? Like wins, or win %, or something else? Or would increasing the cost just fix the problem entirely?

I think in some sense the original PvP system had that part correct. You only got your weapons (the grand prize) when you got to GM. Attaching some variation of 'Requires 10,000 Total Arena Points Earned' would suffice I think.

^^^ This post is why the arena system works the way it does. Blizzard wants everyone to experience the Arena. There are many specs or 2v2 pairings that fall flat in PVP but in this system they still have a reason to participate. Furthermore if you have friends that are casual or just not very good you will not feel like you are screwing yourself by playing with them.

If some absolutely terrible players some free loot it is a small price to pay to have a new game mechanic that everyone can sink time into to advance their character.


Also there seem to be some short memories out there. Back when BWL was still new and buggy the HWL gear was top notch for most classes. Especially for DPS classes. Just because this arena stuff is better now does not mean that it will stay that way. I am sure their goal is to have the best geared players be people that have reached the limit of PVE and PVP progression, not just one or the other.

Iirc, they never announced they would ever upgrade the basic PvP items (though they eventually did). They have said, however, that they will be upgrading the arena items to stay competitive with PvE loot, so saying it will be outdated may not be as valid in this case.

The problem is that getting HWL gear was arguably quite a bit harder personally then clearing BWL. It required *alot* of time investment, much more then raiding in any but the very top end guilds would require. If you couldn't join a good guild it was something you could do, but in general getting geared through raids was easier for most people I think.

The way it seems to be setup right now is that getting arena rewards is quite easy and does not consume much game time (although it does take a decent amount of RL time). On the flip side, raiding is harder then ever with ever mounting consumable costs. I remember back when we cleared BWL (and even more so MC) on my server (we were the top guild at the time) we considered it a big deal to put a flask on the tank and have people drinking +damage elixirs and such. Now that is considered completely normal and infact fully flasked raids are not out of the questions for most guilds that are on the top of their server.

Just the fact that 10 games a week is not a time investment whatsoever. I can long on and bust out ten games in less then an hour.

You'd probably spend more time a week flying on gryphons then loss grinding.

Something seems wrong with a reward structure like that, tis all.

My complaint isn't really with the ratio of progression between groups within the arena, so much as the contrast between the ease of obtaining arena loot and all other loot in the game.

Before arenas, say a whole two weeks ago, if an uninformed WoW-playing friend of yours came to you and said, "I just hit 70, and my weapon is garbage, what are my options?", you'd have a pretty clear spectrum to lay out for him.

1) Go do some quests in the 68-70 zones, and get a decent blue weapon there (ilvl 109 blue).

2) Go do some level 70 instances, and get a nice blue weapon there (ilvl 115 blue), but you might have to run them a bunch before you see the drop you need. And then hope no one else rolls too.

3) Go do a lot of level 70 instances, and get Exalted with <insert faction here>, then spend some gold for an epic weapon (ilvl 95 epic).

4) Start running some heroic instances, and try to get an epic weapon from the final boss of one of those. But be warned, they can get pretty hard, you can only go once per day, and it might take a lot of runs to get the weapon you're aiming for (ilvl 95-100 epic).

5) Gear up elsewhere (steps #1-#4), then get into a solid Karazhan group, and you can get some amazing loot there. But be warned, it'll take anywhere from ten to dozens of hours to learn that place, and it can get expensive with repair costs and consumables. And you only get one chance per week at your weapon(s), and might have to roll against others for them. (ilvl 100 epic; ilvl 110 from Prince)

6) Farm. Spend dozens of hours farming, and get together the mats, or the gold needed to buy the mats, or just a pile of gold, and find a master blacksmith who can make you an epic weapon (formerly ilvl 95, now 105). But it's expensive as hell.

7) Become a smith yourself, and combine option #4 and option #6. Farm to level up smithing to 375, farm massive mats for your base weapon, and then farm heroics in order to upgrade your weapon further (ilvl 100-->115 epic).

8) Join a high-end raiding guild, and kill world-bosses and 25-man raid content. This is a serious commitment. You're going to have to spend dozens of hours learning content, farming it to help the rest of the guild gear up too, pay repair and consumable bills, and you'll probably have to wait in line behind more experienced/veteran members with more DKP if you want to get these items. And they'll expect you to have good gear on your own coming in (options #1-#7). But if you join a good enough guild and work at it, you can get some really amazing stuff (ilvl 105-->??? epic).

...

And now enter option 9, which I don't need to explain, which gives you an ilvl 115 epic. Does that option fit neatly within the above spectrum? Doesn't it render a lot of the above spectrum obsolete?

(bold is mine)

Not really, because unlike most of the other scenarios you suggested, a player on an average team (1500 rating) won't get his 1H/OH or 2H weapons for weeks. Eventhough it will turn out that by the end of the 2 month season he might have 2 or 3 epics, he won't see that last one for 8 weeks. In those 8 weeks he could grind rep and buy epic weapons/armor from factions quite easily.

What's important (to me anyways) is not the time spent, but the time before he will see benefit. Besides, it's been said a few times, if someone hops on and goes 0-10 while dancing naked and gets an epic after 8 weeks, does anyone really care? That person in no way effects your game, an average player will have 2 or 3 epics, a good player will have 4 and almost have 5.

Seriously, who's going to lose for 12 weeks and either a) Spend gold each week to reset his rating or b) Have a rating so low that he only gets one Epic, only to see Blizzard release the T2 Arena Epics next Season. Although I guarentee there will be a few people who do this, I don't really see it being a problem.

The same people who did nothing but sit in AVs so they'd lose them faster. And yes, it does detract from the experience quite a bit when at the end of the season you've still got them with better gear than the raiders.

Just fix the problem by taking the PVP modifier idea to a larger extreme. Halve the DPS, add a 50% mod on the weapon in PvP combat, and ta da.

Though honestly I don't know how you'd implement the damage aura on melee weapons, because they use the internal weapon stats to calculate things like MS or Backstab and a straight modifier wouldn't work there.

well grinding rep with factions is pretty easy, that's not the chief concern here - why would that player buy weapons or armor from crafters? would you pay a crafter 600g (the price of 8 primal mights for a 108dps felsteel reaper, nevermind the nethers or felsteel) for a weapon when you knew you just had to wait a couple weeks to get a better one? This isn't about people not using lower city polearms, this is about epic recipes and primal nethers being rendered worthless by poor design

in the end raiders are going to end up with much better equipment anyway, I'm pretty confident of that barring an overhaul of the arena system, though it'll still take a whole lot more work just to get to the bosses that drop arena-equivalent rewards, but crafters, casual crafters, get screwed over pretty hard by this. again.

A point adjustment to the weapons is all that is really needed to fix the "free epics" problem. And perhaps an updated weapon selection (and raid loot appropriately itemized) at a frequency that makes it so losing constantly won't allow you to have your weapon very long before a new one is available (in which case you'd never have even close to a full PvP set anyway). They could also introduce something like more powerful set bonuses to pull the power focus off of weapons.

Ultimately, I think the "objective" of the arena isn't to get loot -- it's to advance and climb the ladder like in their RTS games. The loot serves as a sort of progression, but it's there to prevent you from throwing on your PvE gear and dominating. If the gear is too difficult to get, then some guy on a team who sits around 1600ish rating for one season but is improving or is simply not on a very good team gets screwed the second season when the middle-upper tier of competition is all decked out in the first tier of PvP gear. There needs to be a sizable pool of teams with a good chunk of arena gear going into the second season.

Prot warriors -- it's 100g back and forth. Designate PvP times. If you have a full roster thats only 10g a person. I'd love to see prot warriors as a viable protective force on a team, but blizzard doesn't seem to agree.

His point was that it does affect his game, since it is clearly the path of least resistance/effort to getting the best loot, which makes other paths obsolete. That affects the game of blacksmiths, at the least. I think the second point is that yes, it matters, because of the game philosophy that it represents, and the precident it sets for future content.