Just because its a higher item level doesn't make it better for raiding. There's no way I could beat someone in DPS with a gladiator set over Voidheart or Corruptor. What the hell do you need so much stamina and resilience in PVE for? The items are designed for PvP and that's exactly where they're going to be used. The items you collect in PVE are far more oriented towards the job. Average stamina, no resilience and increasing attack power, intellect, spirit, agility, healing, spell damage, crit etc. etc. across the board.

This is what I'm afraid most. Crafting is fun, it's like playing a real RPG and by crafting things like epic weapons you could really feel you've achieved something. Now that weapon you crafted is just essentially a 2nd class sword which hardly. When they introduced AV in to the game they killed things like Arcanite Reaper and other craftable weapons with Ice Barbed Spear, and now they are making the same mistake again... :/

Just drop Gladiator weapons to ~iLvl 105 and we are good to go.

edit: I don't think that the price of the 1h weapon is the problem. Doubling the price of the 1h weapon would just effectively screw bad players to be beaten to death forever, becase they could never get enough points to get competetive gear. But by tuning the quality of weapons slightly downwards would keep lots of current weapons still worth competetive but would still keep arena weapons desirable. Now they are just too good.

Increasing the point would just mean people would have to wait few more weeks to get their weapons and I don't think it would actually solve any problems. People would still save any leftover points from current season to next season just to be able to buy the new weapon immidately.

The points made in this thread are entirely about concerns related to *weapons*, not armor sets, because weapons have DPS as a function of item level, and the DPS is the most important factor. Barring some sort of bizarre slight of hand of itemization, like somehow giving the arena weapons damage that only works in PVP or something, this IS a problem.

The best solution really is just increasing the costs of the one handed weapons so they're not so easily acquired. They're too cheap relative to the other gear anyway.

I don't recall such concern over the Grand Marshal/High Warlord Greatswords after they changed the honour system. Before they required an enormous time sink to collect, but in the closing months of WOW 1.0 everyone and their cousin had one. The PvP weapons have always been the highest in DPS and its a bit foolish to neglect the armour and jewellry pieces you collect parallel to them. Gladiator Joe with his full Gladiator set and weapon won't be doing as much DPS as Raider Bob with his slightly lower DPS weapon and buttload more attack power.

If the concern is that you can obtain gladiator weapon too easily and take it into PvE, what's the real problem? The raiders will win in this scenario, because all you need to do is get an average rating and sit on it for a month or two and accumulate enough arena points to get the weapon. You won't get it as fast, but you'll eventually get it. And by the time you have enough arena points to get it, whose to say that the 25 man instances won't be dropping equivalent weapons on a regular basis?

There's an opportunity cost to buying the gladiator weapons, at least for melee. That is, you can't put any of the delicious blacksmithing weapons to use. Even if you never/rarely run instances for nethers, I would think that most players would rather have two epics over one, and would take say, Drakefist Hammer + Gladiator's [weakest armor slot] while still having the eventual possibility of upgrading their weapon to gladiator's quality.

And while casters have no craftable weapon options, they do have the ridiculously easy to obtain Continuum Blade, making the weapon/armor decision on where to spend arena points that much harder.

Of course there will be people that use the arena to get one free sword over a couple months and ignoring the rest of the game(why then do they even play WoW?), but it's pretty likely that kind of player wouldn't do tradeskills/raid/anything to seriously improve themselves anyways. As one item in the hands of someone like that doesn't pose much of a threat, it's out of my concern.

All that said, I could be overestimating people's desire to make their character as strong as possible from as many venues as possible.

The changed honor system didn't offer rewards on par with the absolute best items in game at the time, and it also came at a time that a "reset" (i.e. the expansion) was immindant If 2.0 honor could get you a Kingsfall in a month or so of losing for an hour a week, and it had come out at the same time as Naxxramas, then you would've heard the same concerns voiced then. That's basically what this is equivalent to right now.

Yeah you should probably think more before you post.

This would be unfair to the incompetent, which is not what blizzard is about.

I think you misspelled "that's a good idea." Give the bitterness a rest.

(PS: That is a good idea, and it makes a huge amount of sense. Having the old weapons/armor require a certain lifetime ranking to wear was dumb because that ranking represented little more than massive time investment. Here, getting an 1800 rating takes actual skill, and I'd have no problem with people who manage being able to use their weapons. The only problem would be how to address people selling roster slots for a week on a team that already has an 1800+ rating....)

While it's true that Blizzard doesn't want to alienate its customer base, they are obviously moving towards a more skill-based PVP system with the arenas, so it's hardly out of the question. Given the power of weapons, it wouldn't be unreasonable to put some kind of rating requirement on them. Weaker players would still be able to get all the armor pieces, and there are fairly easy alternate methods for even casuals to obtain very good weapons (blacksmithing and rep grinding). This would allow skilled players to get the best gear without grinding or high time investment, but stop completely terrible players from cherrypicking the weapons just by showing up (or even raiders who could be decent, if they tried, but just want to get the weapons without any effort, then fill out the rest of their gear from PVE).

The gear rewarded by arenas is supposed to be divorced from the skill factor. More skilled players will get their gear faster, and less skilled players will be thrown a bone and maybe once they actually improve their game they won't be two tiers of gear behind the competition (just one tier).

Your only source of arena e-peen is supposed to be your rating and the "visual only" rewards like the armored netherdrake. Not the gear. The gear is there so that they can reduce pvp-only drops in raids so that hardcore pve players will complain less about getting "pvp toys" instead of pve upgrades. And so that people not interested in PvE (but not necessarily the best at PvP) will have something to work for.

There are a lot of reasons why the current system is better than requiring specific ratings for specific gear.

Fun thought: what happens when you start doing DKP again and have drops that are equal to arena gear? The person who does pure PvE is going to end up hosed, because they're blowing a good deal of points on a weapon just to get up to par with someone who splits PvE/PvP. So even if the pure PvE person is more dedicated, they're going to have to make up an entire weapon's worth of playtime, which in most systems is going to be virtually impossible.

Skilled players get them faster, yet they are not exclusive to skilled players. Sorry if that wasn't clear. They're not a mark of superior skill, or rewarded for skillful play. Getting them faster could be considered a reward for skillful play, but the real reward is just supposed to be your rating and your team's theoretical prestige.

At least, that's how I see it.

Like I said, it keeps less skilled players playing because they're still getting rewards. If they become better players, they're in a better position to be competitive than if they were not allowed those rewards at all. Until then they're filling slots with PvE or non-arena PvP rewards.

As for DKP, it stands to reason that because other players PvP'ed for weapons, the intrinsic value of the weapons should be diminished as the demand is lower. The question is whether your DKP system reflects that diminished value. Are you considering the weaponsmithing/etc. BoP's in your DKP system? Their effect is similar.

Actually I think a better idea (because it's less prone to exploitation) is just to have an order of gear progression required, i.e. you must purchase 2 arena armors before you can get chests/helms, you must purches 4 arena armors before you can get a weapon. That may be too restrictive though.

Warning: RambleRant incoming, please do me a favor and hear me out, I'd really like some feedback on this point of view from all you EJ's out there.

Lots of interesting points made here. My favorite so far have been the ones suggesting PvP viability with PvE penalties in Weapon Stats, and the posts that correlate with this my point of view, which is somewhat close to:

I played WoW seriously for a long time, not long enough or committed enough to get into BWL (I quit a few weeks after C'thun went down and before Naxx) but enough to learn to play and make my greatest limitation my gear, not my terrible play style. So I guess I invested the time to get "good" at the game.

Honestly, I love the new PvP system, and I'm probably one of the most casual minded people who posts here, I'm a creative, I can't do math for shit and I'm no good at powergaming b/c I get bored easily. I do enjoy the competitive nature of WoW, and I like PvP b/c you can feel your individual creativity and skill making much more of a difference than you can in PvE. Arenas will not be a means to an end for me. PvP will most likely be the end for me, and it's something that I will probably play 4 to 6 hours a week max when I want to blow off steam from real responsibilities.

I tried that "raiding" thing in WoW 1.0. I hate being treated like fucking cattle, like who I am can be summed up by my CTProfile and my /played. And although I know I'm really opening myself up to abuse with this, a lot of you come in with priviliges and biases that 90% of WoW players don't have. You're the 10% or so who by a mixture of luck and work managed to find other very good players to play with. Most of you are majorly biased to the 1.0 view of WoW, because it was so good to you.

Honestly, as a designer, it also kinda pisses me off to hear people tossing around terms like "Design Problem" like it means something, or what you think it means. Honestly, I think that TBC and Arenas are designed quite well. I think if you're saying they are "Design Problems", all it shows is that you're exhibiting an Industrial point of view in a Post-Industrial society. WoW 1.0 was a monster in my opinion. WoW 1.0 was a calculated and extremely successful Design that tested whether it could get as many people to play as much as possible and make as much money as possible. In my opinion, WoW 2.0 starts to really think, not only about the mechanics of how to addict people and keep them playing, but the ethics of getting people to play as much as possible. I think there is a major ethical line that WoW 1.0 crossed in terms of requiring real world time investment, and BC has considered the should of the problem and is trying to give people options that keep WoW one of many pasttimes and priorities, not the focus of your non-working life.

Give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt on this, I say. They are professionals, and barring a few mistakes, like the still festering problem of the Shaman's place in the game, they have done and will continue to do an amazing job with WoW. If you got this far, thanks for hearing my opinion out, and hopefully you'll feed me back some ideas, I really like seeing all the different opinions that come out on this board.

No bitterness here. And no outright "it's a bad idea" either. I don't have a problem with only the skilled PvPers getting access to some PvP rewards.

However, Blizzard does. Good PvPers makes up a small portion of the playerbase and Blizzard doesn't want to do something that would piss off the mob. So I'm stating the obvious: Blizzard won't do this.

Besides, aren't the Season Rewards meant to be the things that pander to the "I'm better at PvP so I should get something no one else gets" mindset?

PvE or PvP there is some base rule Blizzard wants to follow in TBC (though they're going to struggle with getting it right), which is this: Skill only determines how fast you get rewards, not whether you ever get them.

The IV needs an arm in which to drip...

Well, this begs the question: are we consuming content "too slow" or are the arena weapons just too good?

I personally never even noticed how good the first batch of arena weapons were back when they were posted from the PTR. "Ooh, lots of big numbers" and all that, there just wasn't a good comparison point until now when I've gone thru the instances and can compare my ilvl 115 blues/ilvl 95 epics to them. Would nerfing the arena weapons to ilvl 100 or 105 be a good solution?

If not, then one might presume Blizzard intends the raiders to be getting ilvl 115 epic weapons around the same time as the arena weapons. 3-4 weeks from now on? That just doesn't seem work out.

The "time spent for rewards" disparity issue doesn't really bother me that much, but I'll elaborate on that later.

I was wondering about that... how many points does a truly awful team rake in? I've inspected a few people and seen records like 3-22 with 1320 rating. I'm also kind of surprised at how few people are playing, or at least, it seems that way with a ~1750 rating in 2v2.

I don't play on a 5v5 team, so I can't speak for that bracket. Are there are lot more teams at that level?

So, say, hypothetically, that I was inspired by this post and wanted to snag my Spellblade.

Roughly what rating are we looking at after a week if we go 0-10? 2-8? How often do we really need to eke out a win to stay reasonably near 1500?

I two-boxed my BM hunter/Holy priest and went 1-9 last week = 1377 rating.

Don't you think you are over exaggerating just a bit here? If someone loses every game, it will take them 2.5 -3 months to get 1 item. That is the path of least resistance, 1 item every quarter of a year?

The path of least resistance is for that player to buy gold, then just purchase a BoE off the AH.

Since this is a rating system I don't understand how losing 10 games a week will net you any worthwhile point contribution. The first week you'll be in the 1300's and that isn't too shabby but once you start dropping below that how many points would you get as a sub-1000 ranked team? Hardly any. Of course you can reform every week but that costs some gold and I can't understand a team that would do this realistically. As some have said no one only wanted to get their one GM/HWL sword when the honor became cheap and easy. That may have been all they could get before the expansion hit, but the hampster wheel was going full force because now these items which had never even been an option, something you looked at and sighed because it was impossible, were suddenly reachable. The arena weapons and armor are reachable, but if you think 2-3 months pvping for 1 item slot is not a big deal to a casual player you are simply wrong.

What I am concerned about in this thread is that people consider a 1500-ranked team "bad". It isn't bad, it is average. 1500 is what Blizzard feels a team that goes 5-5 should be at. Losing half your games is not terrible, it shows you have some skill and I don't think those people should be denied thier armor and weapon upgrades on a slower pace than the 1900+ ranked pvp'ers. If there is going to be a severe dropoff in points gained I would place it at around 1300 or maybe even 1400 at the very highest. Only a very few teams will be winning over 75% of their games. There is not a middle ground armor set like the knight/blood guard set in arena play so they can only give the gear more slowly instead of giving a lesser version of it. This is discounting the grindable honor pvp gear entirely but that is much more like the initial blue PVP set in any case, and I'm not sure if it should be included in "pvp progression" although it probably should be noted.

And I'll agree with the paladin that spoke earlier, I'll be getting my armor slots before I even think to get a weapon. Of course as a feral tank I have some severe gaps in my pve raid gear but the feral weapon is only a marginal upgrade for DPS from my Terestrian's staff and not an upgrade at all from my Earthwarden for tanking. I would still only agree to upping the price of say the Main hand Gladiator sword if (arbitary) the warrior and rogue boots were cheaper by that increase.

Arena is setup in a such way that atleast theoretically every player should have 50-50 ratio once they reach their "real strenght".