I remember reading a sticky saying that regardless whether you played the last week or not as long as you have the required % of total games of the team you will receive the netherdrake. I have browsed through varieties of stickies now but still couldn't find confirmation.

edit: Found the post where i read it, unfortanetly no blue confirmation.

I know they're upgrading the arena armor and as such one should save their arena pennies until the 12th, but what about the arena weapons? Are those getting updated?

I for one sure hope the add something to the new give the taste for the new BG system As it is now, we only meet harder opponents but the rewards still suck big ass.

This system has really only increased our guilds lust for arena, since you don't get anything for hourgames in wsg. . .

I have been wondering about whether to upgrade armor or not.

On one side there is the idea of buying things now giving me an advantage for next season making it easier to go to a high ranking faster. Also if the new items are horridly expensive and only little upgrade it would be better to get them now.

On the other side if the new items are a significant upgrade and not significantly more expensive than the current ones it would be alot better to wait for the new season and then buy the items.

I am just waiting desperatel for some specifics on stats and price of new items.

That's hardly a good solution for new players. They'd be too far behind top players for too long. I know that you're top already and this would hardly bother you, but why exactly are you so afraid of new players that you'd want to keep them down that hard? The reason why good PVP gear should be avaialble to everyone and PVE progression works the way it does is because players are matched against players and not againsted raid encounters tuned to their lower gear level.
Besides, at that rate it would be impossible to obtain T6, as you'd need 21375 AP for just the set. That is somewhere between half and a full year for 90% of the teams. WoW definatly shouldn't become a newbie-hostile game, it certainly wasn't before BC.

The inherent problem here lies that in pve progress is linear for your character, in pvp it's a dot.

Let's say a new player levels himself to 70. To get him into your BT raid he needs gear, which he can acquire by boe/bop craftables and by doing some lower tier instance (which by BT time you can clear even if a few of your players are "crippling" the raid). He'll also get his tier 4-5 equivalent gear faster than older characters got theirs since everyone probably has it already.

However in pvp a new player levels to 70. Grinds HWL set+non-set honor epics. I'm pretty sure he'll be rather gimped in terms of stats vs people with t5-t6 arena gear.
Now since he's gimped his team will be "suffering" because of him. After all gear does play a rather significant part in pvp. So he won't reach xxxx rating and will get less arena points than the older/higher teams. Which means he won't be able to purchase his t4 arena set upgrade it to t5 and then t6 until we're well into the next season/expansion/whatnot.

That's why requiring lower tier arena gear+the same cost as others...is very counterproductive to competitive pvp.

I'd prefer a small discount if you're upgrading from the t4 arena set, or alternatively a flat out trade t4->t5. But then we'd run out of things to buy with the points so that's not going to happen. Oh well, time will tell.

Point inflation might help, then. Simply increase the # points gained each season by however many is necessary, or reduce the cost of initial tiers by x%; e.g. T4 = 800, T5 = T4 + 1000, T6 = T5 + 1200 etc. The "spirit" of the idea was to provide some barriers to entry and allow some form of PvE-like progression.

Other solutions proposed seem to involve "make all gear redundant every three months" or "allow free/cheap trade-ins providing no incentives at the high end".

Why the venom? I'm not trying to keep any one down. In fact my main is in a mere 1600 2v2 and hasn't even got his first piece of gladiator gear yet.

I think that the s2 items will cost more arena points, considering that teams hovering around 2000 rating or more will have their full set plus 5000 points to buy new pieces for.
Allowing the active players to reap the rewards before the season actually starts makes no sense, and kind of removes the incentive they have to play.


I am hoping for an upgrade system though, or at least a discount for those who purchased season one gear.

There simply need to be more items, not just a 5 piece set and a weapon. That way only the top 5 5on5 teams would have more points than they could spend.

Should put in Arena point consumables for arenas.

And not everyone enjoy PvE. Yet the best PvE players can pickup high quality pieces to every slot, where the best PvPer will not see trinkets, rings and necks of epic quality. Will not see any useful healing stuff.