Arena season gear scaling (New players left behind?)
 

We were having a discussion in Vent this evening re: the scaling of arena gear from season - season. Specifically, the absolute necessity for casters in cloth to have high Resilience (300+) going into season 2. I'm curious to hear from the PVP community. Do you guys think new players to the arnea system will slowly get left behind? Imagine season 3.. 4.. It gets worse and worse as new players (without the gear from previous seasons) launch their teams.

Gear certainly isn't everything for the top teams. However, like anything in this game, it can make an average player look good or at least keep that person alive longer. I don't see season 2 exposing the gear gap as much as 3 will. Imagine Warlocks in season 3 gear, pushing 500 Resilience with melee DPS on us. Now imagine that same Warlock, new to arenas with 0 Resilience and a bunch of T4, 5 or even 6 loot from PVE. I can see them still being competitive, but the complete lack of raw mitigation will cause cloth based classes to wilt under any sort of well coordinated assist.

The valid arguement is that some classes can generally avoid, or get away with wearing PVE loot. This seems like a really dicey proposition but I guess Paladins and Warriors could look at instanced gear to start out.

Maybe it's an issue at the top level but I can't see anything changing much lower down. After a season or 2 they will be competitive if they play enough. I don't think it's really an issue that it may take a couple of seasons for someone to get fresh 70 up into the top echelons. It's similar to PvE where you wouldn't want to take a fresh level 70 into SSC/TK etc. They have to work their way up to the top.

That all goes on the assumption that resilience will truely stack through the roof with the new sets. It wouldnt surprise me if resilience barely gets upgraded but you will find more stamina and other stats on the sets. But yes, there will always be a gear difference between a new team and an old, but this can partially be overcome with the use of the epic honor items.

But lets say you start a new team at the beginning of season 2, this means you will be able to have most of the season 2 armor at the end of that season and go into the next season with a pretty good set especially if you combine it with honor epics. If you really want to start out and be competitive in a new season you need to be willing to use 1 season for gearing up.

It was said that the gear from a previous season would still be available but at a lesser price.
New players would have it hard for a bit, but then could at least pick up some older arena pieces to offset some of the difference and eventually get the new pieces.

The whole gear difference thing isn't anything new to pre-TBC wow tho, can't really compare the high-end arena teams/pve guilds to the average player. People running in naxx gear trashing people who just set foot in aq was the same and i think it will always stay the same.

Nothing to look forward to if you never get smashed by gear that's way better than yours right? :)

I'm not convinced it's a big problem, people don't just jump into pro-sports without years of training. New teams will also play other new teams, and will catch up with gear over the course of a couple of seasons. Working your way to the top should be a natural progression in PvP, as working your way to the end content is in PvE, and becoming a top sports personality is in the real world. It only takes a season of "average" rating to get close to a full set or arena equipment.

I think, in arenas, skill and practice seem to be as much more important than equipment anyway - since my team switched from playing most evenings, to having 1 night a week when we play all our games (due to PvE respecs for raiding limiting arena time), we have steadily lost rank to (what look like) lesser geared teams.

I'm focusing on PVE for now since it's more fun to me, but I've recently played some arenas and I will get into it sooner or later, so: I can see it being a problem that the price cut for "old" items is not significant enough, which will make it hard for newcomer teams to get the necessary resilience to even compete. Then again, making it very cheap would diminish the relative value of raid drops and other items.

I'm also curious to know where the iLevel of the new season's sets lies. The current ones are about mid-karazhan level which sounds about right considering this is where the average PVE player is. But if they suddenly make it dirt cheap it would be unfair to the lower tier raiders, and if the new stuff is TK level it wouldn't be right too, since I'm pretty sure you find more people in gladiator gear than people decked in TK epics on any given server.

Should they look at the gear level of all average PVE players (including non-raiders) when allocating the new sets or the average gear level of the top5 progressed guilds on any server?

With the way that arena gear is priced in the future, won't people be able to get gear immediately below the pro tier fairly cheaply? You'll be able to leap straight in and start grinding towards extremely good gear.

Blue post yesterday that put the discounted price of the previous season's gear at -15% so it's ot going to be that cheap a discount - would expect people to use it more to get an additional piece for set bonus purposes than anything else. Other implication of course is that the new sets are only a slight upgrade and so a 15% cost reduction's in line with keeping the cost/stat ratio appropriate.

Well, ofcourse new players are getting behind more and more, but that's basically a part of a MMORPG where peolpe do progress. After playing an amount of time you should have better gear than someone having played a lesser amount of time. Wether it is fair, yes in a way, wether it is good for the competition, no. But that's a reason why I can't see WoW Arena becomming an E-sport, since it's a hell of ride getting a new character up par with people that have played more, and in the current arena system, good teams get better gear, while bad or lesser good teams are staying behind increasing the gap between good and bad teams.

The ultimate sollution would be ofcourse making fixed arena sets which everyone in the arenas would wear, but it kinda kills the idea of a MMORPG.

With annual reset buttons in the form of expansions I do not see how the arena gear gap can be come a prohibitive issue. If you join the endgame at the end of an expansion yes you will get rolled for a while. But that is to be expected, really. Presuming Blizzard releases expansion at a decent pace then you will either be close enough to the beginning of an expansion to be able to catch up quickly or close enough to the end of one that before you are skilled enough to compete at the top the gear will reset.

You did not hear about Guildwars until now, did you? ;)

In my opinion, the compete on common pvp, it's enough getting 5 pieces Season 1 until Season 3, the boost isn't that much between Tier 4 and Tier 5, especially beeing a caster/healer won't bring you in biggest troubles.
Warriors and Rogues whose aren't blacksmith and can't obtain Tier 3 Weapons get bigger problems, but they were all the time very item dependent.

Actually, Mutilate Rogues get screwed because the only crafted dagger is Dirge which is mainly a PvE weapon.

Well, there are sooo many Daggers avaible from heroics/kara, it's not necessary for season 1. And Multilate Rogues need cp/crits more than 5 extra dps.

Theres about 6-7 daggers, 4 of them are basically copies of Ced Carver but with slightly different stats, one of them is heroic arc off the last boss, another is whispering slayer from SL and thats only around 8-10 dmg range increase and not much crit compared to Ceds.

Kara has ER which is slightly worse then the Gladiator Shanker, and Gladiator Shanker is slightly worse then a malch, depending on how you value stats.

You have about the same availablity of weapons as Warriors do for 2Hs.