Well if you want go ahead. I thought of making a post/request like that 1-2 months ago. But basically I figured out by myself to get the BG gear, figure what I want from arena rewards, etc. I'd be interesting in reading a thread about dps playstyles, especially for a class like my shaman that suffers very badly from LoS. Then again maybe there is nothing else for a shaman to do than pray like mad when a warrior or rogue starts beating/stunlocking you. :p

I can definately see that I am improving. Did 2v2 for the first time in about 1.5 months the other night and won 10 straight, bringing us to mid 1600 ratings. Only one of the games was really even close, so I could see how that could continue into the 1700s before hitting any walls. How that changes from 1700 to 1900 I don't know though.

Edit: True coordination and practice helps a lot, and I can see moving up even more. But its slow and right now much more than season 1 it is limited. You said you geared up fast in season 1. Well that was what, 3 months ago? There is a lot more pvp gear around now. What worked for you then might not work now. Also rate at which you get points has decreased as well iirc from the S1 point nerf.

If this system does go through, I'd like them to do something about the 2v2 and 3v3 issues for class balance. I could totally see that if I was a lock with a spriest partner (or even holy like I have now) how easy it would be to cruise through to 1800-1900 with the level of resil I have now. Someone said it earlier about how druids are hard to play but if played well can excel. Well imo I play one of the more difficult classes in a shaman, and a more simple class in a warrior. But if I was a lock I could totally see crushing through people with dots/los issues/fears/felhunter in 2v2 because there is so little most people can do about it. Compare that to a hunter in 2v2 and I don't think thats a fair system.

True, but the situation isn't quite the same. For example, players in blue gear can start on Karazhan whether it is Feb. 2007 or August 2007 and can expect the similar levels of success assuming equal skill/gear. This is ignoring bug fixes/nerfs, but that makes things easier for the August 2007 raid not harder. New players starting in the arena in August will be facing much tougher opponents at 1500 than the 1500 competition in Feb. 2007 and this trend will continue. This is a non-issue when S3 starts due to new players being able to get S1 gear through honor and new players should have this gear before starting arenas just like everyone should have blue gear before starting Karazhan.

My point is this: Every raid get easier as time goes on through nerfs and gearflation, but arena ratings get tougher as time goes. These are both desirable things IMO.

However, your example is flawed in that Karazhan doesn't drop T6 weapons, BT does. As time goes on, S1 gear (Karazhan level items) gets easier an easier through reductions in cost.

Arena is weird because you're right, it's harder to achieve a high rating starting out now than starting 6 months ago. However, all the entry-level loot, S1, is cheaper to match.

I really do think that Z'A Is going to help a tremendous amount in this regard in helping people gear for Arenas to start out with. You're correct in that pvping without resilience is painful.

The start of season 3 puts season 1 gear onto the honor vendor. If you grind it out, you'll be behind but not outstandingly so.

If those prices for that gear is at the same price as current blue 115 pvp gear, I'm not sure how quickly that will work. It's something like 70k right now for the 5 piece blue set. Add in wrist/bracer/ring/neck and thats a lot of honor to get. Unless you become a hardcore pvp farmer, most people won't be able to get over one item a week. So really those new people to the system are 2+ months behind right from the start. But for those who do feel like grinding their life away in there, they could get them faster. (provided of course they don't nerf AV weekend)

If they kick the S1 pieces to the honor system, it would probably be at the same price as the blues are now. I feel the prices are fair. If you know you are making a new character you are going to pvp with, you can start casually doing AV at 51, and probably have enough for a trinket and several blue pieces. Personally I hit 70 on my warrior about 2 weeks before the reduction in prices, and had enough for 4pieces and a trinket, plus I bought the cloak because I was about to hit cap.

If anything, there needs to be more or more expensive things to buy with honor. I have two characters pretty much honored out atm, and about 25k on my third.

I somehow find the thought of spending more time in AV watching TV unappealing. Definitely not my idea of fun gameplay.

Talking about arena rewards for honor points just brings us back to the whole "Horde have shorter queues and get more Bonus Honor because of it." argument.

Some battlegroups have to spend an entire night just to get 2000 points because of queue times and otherwise pugging it.

I'm sure everybody would think the prices were perfectly fine if they didn't have to wait 20-25 minutes for their AB match to start.

I rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes for any BG and I think the pieces are overpriced with regards to being a "necessary" start to doing well in arenas. It's very doable but it takes a great deal of time to get them all. While I have come to enjoy the arena, I still hate BGs when having to pug it (which is almost all of the time for me.) However, to progress at anything close to a reasonable pace in arena I need to get the resilience and stamina from the honor gear.

There is already a large barrier to entering the arena at this point. Making it even larger by increasing current prices or adding new "required" pieces that are extremely expensive would make it that much worse. All this would serve is discourage those that may not be pvp people like myself from sticking with arena. Some catch up time is to be expected, but weeks or months of getting slaughtered by better geared people (or your rating drops so low everyone is horrible so you stand a chance) is extremely discouraging. For those people that have a "true" rating of 2000+, the 1500-1700 range will probably be easy regardless of a lack of pvp gear. For those merely mediocre like myself with a "true" rating in the 1750 range, the 1500-1650 can be horribly painful. Making it more painful or the same pain last longer will only drive people away.

Exactly. I can think of no good argument for requiring people to spend 50-100 hours doing something they don't enjoy just so that they can be competitive in arenas. This is 2007. I want entertaining content, not mindless grinds.

BG gear should cost a lot less than it does now. It does not compare to raid gear for PvE and does not overlap with arena gear for PvP. So who is hurt if they cut the cost?

For those really into BGs, add vanity rewards. The title was a good start, but there is a lot more they could do. Add a really cool flying mount but make it cost 100 tokens of each type and 75k honor. Maybe even add a quest that actually requires you winning to get it, like in the old days.

Sorry I should have been more clear. I wasn't advocating that everybody getting into arena's be forced to spend several weeks gearing up in flawed battlegrounds. I also didn't consider that allies might have longer queues then me.

My point was that it shouldn't be possible to "finish" a facet of the game on multiple characters in six months if it's not your focus. If battlegrounds are going to be an important part of WoW, they should have more value then covering the 3 slots your arena set doesn't, something that keeps you logging in when your arena team isn't playing. Obviously simply jacking up the prices isn't the answer.

So it's 8/17 now. Since they've preloaded the 2.2 patch, it's reasonable to expect that the 2.2 patch may arrive on 8/21. Given that the 2.3 patch with ZA is when some blue indicated that the next arena season will start, and the ZA patch includes a lot of extra stuff that also needs testing, does 9/17 seem likely to anyone else for the end of this season?

Remember that they have lots of little sub-patches. We will see 2.21 up through (I would assume) 2.23 at the very least. I don't think we will see the new arena season until November at the earliest. I would guess they will release ZA to keep people interested through the winter holidays when other games are going to be coming out.

Neck, Ring (x2 if you want the blue, but it'll be 2 rings in S3), Trinket(s), Boots, Bracers, Cloak and Belt. Not to mention gems. Quite a bit more than the 3 slots you can't get Arena gear in. Upgrading all my Veteran's Gear and getting a new Cloak is somewhere in the ballpark of 90k honor. That's whole lot of retarded bg zerging right there, and that's only for one character. Some people don't mind suffering through shit games all day every day for a few weeks, but I do. Honor/Arena gear is viewed as easy to obtain because you can fail all the way to the rewards but we are talking about some serious amounts of grinding here.

Well problem beeing that its wow and you got to see the pve side of it. Say you drop price by 2, who is still going to bother going into normal instances or even heroic when you ll just be able to get your shiny piece of epic by running a dozen of alterac ?

Now my BG has no problem with queue time ( at worse a few mins but usually a few seconds), so I can understand the problem with long queues.

The problem isn't that he's being "forced to PvP", it's that BGs (and especially AV) are incredibly shitty and not very fun, but required in order to get gear to do real PvP. I'm not even sure how you can really consider AV to be PvP since most games you can go without seeing a single person from the other team

AB and WSG were fun once upon a time. I've done them way too much by this point and it's pretty much the equivalent of telling me to go back to UBRS and scholo. All that epic gear should be produced from arena points, except maybe a trinket or two. If there was a better solution for catch-up gear to be handed out like they are with s1 next season, I'd be all for that too.

I've farmed ~200k honor since about a month before S2. I really cbf'd running the AV circuit again 1 more time. I don't AFK in the cave generally though, I tend to AFK in towers and at GYs while they cap so I'm useful should someone try and take them back, but if the option didn't exist I sure as hell would be in the cave.

It was fun at the beginning but it sure as hell gets old eventually with all the gear you have to grind out.

Just introducing new wsg/ab/av maps would go a long way towards reinvigorating them, at least for a while, and doesn't seem like it would be a massive development expense.

Yeah I get excited when I see different weather in AB, that's pretty sad.

Several maps for each gametype, like arena does now, would do wonders.

This is assuming of course they've learned from the terrain exploits they left open. It took forever for these to get fixed, especially in warsong gulch.

You say that, but I can still get up from next to the horde GY with just two jumps. (Not the old 'ramp' though, a bit left from that).

Some other places as well, but that would probably get you banned after some time.