Couple points-

First off the biggest pve dps upgrade for a rogue is the trinket slot (this is just a derail but sickeningly its true) of course generally and non-DST speaking it is the weapon slot. For my own person experience, going from Spiteblade to talon of azshara was half the dps increase of going from abacus to DST. Typically yes the weapon is the best upgrade.

Im pretty much a pve rogue who arena's to get pve gear. Its just recently that i've been having alot of fun with our 3's team (of similar pve'ers) that ive started to really get the honor gear and make efforts to improve my resilience etc.

The arena gear that I do have is simply future planning for stam encounters, thats how i've approached it and while I have been having fun my opinion of it hasnt changed, its still just for pve stam gear. Point being that if they cap weapon usage at a certain rating I would very much be inclined to stop arena's at the point where I can still use my weapon just to maintain my rating. It simply isnt worth the <small as it may be> risk to go to vashj or KT one handed because of a bad string of war²/pal matchups that dropped my rating below the threshold necessary.

What, give healers Mortal Strike Penetration?

No, these are good ideas. Put more PVP stats on the PVP gear and it becomes less good for PVE. The problem is that even though my Merciless Gladiator's Shanker has a bunch of PVE-worthless resilience on it, it still has hit, crit, AP and at the end of the day is 97.5 DPS which is a ton more than anything I can raid for.

But I too do not want to return to the days of farming BWL for a CTS that will never drop. Weapons are too damn important to a physical DPS class to be bound to pure luck.

It really is simple... make Defensive stats that make PvE gear less potent, and offensive stats that make PvP Defensive stats less potent.

No matter how good JC might think he is, 1 day a week pretty much guarantee's your not the best pvp'er ever. Not saying you need to play 5+ hours every night but like anything competitive you need to put in real practice time to get good at it. It really speaks to the whole effort issue. JC wants free epics while putting in the absolute minimum effort.

I'd say the real minimun for me personally is around 3 nights a week for ~3 hours a pop to remain relatively competitive. That's time dedicate 100% to pvp practice with 90% of it being arena based. It's very easy for me to notice the difference in my game when I play 1 night a week vs 4+ nights a week.

To get back on topic I love the idea. 1900 or top 20% BG wide or whatever is pretty trivial. Anyone with any decent level of skill, team coordination and who can put in anything above the bare minimum effort should not have any problem with this. We've had full alt teams break 2k already this season and were on one of the smaller BG's 5x5 total teams wise.

Instead of being free epics they will be cheap epics.

I support this change. As it stands now, the time invested/skill/organizational effort required to get an amazing epic weapon via arena is grossly out of proportion with the rewards from other areas of the game.

Bottom line, players will always take the path of least resistance to improve their character. Right now, Arena weapons are that path. Players, casual, raider or PvP junkies, are going to do arena to get access the most powerful weapons in the game. If restricting weapons to top X % of teams is the way to do it, so be it.

Notice, they are NOT doing it for armor. Why? Because its not a problem. Nobody is doing arena just for the armor, because they are very PvP specific pieces. There are plenty of people out there who are just logging a bit of time each week specifically for weapons.

A 1900 rating places you within the top 3% of every Battlegroup.

I arrived at this by taking the # of 5v5 HoF teams in Season 1 multiplied by 200 as the amount of total eligible teams for this season, so it's really only a ballpark, but probably a small one. From previous looks at my own battlegroup (Shadowburn), the rating requirements per Arena Titles across each bracket were within a few points of one another so you could expand this out to 2v2/3v3.

Also, since 1750 got bandied about the IRC channel yesterday, that's around 10%.

I don't understand all these talks about "spending a few weeks to get amazing epics for casuals". It is going to take a casual warrior that does 1300 every week 13 weeks to get a merciless 2h weapon.

13 weeks!

I think anyone who can keep paying blizzard for 3 months deserves a purple weapon.

Besides, some of the guys here almost sound they are afraid of the casual warrior with a 2h merciless weapon, what happened to the "skill"?

That's definitely not what is going on here. I'm atrocious at pvp, and I'm quite sure I could kill a warrior who took 13 weeks to get a Merciless Decapitator if he had no other pvp gear. The point we've been trying to make is that the weapons are the best not only in pvp, but they are very near the top for PvE for several specs as well. Just like the PvPers don't want to have to do icky raiding to get the gear they need to be effective, many raiders don't want to have to grind away mindlessly in the arena to do their own thing. The rating cap means that if you aren't serious about arena (read: many PvE'ers), you can't use the PvP path to get PvE gear progression. Which is exactly what the arena people want, in reverse.

The problem here is that this really won't change much of anything. The only thing this will do is give the higher rated arena teams another reason to sell temporary spots on their teams. People will still farm arena points for weapons(hell, I reform a 2v2 team and 2-box 10 losses every week). The only difference will be that once they have enough points, they will have to find a 1900+ team to sell them a spot to buy the weapon.

I think this was introduced for two reasons.

1. To counteract the effect of frontloading. You can carry points over to the next season. This is a good idea, because otherwise the ladders would be dead at the end of the season. But it also produces a rift between PvP (where you can get the best item at the start of the season) and PvE (where the best items come at the end of the dungeon). Arena season 2 was introduced when SSC/TK were opened to the masses via the nerfs/fixes. But nobody went straight from nowhere to killing Vashj. Lots of people on medicre teams saved enough points to get the new weapon right away. With the change, even if you are on a 1900 team at the end of the season, it will take you several weeks to get back there. So frontloading does not play.

2. To maintain weapons as status symbol. Blizzard has always been notoriously stingy with the weapon drops. I used a weapon from MC until after I had killed Twin Emps. We all know the most exciting thing about your 10th Nef kill was to see if he dropped a weapon. Arena destroyed the status symbol factor of weapons that Blizzard clearly wants to have. Problem with this is, it affects some classes way more than others. For some classes, weapons are just another item slot. For some its character defining.


As someone who does not raid I obviously want Blizzard to create as many incentives as possible for people to PvP. But I feel there are legitimate concerns about the availability of weapons. The key is to ensure that this does not turn half the population into cheaters. Arena point selling is already rampant, and if this just required a rating then it would get worse. /2 WTS spot on 1900 2v2 team PST . But they cannot really make a rating requirement to use the weapon, else we would all be naked at the beginning of a new season - not to mention bad experiences from the original honor system.

Then of course there is the issue of creating a barrier to entry for PvP gear. If they make season 2 gear available without restrictions then I think this would not be so bad, especially since the classes this affects the most often use blacksmithing weapons anyway. But I personally would still put the bar way below 1900. In Bloodlust, which is highly competitive and very active, 1900 was about top 4% in 5v5 last season. That is quite a small portion of the population (especially when you factor in that not everyone arenas), and could ironically be less than the number of people that have access to BT loot by the time season 3 rolls around.

Please don't pretend it's a terrible pain for raiders to lose 10 arena games a week to get a weapons once per season while at the same time saying it's too easy for Johnny come Casual to get weapons in the same time allotment. And really, it's not breaking anything that players bereft of tier 6 content can get t5 level weapons, whether they be t5 progression raiders or the casuals who get nowhere in the game and still pay the same monthly fee we do.

I understand how it devalues some PvE drops and it does go against certain established design principles but judging by the tone with which some people are complaining about this you'd think the game was somehow broken (in this regard anyway). It's not.

Still, I think it's fitting that they apply the rating requirement to S3 weapons though, they'll be the endgame until L80. Not that I can see them becoming much of an upgrade from Season 2, seeing as the melee weapons only 3 dps short of (pre-Illidan) Black Temple gear. Maybe we'll get a visual upgrade. I'd drop some points on a dagger that looks better than the Spellblade does. It looks more like L30 Rogue dagger than anything else, save for the innate +3 weapon dmg glow.

You're conflating people. I've never said it is too easy for the casuals to get their weapons. I don't know the rates, but I suspect that if our stereotypical casual player is as bad as everyone in this thread thinks he is, he'll never get any appreciable amount of gear, which is probably disheartening to him, but not really germane to the argument.

My point is this: if you are going to add PvP gear that is some of the best for PvE (and the Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade is very close to the Naj'entus dagger), then it should be equally hard to obtain for raiders so they aren't encouraged/forced to take up PvP to remain competitive. Really the weapons are the only rewards that have significant spillover to PvE, that's why they are getting the rating and the armor isn't. It's not a tier behind, it's equal. That's just poor design when the risk/reward for someone who actively raids the tier 6 instances is still in favor of getting a PvP reward.

Am I that far off? Isn't this exactly what the PvP'ers complain about when gear they need comes from raids?

The difference is, no PvEer NEEDS Arena gear to PvE. PvPers in the past NEEDED PvE gear to be competative.

I only have time to play one night a week, and this includes all of my arena, and my PvE progression. I don't expect to be totally competative, but I do keep my team scores > 1550. I am not well geared due to only getting 10 games in a week, and starting season 1 late, so I have now 3 pieces of S2 gear, and 1 piece of S1 gear, and no Arena weapon. The rate at which I can obtain Arena gear forces me to rely on PvE drops and Honor(which takes longer to get than Arena gear).

If the season 3 weapons require a certain rating, Chances are, i will not be capable of reaching that rating, and will have to spend my points upgradeing already decent gear instead of filling out the slots that I don't already have gear.

The solution should not be to limit the acquisition of this gear, but to limit the gear's PvE potential, just as it has with the rest of the PvP gear.

I'd like to see the BT/Hyjal itemization dude be on staff for Season 3 gear. Give me +hit and +haste and -armor, screw crit rating bonuses. They can still be 98dps or whatever, just give me some more supportive stats and slower 1handers.

What's wrong with just purchasing the season 2 spellblade (merciless) at a reduced cost rating?

If your arena team isn't the highest rated and is simply mediocre at 1550 then why should you have the best weapon?

It would be like saying that people should be able to farm 200 heroic badges in PvE content and trade it in for Illidan loot. Eventually there has to be a wall where certain sub-par players are cut off from the top notch gear. (Only the best PvPers should have the best PvP gear)

Had to look up "conflate" but sure. My point is that 'forcing' raiders to spend 20 minutes losing some arena games (we're presuming it's a gigantic pain for them to play these games so why not presume they'll just queue, enter and leave the game) to get the Glad's WeaponOfChoice once per season is a really minor thing to put someone through. You're acting like you're being forced to do something hard to get the best in slot until T6 content. You're not. It's a pity that the pve caster weapons aren't better itemised but it's not like you can't skip the Spellblade. The small difference and extra dkp spending vs spending time in arena is not going to break your raiding. At the end of the day, this is a really, really small problem in the big picture. There is a small problem, I'm not saying there isn't a problem at all, but it's just not a big deal.

Yes, you are. Raiding is an entire lifestyle. I can't fit raiding at the progression level I'd be content at (I was in top-on-faction guilds before BC, killed CT the weekend he was killable, etc) into my life at all. Anyone can find 1-4 friends and play for an hour once or twice a week. I cannot find 35+ other guys that are on the same page, and be at my monitor for the required stretch of time at the specified start time 4+ nights a week anymore. Cannot. The same goes a whole lot of other players.

Because upgrades make players happy, and gear progression is what drives them to continue playing the game.

And like I had said, anyone who would pay blizzard for 13 weeks deserve a purple weapon.

I agree with Yaltus with his concern that PvE player has to grind PvP to get a good weapon in order to progress PvE-wise, I just can not stand the attitude that "(if your team) is simply mediocre at 1550 then why should you have the best weapon?"

Some thoughts:

1. The pvp system is built around the premise that no matter how bad you suck, you will get something sometime. It's the same with switching to tokens in raiding. Guaranteed match of effort with reward. It may not take a ton of hours, but if it takes 12 weeks of queuing up to get piece one, I think you should be able to use it.
2. A 98 dps mh (+5 dps over Prince drops) or that big 2 hander makes you better at dps in PVE, but it's not a game breaking change. At some point, if you are willing to as a guild put in 3 months for some weapons, there is no reason you shouldn't have a slightly easier time getting your first couple TK/SSC bosses down. This flows right into Blizzard seeing more people see end content. S3 weapons aren't going to put a Karazhan guild into Black Temple.
3. You can tie the weapons to other things other than ratings. Make the weapon require you to be wearing 2 pieces of MG gear to use. The boost in DPS provided by the gear is somewhat negated by the less optimal PVP armor for PVE. Or, make it a requirement to play 20 arena matches a week for continued use. Now the gear requires maintenance. 20 matches is almost 7 times the min for qualifying for points and really is a more intensive requirement of effort rather than skill.

If the PVP weapons don't come with PVP skill attached, the hardcore PVPers have nothing to worry about other than a large pool of JC's feeding them points. If the PVP weapons don't provide PVE skill, they will hasten progression through low level raid content, but hardly trivialize. I don't remember many encounters where mindlessly dpsing hard enough was enough.

Grymm your post gave me a really good idea and solution to the PvP weapons being too powerful in PvE.

Instead of making arena gear a requirement to equip the said weapon, they could make it an additional set bonus, such as instead of just having a 4 piece armor bonus, they could add a six piece item bonus, and have the six pieces made up of the existing 5 pieces of season armor, and the sixth piece be the weapon.

For the 6 piece set bonus, it could look something like:
6 pieces: Weapon damage +50 (top end, not DPS; for a two hander in this example).

This means that a season 3 weapon would require the user to have all 5 of the armor pieces prior to the weapon being at it's full potential (otherwise the weapon could just be made only as powerful as the season 2 weapon without the set bonus).

This wouldn't imbalance PvE because the user would be giving up 5 slots of PvE armor to wear PvP armor instead if they wanted to retain this bonus, meaning they would be sacrificing a lot of PvE dps stats in favor of all that extra stamina/resilience.

This would also require PvPers to build up their suit of armor prior to having a fully powered up weapon.

It could be tuned to just require less pieces of the armor as well, so that as long as the new weapon was equipped with enough arena armor pieces, it would be more powerful than it was previously.

This also would prevent highly rated teams from selling slots for weapon purchases.

As much as I regret coming out on the side of the 'easy epic' crew (I do believe that the weapons ARE too easy to get - but a rating cap on getting them is not the correct solution, in my opinion, as it just promotes selling spots on high ranked teams), I have to say I'm the most disappionted by this because I have a chunk of raiders who are now PvPing for the FIRST TIME, really, in the Arena, and they're ENJOYING it ... why? Were they really closet PvP junkies that never got exposed to the drug? No - it's because we run a team that 5v5s, 10 games a week, and while everyone tries their best to win - we don't stress over it too much if we lose.

That being said, I'd be totally in favor of the strict rating requirement as long as it's removed when the new season comes out - so if S3 is restricted, once S4 comes out, the restriction is taken off of S3.

That's a good idea, but it makes players that can't get the points per season to get a full set of gear plus weapon even worse. The arena gear doesn't need such a huge bonus that it in and of itself determines who is the better team.

Of course, then you run into the problem of what happens with dual wielders, and classes that can use more than one type of weapon. The list of items to complete the 6 (or 7) piece set bonus would be ridiculously long...

All in all I have to say this thread is just dumb, it is full of rampant speculation, and massive quantities of crying and complaining about a potential feature that nobody even has complete and reliable information for yet.