I'm pretty new to the whole pvp scene so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but have the devs said anything about the potential of arena gear for the rest of the gear slots?

Obviously honor gear fills that gap currently, but playing BGs is brutally slow honor grinding and every game ends up hurting my soul due to horrible PUGs, AFKers, half-formed teams, getting rolled by premades, etc. It's AV weekend and in about 80 minutes of play (double-queuing with AB/WSG matches in between) I'll be lucky if I scrounge up 1k honor. I need tens of thousands of honor to fill in the arena piece gaps, and I'm pretty sure I don't have it in me to deal with that many hours of BG pain.

So, this it, arena-gear wise? Have people asked the devs at any of the conferences about more arena gear in future seasons? Or do I really need to grind a whole lot of hours of BGs to be truly competitive in arenas?

Grinding honor is pretty soul sucking.. probably more soul sucking that grinding mats/gold. Why? I don't know, perhaps because the goal is always so high (a few hundred gold takes hours, a single piece of honor gear takes days or weeks), or perhaps because your options for honor are so narrow (basically Alterac Valley, or else you slow down collection considerably). Probably a combination. But grinding honor is easily the worst part of this game, hands down. It even beats out the epic flying mount cost imo, and lord knows I bitch about that enough. =p

I'm not an armchair game designer, so I'll leave it to blizzard to find a better solution, god willing. Personally just glad I got enough s1/s2 gear to fill all my slots with resilience. I can live without the season 3 upgrades, but missing an entire armor slot of resilience is pretty crucial.

Farming honor is better than waiting 2 months to be able to compete in arenas, but it's still pretty boring.

Honestly if Blizzard implemented this they could practically close the BGs. The honor gear actually being "best in slot" for PvP is probably one of the few things that keeps people coming back to the battlegrounds after they've done each of them 10 or so times.

Yes, it is the dev's vision that players do Arenas, BGs, and even some PvE on the side to become the "best". Note that SSC drops rings with resilience that are better than the honor ring for Arenas, but then the honor ring is second best .

AV should be a pretty easy grind since you can get so much honor as alliance. Other than that get your arena team to grind the honor with you. Going into BGs solo is probably the worst experience in WOW but having a few people in there with you can make it bearable at times.

Here's my two cents on this subject:

I think that in order for the higher end players to become interested in BGs (or even anyone who's gotten all the gear at this point) there needs to be some sort of ladder system where rank determines the amount of honor (independent from the honor/bonus honor from the actual BGs themselves) that you and your team would receive. The amount of bonus honor is also determined by the players that you play with and their ranking. For example, 10 players who played together 100% of the time and all had similar high rankings would receive more honor than 10 players who played together 50% of the time with the same high rankings or 10 players who played 100% of the time with a large variation in ranking. However, the penalty for introducing new players into your group would not be stiff enough to deter anyone from doing it, as long as your group remains relatively similar.

Hopefully this would bring back competitive team versus team battlegrounds and everyone would be able to play at their skill level. Also, this eliminates the arena system's reliance on having certain team members online (it would still be beneficial to keep the same players on your team, but not necessary). On top of this, you can still solo queue and get honor, just not nearly as much as you would with a ladder team. Also, the queue times would probably be decent if the reward for queuing as a team is worth it enough. Like I said, hopefully this will bring back more competition in BGs (which is pretty much non-existent in my Battlegroup at the moment).

That's just the rough outline of it, no numbers or anything. What do you guys think?

No criticism taken -- I certainly don't consider myself a PvP player of any significance.

Maybe "put them out of their misery" is a better term. I actually like a good BG game quite a bit, but based on my experience over the last couple months, they're extremely few and far between, with the issues listed in my OP the norm. I don't mind a grind, especially one that rewards skill. I have no problem working my way up the arena ladder earning points and gear over many months. What concerns me the necessity of running BGs to even be competitive in arenas.

The BT/Hyjal comparison is flawed. You're playing the same game, more or less, in PvE with the two instances. BGs and Arenas are wildly different. As different as Arenas and PvE, in my opinion. I really enjoy Arenas. I find BGs obviously broken and grueling. I was hoping that someone had pinged the devs on the possibility of arena gear is more slots, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

It'll be sad if I end up bailing on Arenas because I can't bring myself to grind weeks of BGs though, and that's a real possibility.

Not wanting to do BG is pretty different from wanting free epics. For me at least, the problem is that most of these BG's have been out since like BWL-era. I bet the wow PvE population would be a lot lower if we still had to gear up every raid in Mc/Bwl before we could tackle new stuff. It's not that they aren't fun, but that fun is deminished by having to slog through games with PuGs and AFKs 75times per item.

Personally, I think if they were to provide more honor bonuses for contributing to winning games, the BG system would go much better. Some bonus for defending nodes in AB instead of just zerging around or the like. Having grinded a character almost entirely through the 2.1 honor system, I find I have next to no desire to participate in BG's to gear additional characters. And I dred the prospect of them adding other gear to the honor vendors that I might decide is a requirement to compete in the arenas.

No, we want to pvp to get the best pvp items. I hate to say it, but I'd rather not ever step foot in AQ or BWL again, and yet I've been doing Arathi Basin forever. It's been two years since the first Blizzcon, and I remember grinding Arathi Basin rep to exalted before that blizzcon.

I've been through this crap before, and yet I still have to do it. AB does not change, pugs leave points with nobody guarding, people AFK, its a half hour suckfest that I pull crap honor out of.

The only saving grace is that on my server/battlegroup we plow Alterac Valley so fast that it's almost bearable, course thats PvE, I rarely ever even see a horde in Alterac Valley.

I fully agree that the current system for "grinding" honor is flawed, especially when it comes to Alterac Valley.
I've always wanted to obtain some PvP gear myself outside Arenas, but I simply gave up because of the horrible Battleground system.

Implementing some sort of match-making system in Battlegrounds would be ace, as well as rewarding significantly more honour for actively participating in Alterac Valley for example. Also, I believe the new feature of being able to report players AFKing in A.V. will force most people to actually participate in the battle.