Any chance of Arena gear for all slots?

Melador · 09/01/07, 1:18 AM

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?

Juli · 09/01/07, 1:47 AM

I'd personally like to see a rated, objective-based, team ladder system that is essentially a marriage of the battleground and arena systems, with "best-of-slot" pvp rewards that fill all the gaps not covered in the arena gear. Grinding honor is terrible.

Vontre · 09/01/07, 4:12 AM

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.

glick · 09/01/07, 4:22 AM

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

Thandi · 09/01/07, 6:17 AM

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.

Bahkauv · 09/01/07, 10:42 AM

I have to wait about 40-60 min on an AV weekend to get inside a bg. Outside AV weekend the queue is somewhere between 2-4 hours. If I am online the whole day I get about 6K honor. Currently I try to get the bracers for my druid, which will take me 2 days. Getting an item playing Arena I need to play 10 matches a week, for 5-6 weeks with a 1500 2vs2 rating, which is a lot less time invested into an item.

I´d really like to be able to get honor points faster, or an alternative method for getting items in the slots not covered by Arena gear. And I love the idea of Aldor vs Scryer bgs, especially as an Alliance Player in a battlegroup with a approx. 3-4:1 Ratio.

• frmorrison · 09/01/07, 11:03 AM

Originally Posted by Melador

do I really need to grind a whole lot of hours of BGs to be truly competitive in arenas?

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

.

Ralask · 09/01/07, 11:53 AM

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.

Himiko · 09/01/07, 3:16 PM

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?

Chasy · 09/01/07, 5:41 PM

Sometimes I get the feeling that PvP players really want their items handed to them on a silver plate, no criticism to the OP.

Grinding Battlegrounds for honor is tedious, but required in order to fill the gaps in your gear. Also, having Arena gear available for every slot would be an easy solution, but it would also kill Battlegrounds.

It's the same deal with PvE oriented items. It's not possible to simply grind/farm a single raid-instance and recieve the best items for all your slots. For example; Black Temple and Hyjal Summit are pretty much parallell instances, and in order to obtain the best gear available for your character, you need to run both.

I see no reason to why this is a problem in PvP, besides the obvious tedious reasons.

Melador · 09/01/07, 6:00 PM

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

Grinding Battlegrounds for honor is tedious, but required in order to fill the gaps in your gear. Also, having Arena gear available for every slot would be an easy solution, but it would also kill Battlegrounds.

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.

Zaq · 09/01/07, 6:57 PM

Originally Posted by Chasy

Sometimes I get the feeling that PvP players really want their items handed to them on a silver plate, no criticism to the OP.

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.

Killmour · 09/01/07, 7:07 PM

Originally Posted by Chasy

Sometimes I get the feeling that PvP players really want their items handed to them on a silver plate, no criticism to the OP.

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.

Duilliath · 09/01/07, 8:18 PM

Originally Posted by Chasy

Sometimes I get the feeling that PvP players really want their items handed to them on a silver plate, no criticism to the OP.

Grinding Battlegrounds for honor is tedious, but required in order to fill the gaps in your gear. Also, having Arena gear available for every slot would be an easy solution, but it would also kill Battlegrounds.

It's the same deal with PvE oriented items. It's not possible to simply grind/farm a single raid-instance and recieve the best items for all your slots. For example; Black Temple and Hyjal Summit are pretty much parallell instances, and in order to obtain the best gear available for your character, you need to run both.

I see no reason to why this is a problem in PvP, besides the obvious tedious reasons.

I think it's not so much the horrid PUG-like behaviour that's the most mind-numbing part... but that fact that the OP actually has to sit n wait for about an hour to even get there.

I'm lucky in that I have, for the most part, instant queues. If I could stand it, I'd easily be able to attain 20k honour in a single day. However, running AV the entire day feels the same as running, say, Sethekk Halls normal 10 times straight. There's no challenge, nothing changes and after the first time the initial 'novelty' has waned considerably.

I think Blizzard could do with taking a look at the queuing times and combining some battlegroups so that queue times get somewhat acceptable. And I hope that there's going to be a new BG soon - EotS feels like a bit of fresh air at least, for as long as it'll last.

Chasy · 09/01/07, 9:02 PM

Originally Posted by Zaq

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.

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.

Crossbones · 09/01/07, 9:12 PM

Originally Posted by Thandi

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.

If the only thing keeping people there is a tedious grind, and not fun, then they ought to be left to die.

• sadris · 09/01/07, 9:22 PM

Originally Posted by Duilliath

I think Blizzard could do with taking a look at the queuing times and combining some battlegroups so that queue times get somewhat acceptable. And I hope that there's going to be a new BG soon - EotS feels like a bit of fresh air at least, for as long as it'll last.

You think its a good idea to have new BGs? That would dilute the player base even further... if anything they should have anti-BG-weekends where a certain battleground is blocked from being queued into.

Zaq · 09/01/07, 10:17 PM

I think the solution is to develop a new bg or two for the xpac, and have the honor rewards for that directly relate to the strategy for winning. (So if it was like AB, Hk's become unimportant, and the nodes, from both a defensive and offensive perspective are where the rewards are.) And then, cap the old bgs to level 70. Such that they're no longer valid endgame content, because we should all be able to move on to new things. Even if a game type is close to one of the ones currently open, just some small changes could up the appeal significantly I think.

Similarly, matched bg teams, if there were fewer bgs, and some valid reward structures, could be really well implimented. The current bgs almost universally suffer from being designed with old goals in mind, and don't really reflect the new pvp system. Maybe they just need to increase the honor rewards in other bgs such that AV isn't the be all end all bg.

Opioid · 09/02/07, 2:03 AM

Originally Posted by Chasy

It's the same deal with PvE oriented items. It's not possible to simply grind/farm a single raid-instance and recieve the best items for all your slots. For example; Black Temple and Hyjal Summit are pretty much parallell instances, and in order to obtain the best gear available for your character, you need to run both.

I see no reason to why this is a problem in PvP, besides the obvious tedious reasons.

Its not just that they're tedious, its that they're stupid and broken/hopeless.

Alterac Valley is a ton of AFKers, but its not one emergent problem so much as the epic series of failures in a row that make most people not want to actually play. The map is famously imbalanced, and the issues with switching around troops or trolls or enemy corpse turnins and the fixes did nothing to make it anything better. Then you have Warsong Gulch, which favors certain classes/the lucky makeup of your PUG at that instant over everything else and doesn't award honor beyond kills unless you capture a flag (which isn't even guaranteed to happen once in what can be an hour long game - even PUG vs. PUG matches can have streaks where your teams do not ever get lucky enough to capture.) Eye of the Storm is the worst of all, nothing approaching "strategy" comes into play. It might as well be a public Netherstorm world PVP objective point for all the subtlety that goes into it.

That leaves essentially Arathi Basin as the map thats somewhat doable by a PUG, resolves in a reasonable amount of time, and lends itself to strategy and fun games each time you play. One out of four.

The second is how disinterested Blizzard seems to be with battlegrounds at all. Of course the arena is going to be popular (its new) but a little concern would go a long way. They developed most of a new BG with Azshara Crater... and decided not to release it after all. They've dragged their feet for a very long time on things like the gear matching system for BGs and the afk fighting system for Alterac Valley (which is still unproven in the wild, it could turn out to be another failed band-aid.) Eye of the Storm, once again, is the worst case, it seems like it was just scrambled together towards the end to have the bulletpoint of "New Battleground!" on the Burning Crusade box. Issues that have been around since its launch, like blinking out of the start bubble to take the flag before the match even starts, still persist. They didn't even bother to setup a BG specific vendor with a few beneficial items or even a "place" in the overworld in Netherstorm where the recruiters are based. Its just disconnected from the rest of the game, with a few NPCs pleading their case in Shattrath who will magically teleport you there on request.

Looking at the raid game in TBC, Karazhan is really fun, Gruul was irritating but not so much anymore, Magtheridon is still very annoying, SSC is fun, Tempest Keep is very fun, Black Temple is really fun, and Hyjal Summit is somewhere in the middle, having bugs and being irritating to wipe on trash, but I do still hear about a lot of people finding satisfaction in beating it.

To really be an apples to apples comparison, imagine if only one of the raid instances was really any fun and that was marred by constant "Dungeon Slayer Weekends" where you got so much more loot out of doing the bad, boring instances that guilds didn't even bother going to the fun ones. Imagine you had heard so much about fighting Illidan and his cronies and how fun it would be (AC) and instead they just declared Black Temple a dead attempt and instead just rushed through a new Heroic Mode of, say, Molten Core (to symbolize the necessity to do years old content again and again even after the expansion to succeed, see WSG and AV) with bugged bosses that shamelessly just reused combinations of the same powers the bosses in the content you just spent months on had (EoTS and its objectives). Add in some lingering bugs from years ago and a very conservative approach to changing the bosses at all, whatever the public outcry, and it starts to look like battlegrounds are now. Imagine that when new content does come out for endgame raiders, you have to go back and refarm the old content you had quite enough of because instead of having any post tier-six boots, bracers, belts, necklaces, or rings in the new dungeons, Blizzard decided instead to reitemize Gruul, Magtheridon, and Karazhan with those drops and since they are now the best in the game again, your guild has to go back even if it swore it was done with those annoyances forever (new ranks of honor epics for several tens of thousands of additional honor points for the new arena seasons.)

In conclusion, I have no problem with having to do something radically different than arenas to gear up for them, hell, even if it is still the same honor grind I'm not against that. I just want things that are *fun*, encourage PVP strategy beyond endless zerging, and are actually original and fresh, at the same time.

Nocturnus · 09/02/07, 2:34 AM

12,000 honor today in AV. I was all kinds of excited to know that tomorrow I'd be getting the veteran's boots for my warrior. Imagine the horror of finding out that it also costs 40 EotS marks. I don't think I've ever seen alliance win an EotS match, and I have to play 40 of them? Craptacular. Isn't the fact that people have to grind honor until their eyes bleed from the tedium enough?

Vontre · 09/02/07, 3:50 AM

Originally Posted by Chasy

Also, having Arena gear available for every slot would be an easy solution, but it would also kill Battlegrounds.

Why do people keep bringing this up like its a problem? If the players don't enjoy battlegrounds then by all means, kill it. All the old 60 raid zones were tossed aside for the new 25-man raids, I really don't see why the battleground system hasn't been replaced entirely by arenas. The arena experienced is so much more refined, balanced, and altogether more fun that it has entirely killed my motivation to do BGs. That's not a bad thing if new content replaces the old. I'm not saying the battlegrounds should be erased from the game, but it shouldn't be a requirement for gear, in the same way MC->Naxx runs aren't required for gear that is useful in the new raids.

Calantus · 09/02/07, 8:34 AM

Originally Posted by Thandi

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.

It's not fun being powerless in a game. It's not fun to put everything you have into a game and still lose not because you weren't good enough, but because factors beyond your control cause you to lose.

Counter-Strike is pretty-much my favourite example of a random-team game done right for a skilled player. You can potentially kill the entire enemy team single-handedly and win the game by yourself (special emphasis on potentially). Failing that, if you kill more than your fair share of enemies you've made a significant push towards a win for the team. If you make it to the last few players a decent player ALWAYS has a chance to win because it will often come down to a couple 1v1 firefights and with the lethality of CS you stand a good chance of walking away with as much health as you came in.

WoW is not like this at all. You can win every single battle you place yourself in, have every one of those battles occur at a strategically important location every single time, and still lose badly. You and 2 others hold blacksmith against 2-1 odds but you lose stables and mine? How does this even happen? How can you have more people outside of BS and still lose 2 other nodes? It is a mystery to me and yet it still happens. I used to think "YES we won this node against heavy odds, surely the other nodes will be taken since we must have more numbers elsewhere!" Nope, they still lose. Somehow. It's really very disheartening. There's only so many times you can play to the best of your ability while you KNOW you will not improve significantly and still lose the vast majority of your games.

I don't know how some players seem to be okay with failing so often. Are they really just so bad that they become used to losing? Is it a different frame of mind here and I'm just crazy? To me, the whole point of a game is to strive towards winning. Not winning, the winning isn't the most important bit. It's building up the skills, building the character (where applicable), and gaining the knowledge towards winning that is fun. It's the tension/adrenalin as you know you can win or lose the game based on your actions. And then you win and winning is fun too. WoW BGs don't have that. In the beginning you win/lose depending on faction/battleground. You skill up, gear your character, tweak your talent build, learn the maps and the strategies, and then you... win/lose depending on faction/battleground. What a shitty PVP game.

Then arena comes along and you can finally build towards winning. It's just you and your teammates that decided the outcome. There are periods where you lose just because of gear or low practice or whatever else but you're bulding up to the winning at all times. This is why I came back to play this game, and this alone. Only you have to gear up in the shitty, shitty random BGs to do it. Whatever. I've grinded money and XP in more RPGs than I'd like to admit so I can take it. I just won't be sad to see it all DIE. :P

Duilliath · 09/02/07, 9:00 AM

Originally Posted by sadris

You think its a good idea to have new BGs? That would dilute the player base even further... if anything they should have anti-BG-weekends where a certain battleground is blocked from being queued into.

Yes. I'm bored to tears with the old ones. I'll be the first to admit EotS is buggy, not all that fun and pretty much requires a zerg mentality. (The best results I've had in a premade were the ones we didn't even bother with defense.)

But, it's the one I haven't played a million times over - either on my main or any of my other characters. It's fresh.

Who cares -where- you get the honour, as long as you have fun doing it.

Scratch the stupid mark system. If people prefer AV over WSG, let them. If they prefer AB to EotS - so be it. I personally hate WSG (it might as well be called Kill the Druid for all I care), but to get the best Druid bracers attainable to me, I'll have to run it 20 times. I did it twice as they're great for tanking and dps.

At the moment, as stated above, it's largely irrelevant what you do in the BGs. If you have 9 morons going "z0mg ! Let them win, we get medal!" in WSG, your actions aren't going to get you three marks or any honour whatsoever. But you're required to be there, because you need those bloody marks.

The system could do with a complete overhaul.

Melador · 09/02/07, 10:13 AM

Another thing to point out: You can entirely gear your character for PvE with PvE. You can entirely gear your character for BGs with BGs. You cannot entirely gear your character for Arenas with Arenas.

Lysander1 · 09/02/07, 1:26 PM

The honor grind does suck, especially for those players that don't have easy AV queues. For example, on my battlegroup non-AV weekend queues are 30 minutes, AV weekend is 5-6 minutes. On the other hand, there are some battlegroups with 30 minutes queues ON AV weekend, and even longer on non-AV weekend. On some battlegroups AV queues are instant on AV weekend, and beyond instant on non-AV weekend. That kind of discrepancy is just ridiculous, especially when AV is the only way to make decently fast honor. With instant queues for AV, one can make near 1500 honor every hour, but with 30 minutes queues at best its 700.