Dinadass

CHOCNOTE: Do not use this thread to argue about horde/alliance racials. For 2.3 racial ability changes see this thread: 2.3 Discussion If you want to argue about horde vs alliance racials take it here

A quote by Drysc:

WoW Forums -> Selling Arena Teams?

" Well to start we'll just let everyone know that the arena RATINGS (not the number of points they'll cost) required to purchase the season 3 items will be 1850 for the weapons, and 2000 for shoulders. The rating will not be required to continue using the item, only to initially purchase it.

Now, most people have expected the weapon rating since we announced it at BlizzCon, and it's a bit lower than we had initially said, but the shoulders are obviously going to raise some questions. The shoulders for any set are commonly the most visually representative, they're the most visible at any distance, and as they allow a lot of space compared to say a leg or bracer item, we commonly take them and really create something visually impressive. We want that visually impressive item to represent what a player has achieved, and so the achievement of being a contender in the arena at a higher level will be visually distinguished. The shoulders are also average in the benefit they provide, as compared to a chest or leg item for example, and without them the set bonuses can still be completed.

This raises the question of a player finding a team that is of a skill level higher than their own, and simply buying the item with points they've gained at a lower rating. To restrict this we're implementing a personal rating system in patch 2.3. This is an additional arena rating that is unique to each character for each team they belong to. This rating rises and declines using the same formula as the arena team rating, but only in games that character participates in. You'll also be able to track this rating through the PvP interface. The personal rating will be used for purchasing items that require a specific rating, and also be used to determine eligibility for the end of season rewards. So, a player will have to achieve a specific rating, and not just get into a team to see the rewards that are meant to visually distinguish the high-rated players."

... So, 1850 for weapon, 2k for shoulders (/boggle), personal ratings for end of season rewards and gear... End of the road for selling arena teams?

 

Toppazz

This doesn't really end selling arena teams. There are tons of players who can't maintain either of those ratings. They still need points for the other 4 pieces of gear, even if they can't meet the personal rating requirements for the final piece and the weapons.

 

Dinadass

I suppose, guess it will most likely just put a curb to getting guildies/friends netherdrakes.

I'm still not sure that the weapon/shoulder requirement is the correct solution to that problem, or that it even makes any sense, but it's better than nothing /shrug

 

Daenerys

So if the shoulders are supposed to be some visual representation of accomplishments in arena, does that mean they won't be re-colored T6?! I'm guessing not, but I just wanted to call BS on the explanation. =)

 

Malakitoo

In fact, selling teams might be a decent way to raise your personal 3v3 rating, since you'll win all the games up to whatever rating you sell at, then the buyers will lose but it won't affect you. Then you drop to 1500 and do it again. No need to throw games on alts, just sell teams.

 

Celandro

If my personal rating goes down because I play 2v2 with friends Im going to be very upset.

 

crimsonsentinel

I'd imagine you'd have a personal rating for each bracket you play in.

 

dinesh

Read the thread. Personal rating is by bracket, and resets back to 1500 every time you join a new team.

 

tristantio

I'm wondering however if personal rating will be based on your personal rating compared to the team your facing's rating, such as if I were to have a 2000 personal rating, and faced a team with 1500 rating because my 2v2 suffered repeated losses at the hands of the other group members, would I receive +0 to my rating if I won (similar to a 2000 team beating a 1500 team in the awkward matchups that sometimes occur) and would I lose 30 rating if I lost to such a team?

If not (and the +rating gain is static) on a 2v2 you could easily exploit it by having 2 members that are alts and only on the team to throw games (lowering the team rating and their personal ratings) while you had 2 members who played to farm personal rating (by taking the team from 1300 back to 1500 before having the 2 loser members drop the rating again).

 

Aphyrax

It has to be that way, otherwise you could never close the gap between your team and yourself. That is, if you join a team at 2000 rating, you would always be 500 points behind them if you play 100% of the games from that point on, since you would mimic the teams movements exactly. That cannot be what Blizzard has in mind.

 

Adiar

You have to be within 100 personal rating points within a team to join it.

 

Calantus

You beat me to it. I actually think it's funny that it is even an issue.

Are you being serious? Has Blizzard said this somewhere? If so that's BEYOND retarded. It would mean people would have to step through teams to the top if they want to go anywhere and is far worse than raid keying ever was.

 

Currylaksa

wow

The only reason the shoulder is more distinctive than the weapon in TBC is because many of the weapon models looks the same. So basically we have to pay more for shoulders because they spent more art design time on it than the weapons.

 

Dinadass

You don't have to pay more for shoulders, you just need to receive a higher rating.

I haven't seen anything about being within 100 personal rating of a team to join though, is there a source that says that? If they plan on pushing that live, that will be amazingly retarded.

 

Lysander1

Personal rating will probably reset every time you leave/join a team, I would guess.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

This appears to be incorrect. What was stated (in the same thread) is that to earn the end of season rewards (netherdrake) and titles, you have to be within 100 personal rating of your team

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

pheno

I don't think that's the way it's going to be realized, if they wanted something like that they could have done much easier than by using prp.

- That's why we're warlocks, not lovelylocks! -

 

Bogeywoman

SCENE: A successful fruit store, interior.

BOB: Well, Harry, it's been a year and our fruit business is booming.
HARRY: Yeah, we've really done it, Harry.
BOB: But there's a problem.
HARRY: What's that, Bob?
BOB: Well, it seems that pretty much everyone is buying bananas, so it's not all that special any more to have a banana.
HARRY: How is that a problem?
BOB: Never mind, it just is. So the question at hand is, how do we stop people from getting our bananas?
HARRY: Are we in short supply or something?
BOB: No, we have all the bananas one might ever need. In fact, we have a banana plantation out back that just keeps spitting out bananas. But that's neither here nor there. It's important that we stop our customers from getting too many bananas.
HARRY: Well...I guess let's run with that idea for a minute. Let's see...economics 101 suggests that we, perhaps, raise the price of bananas. That would cause only rich people to be able to get bananas, and would reduce their accessibility to the average person.
BOB: I have an even better idea.
HARRY: What's that, Bob?
BOB: We're going to invent an entire new currency, and that currency is the only way that you will be able to purchase bananas.
HARRY: A...new...currency.
BOB: Yes.
HARRY: It seems like we've already got three currencies that we take for our goods -- gold, "honor dollars", and "arena dollars"...?
BOB: Yes. So three currencies isn't complex enough -- we need to have four. And this fourth currency, which I'm going to call "personal arena dollars", is going to have a number of very complicated rules associated with it.
HARRY: ...
BOB: You see, we don't want people to get "personal arena dollars" too easily. So we're going to limit whose house you can go over to. The moment you step over someone else's threshold, bingo! You lose all your personal arena dollars.
HARRY: So in order to purchase this banana, I need to save up in a special fourth currency and make sure never to go over to anyone else's house.
BOB: That's right.
HARRY: But what if my house burns down, or I get a divorce, or a friend invites me over for dinner to have some fun?
BOB: Then you need to start over in your attempt to earn this banana.
HARRY: But this doesn't apply to apples.
BOB: That's right.
HARRY: Only bananas.
BOB: Well, actually it will apply to our kumquats too. Because our kumquats are also seeing too much action, and lord knows what would happen if everyone had a kumquat, you know what I'm saying?
HARRY: Not exactly.
BOB: Treacherous dilution of our precious bodily fluids.
HARRY: Uh...
BOB: Or something, anyway it's not important -- the important thing is, we must generate exclusivity on our bananas and kumquats; and the only way to do that is to introduce a fourth currency bound up in complicated rules.
HARRY: I really think that just changing this price here from '18.50' to '49.99' would probably do it real good...I mean, haven't we as humans used pricing to differentiate between product lines since the first prostitute and her sister?
BOB: Look, I've worked really hard on this fourth currency idea. Long nights contemplating bananas. Your skepticism is wounding.
HARRY: Let me put it to you frankly, Bob. We've built up a very successful fruit business, and one of the main complaints in the past -- back when we had High Warlord(tm) brand pears, for instance -- was that the hoops the customers had to jump through just to be able to open the display case were insane. And in fact over 90% of the people who ever ate one of those pears realized it wasn't worth it and took their business elsewhere. Further, three currencies is already excessive and bewildering, so making another one and binding it up in crazy exclusions when another one will work perfectly is more than a little strange. And lastly, there's maybe 200 guys in the world that think that bananas and kumquats should be completely exclusive, but we serve millions of people a day. So I guess I don't understand the point of this exercise.
BOB: You're a bananatarian aren't you.
HARRY: What?
BOB: A filthy Marx-loving bananatarian. I should have seen the signs.
HARRY: Bob, what are you...?
BOB: DIE YOU BANANATARIAN HERETIC! MAY THE LIGHT CLEANSE YOUR CORRUPTED SOUL!

BOB delivers a brutal Crusader Strike with a kumquat, felling Harry in one blow. As HARRY falls lifeless to the floor, BOB gloats momentarily, then moves to a chest in the back of the room. Opening it, he pulls out a set of Tier 1 Paladin shoulders. He begins to stroke the banana shoulders obscenely.

BOB: My precioussssssss.

CURTAIN FALLS.

 

Tower

Is this thread only about the mechanics of the arena and it's reward's-based system? Or are we discussing other changes, like the distribution of Fear Ward.

Honestly, this is a classic case of where a developer should have just removed Fear Ward instead of giving it to all priests in my opinion. But it may be also a slight lean on balancing warlocks in 2v2 and 3v3, namely the paladin/lock, shaman/lock and druid/lock teams that do significantly better than priest/lock, and also a buff to the other classes that have more synergy with priests in smaller brackets, let alone other priest's themselves.

 

syeren

I'm not really fond of the Fear Ward Duration and Cooldown any more as that was an incredibly important part of the game to make sure you micromanaged when you was against teams that utilize fear, but now it's just going to be horrible playing against Warlocks / Shadow Priests with this change :/

Not really impressed with Undead Priests getting the spell either, I would have just put it on Trolls and Blood Elves and left it at that, because knowing that Undead Players have such a ridiculous advantage against fear now is absolutely horrible (Not so much an issue to me due to dispel, but Warlocks aren't going to be happy :/) :P

It's also amazing to see how incompetent Blizzard are when it comes to honor items, I'm going to be running around for my third season with an offensive spell caster cape on because I have no other options with the current details released -_-

 

Vermis

its more fair that every priest can use fear ward, one less T_t for horde players. Besides since it has been ingame for so long it would be treated as nerf to ally players if they removed it.

Now everyone can be happy about it and dr will hit the deck, after all this is a slight nerf towards fear using classes.

To me 2.3 if it comes out as it is now, is a huge "be more playable and enjoyable" -patch so to speak. The pre-patch notes are more than welcome and there are tons of balance issues that were asked and are attented. Drain life ms, deadly throw spamming etc.

Ill sing praises if it comes out as it is. But be thrice cursed the one who decided to remove detect magic.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

I would guess that at least 80% of horde priests are undead, so if they didn't give it to undead priests they'd essentially be forcing horde priests to reroll if they want it

Will of the forsaken and fear ward together is a strong combination for sure, but I don't think it'll be excessively dramatic with a 3 minute cooldown

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

• Snowy

To be honest in arenas I'll probably be casting it on a non-UD player, or a melee char who needs to stick to someone without any interuption whatsoever.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

syeren

It would be like how they forced a huge amount of Alliance Priests to reroll Dwarf if they wanted it, but even then the Human and Night Elf Priests didn't really have amazingly strong racials to begin with, unlike the Undead Priests (I used to play Undead Priest before TBC, I took great pleasure in how stupid my racials were at the time when it came to PVP back then). I also realize that my suggestion may be counter productive in regards to what the developers are trying to do with Fear Ward but to put it like this...

A Warlock will be walled by an Undead Rogue with Fear Ward for around 10-15 seconds without any form of stun taken into consideration, which is absolutely horrible if you're playing a Warlock (I play one as an 'Alt' at level 70, and it's rather sad that I have more trouble with an average Undead Rogue than I do any other race, no matter how much better the player of the other race may be :P).

Now as for my Priest, say I'm being assist trained hard and I haven't hard any time to dispel that Undead Rogue, I won't actually have any form of defense against that Rogue for 90 (Hilarious I know,) seconds, and I'm sure you know how weak Priest's Fear can be from PVP'ing at some point. But hey, if the person wasn't undead, I would be able to use a spell in my defense after a minute of exposure to them, which makes it A LOT easier :P

To put it quite simply, the Alliance are going to feel this rather harshly, especially when we don't have any near as many good racials to fall back on as the Horde always have

 

Blixa

•New Battleground rewards: Boots, Belt, and Bracers

Not only to they not add a healing version of the s1 dps cloaks. They only plan to upgrade boots, belt and bracer. If there is a logic here, I fail to see it. Anyone care to explain?