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

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.

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.

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 -_-

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

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.

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

They also haven't announced any S3 gear outside of the rating system. All the "patch notes" have been links to a variety of blue posts. There has been no farmed PTR loot info. We've also had 2.2 live for all of... 3 days. Try having some patience regarding new information.

erm I do have to admit that devouring plague isnt exactly the win unless you can bring UA lock into the equasion. Otherwise its über expensive and doesnt benefit the group so much, not to talk about the cooldown.
stoneform my dear
The thing that chills me is that alliance sees this as nerf, the thing is as most of us allready know fears are ridiciously OP they were allways and they'll be in future. Now that IF in 2.3 fearward is distributed to all priests its a winwin for all priests. One less concern if blizz implents a boss encounter with fear ward. It was stupid enough that all alliance priests were more or less forced to roll dwarf due fearward and stoneform, now its just stoneform. Stoneform still being the best possible priest racial for pvp.

What comes to defence against rogue you allready have the best possible racial, well gnomes would be kinda neat as well but still, the rest lies upon your mates helping you to keep that melee off. Undead rogues will be pain in the ass for priests, but go and ask any mage how do they feel about gnome warriors. Pain in the ass perhaps but just live with it. I curse every gnome to the lowest pit of hell everytime I get focused, fair that they can counter most of my abilities? Perhaps no but thats just the way it is.

Now that im at it, which is a bit weird on this forum since im mostly just reading it and god forbid to do so thorough analyzes as some do on other sections. I just sincerely hope that blizzard would see that other parts other than gladiator upgraded.

I reckon seeing a blue post about zulaman stating that there would be actually usefull pvp gear in the instance. I dont know if its combine loot from pvp vendors and zulaman that will fill the slots but I wouldnt want to see item slots disregarded. Perhaps not yet but blizzard should see there is a groing population of players who like to pvp not pve at all. Would really apreciate that those who just pvp have option to actually compete and not face "best of both worlds" teams that just run over them.

Being able to see opposing teams buffs without detect magic will be game changing. You will be able to quickly find out which teams have stealthed ferals and which locks are demo, and ice armor...

Its going to take a lot of the guess work out of early arena focus targets.

Not to turn this into a huge racial debate, but gnomes and dwarves are still the mage/rogue killing races, like undead and orc are the priest/rogue killing races. Check any of the Arena mapping sites out there, many have rerolled Alliance for dwarf and gnome racials. Stoneform itself lead an underepresented class to own up the 2v2 bracket on a competitive Battlegroup (Hamchook).

Horde racials are more suited to Battlegrounds than Arena, in my opinion.

But I regress, I would have rather seen them remove Fear Ward completely and give dwarves their new CC ability.