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.

The only thing that is really missing is comparing your personal rating to the other teams rating, for purposes of adjusting your personal rating. If you join an all-star team of 2400, with your personal rating of 1500, and you play against other 2400 teams, you should get 32 (that's the max for a win, right) personal points, and if you lose you should lose only 1 point. That way the teams personal ratings will converge at about the actual team rating.

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.

Not to mention the whole polymorph+detect to add an extra debuff to cleanse, or even devour magic, is now down the toilet as well.

Another problem with the rating restriction is that people are not going to have any incentive to play. A 1500 team can get 4pc gladiator in 5 months, what do they do after that? My feral druid will be out of stuff to buy in no more then 3 months.

IMO they should be releasing more, bigger point sinks, rather than eliminating them.

If you join a 2400 rated team and are capable of winning, then it means that your personal rating should be a number over ... 1900.

There are new idols coming. Also, they lowered the points a 1500 5v5 is getting. And don't forget that you can buy S2 weapons, which are still quite nice and cost a bundle. So a 10 games a week player at 1500 will likely not run out of stuff to buy, unless the season is really long.

I am quite certain that that is how it is going to work. Blizzard has not given the details and given their vast experience in the matter of automated matchmaking and player ranking, I don't see them implementing a solution with glaring holes. They might be slow but they tend to be thorough.

Wand, offhand, save points for next season?

You know what racial really rocks?

Diplomacy.

WTF was I thinking (other than that I levelled a gnome to ten and hated looking at everyone's knees)?

I still have never found a competitive arena team, but I am curious how the detect magic change will impact the role of mages in arena.

My impression was that the personal rating would reset to 1500 every time you joined a team. If that is not the case, the most likely other system would be that you maintain your personal rating across team jumps. That would lead to the obvious abuse of 5 people logging in alts and losing a bunch of games down to 1400, then logging in mains to pump their personal ratings up to 2000. If they do reset on joining a team, but do not float independently of the teams rating in some way, then anybody joining a mature, stable team will see their personal rating go sideways for the most part.

Calculations were done with the new point curve, and most people who want one probably have a S2 weapon by now.

At this point, trusting Blizzard is a very silly thing to do. Go see the Illidan enrage thread.

Just so you know, I read the whole thing and appreciated it.

Also, dwarves can no longer stoneform out of blind as it is a physical effect now. So dwarf priests are now the bane of mutilate rogues primarily!

I think the whole point of a personal rating is to completely ignore your own team's rating in the calculation.

Say you're in a 1500 rated team and have a personal rating of 2000.

You win vs a 1600 rated team. Team rating +18. Personal rating +2.
You lose vs a 1800 rated team. Team rating -6. Personal rating -22.

With the way the ELO system works, over time if you always play with the same team and play all games in that team, your personal rating will be close to identical to that of the team. It probably wouldn't even take that long, maybe less than 50 games.

Personally I like this change and hope they're gonna take the extra step and apply it to arena points as well. You should get rewarded arena points based on your personal rating and not your team rating. This prevents a lot of team manipulation like buying/selling teams, or playing 3 games with a group of alts/buyers; and then have the regular lineup play the other 7 games.

(disclaimer: the rating values above I just made up on the spot as an example)

So then why have a roster over 2,3,5 people? This screws over *good* players who need the gear (geared night elf priest plays the 7 games, his dwarf priest reroll plays the other 3, for example) but don't yet have it, and people who play with friends and/or the "lesser classes" of rogues, hunters.

Roster larger than team size is useful for replacing people so that you are less reliant on having every person online at all times to be able to play.

As for letting an alt play 3 games, it's not an issue if he actually wins them. If he doesn't, then I don't think he deserves what are effectively free points. I would probably even make it so you have to play 10 personal games (instead of 10 team games) to be eligible for the week's points, so playing 3 games wouldn't even work.

Edit: Just to elaborate a bit further: I've actually been in that situation this season, trying to gear up my priest with 0 resilience and letting him play 3 games a week on a 2200 rated 3v3 team. I don't think it's fair though and the system should be designed to prevent this. I've pretty much accepted now that the vast majority of people in my BG over 1800 are now fully geared and playing at or over that rating without full arena gear is always gonna be a handicap. But that's just the way the game is, I don't think my alt should be automatically stronger just because my main is. The same should be true for anyone that buys or gets handed high rated arena teams.

Aside from the shield they just put in tuesday, I haven't had things to buy in ~2 months. I definitely agree, there needs to be more useful items on the arena vendor.

I am on a bad team. My 2v2 is horrendous to say the least, but it's me and my brother, and so I will continue to play on this team. From what I understand though, as both me and my brother are on a significantly better 3v3 team, we can hold off on 2v2 until purchasing the weapons/shoulders, and instead purchase those rewards once our 3v3 has worked it's way to 1850/2000. Since the rating is not required to use the item, only to buy it from the vendor.

Although I must say, it is likely that the upgrades won't be glaringly large so as to completely gimp a team that hasn't the rating to purchase them, and those that can't get said rating will at least have the ability from what I understand to get the set bonuses from the armor.

And the shoulders requiring higher rating than the weapons? I find it particularly funny that when that warrior comes charging at me, I don't quiver and say "Dear God, s2 shoulders!?" as often as I'm telling my brother "Kill that gnome with the mace bigger than his body!"

Incentives, Gear up to the point where you can effectively buy everything, Titles beyond that, and lastly mounts and as top 50 in a battlegroup your definitely in that region.

The problem he is talking about is a disincentive to play if you are <1800 and have run out of items to buy. Personally I am fine with the ratings requirements even if I wil have to play a little harder and schedule at the right times to at least at achieve 1850. But that doesnt stop me from realising that some will not play because because of it.

Nasgul from my understanding your 2v2 will have no affect on your personal rating from 3v3. The only thing that may have a affect is if your 3v3 had a 4th member who is substantially worse then the other 3 and even that is still unknown.

Yeah one big issue with the rating requirements is that for there to be a decent amount of 2000 rated teams, there have to be lots of teams below that. If you don't give the lower rated teams incentives to keep playing, it'll be even harder for the top teams to reach 2000.

As seasons go on, it becomes slowly easier to get higher rating due to more points entering the system from people going below 1500 and reforming. Take away their incentives to do so and we may not have many teams, even very good ones, above 2000.

Then of course the issue with the number of teams per battleground, which varies drastically and has been touched on already by other posters

Titles and mount don't change per season (as far as we know) so that incentive dissapeared for me after season 1. Mostly now I'm just tanking my 3v3 rating to get some people points and missing weeks as often as not with my 5v5. Which is why I think the best change for everyone would have been tiered gear so higher ranked players will want to keep playing to upgrade their gear (even if the upgrade is very minor) and lower ranked players will never be locked out of a certain piece they want but probably never be able to completely max out their equipment either.

WoW Forums -> Weapon Mastery Nerf ... Sense No Make


This includes weapon chain.