Story time. Both from a ret pally perspective and mage perspective.
Mister rogue wearing PvP blues wielding daggers he managed to dredge up from some heroic opens with cheap shot. Being a pally, I just sit there and wait for kidney. Pow, there it is, blow freedom on myself, and now the cooldown blowing competition begins. The rogue has dropped me to 95%.
Mister rogue wearing furious and relentless gear wielding 1800 rating daggers opens with cheap shot. Again, I wait for kidney. Pow, there it is, blow freedom, and the rogue has me at 60%.
The blue wearing rogue in crap gear opens on me with cheap shot. Being a mage, I just sit there and wait for kidney. There it is, I blink, at 90% health, and the rogue tries his damndest, but the poor guy just can’t touch me.
The elite gear wearing rogue opens on me with… not cheap shot, but Garrote. I can’t blink, being silenced, and he uses Eviscerate as a finisher and I’m dead literally 4 seconds after the fight started.
This isn’t QQ, not yet anyway. Rogues tear clothies apart pretty easy, I don’t wear a lot of resilience, arcane shatter mages aren’t very good against melee classes anyways, and it’s my fault I didn’t use a cooldown of some sort to survive the opener.
Point is, the geared-out-the-ass rogue could tear me apart like I was made of tissue. The one who, more than likely, is a fresh 80 could blow every cooldown he has and still not kill me, even if I didn’t use any.
Is it fair that the rogue with better gear massively outperformed the lesser geared one? Well, yes.
Is it fair that the rogue with lesser gear was forced to fight someone who could tear him apart without even thinking, only because of such a huge gear gap?
If you just dinged 80 in the last couple of months, your gear is far behind where the majority’s is. It’s easier than ever to gear up for end-game, with badge resets every patch and old PvP gear being cycled down a tier to be easier to get. Hurray!
The problem is, PvE and PvP aren’t the same game. If you hit 80, decked out in greens and a couple blues and want to do PvE, there is content for you. Grabbed crafted epics, some quest rewards, throw yourself into heroics designed for your gear level. You get badges, you get high-end epics, you catch up to the people who’ve been 80 longer than you, you move into some raids and there you go. Hurray!
If you hit 80, decked out in greens and some blues, you will be destroyed over and over again without mercy in PvP. Even if you grab the full blue crafted set, you will be completely crushed with no effort by those whose only real advantage is they’ve been blithering about in BGs longer than you have. Hurray!
Thing is, there is no content for you. There is only content far beyond what you’re capable of, and your only real option is to simply suffer through that, for days and days, until you get caught up. Pray you picked a class and spec that’s actually good at PvP (hint: choose the sword icon) because it’s going to be a long haul.
And even then, you’re never going to be able to get everything for every slot. A lot of the high-end, excellent gear is (rightfully) placed behind some pretty high barriers. You can outfit all of your slots in battlegrounds, getting you on par with your fellows in BGs, and good enough to start up arena and start collecting furious and relentless pieces.
Unless, of course, you’re after weapons, in which case you’d better be a raider or you’re going to end up toting impressive 245 level gear next to that Titansteel Destroyer that comes standard issue with level 80.
Now this is just my opinion, of course. I still think, and have always thought, that the PvE and PvP portions of WoW should be driven as far apart as possible/necessary.
Is having 219 or 232 weapons available for honor going to screw up raiding balance somehow? Fine, don’t allow players to equip weapons with resilience on them in any instance or raid. Actually, take it further. ANY item with resilience on it cannot be equipped in any instance or raid.
Allow PvP trinkets for fights like Faction Champs if you must; or better yet, never ever design any PvE content that requires PvP in any way, shape or form.
Then do the reverse.
Any item which does not have resilience on it cannot be equipped in any battleground, in arena, in WG when there’s fighting going on.
Then, of course, complete and full gearing options from start to finish needs to be available for both sides of the game.
Bring back greens with resilience. Add in iLevel 200 epics that you can do quick quest chains for. (Cap five flags in AB, get an epic hat!)
I get that this is an MMO, and that gear matters. But this… this is PvP. It should be decided by player skill (in whatever form you wish to define that), not things like gear.
Imagine it this way. From the perspective of PvP, you, arrive at 80 in a full set of blues.These could be crafted blues or quested blues or whatever, the point is that as soon as you hit 80, you can have blue quality gear in every slot clearly designed for PvP.
“Quick” questing nets you 200 epics for every slot. Quick here meaning that you could conceivably churn out an epic every 20-40 minutes, assuming you get the quest done in one go. Longer battleground fighting (i.e. our current honor grind) awards you 213 deadly gladiator style epics. To bump up to 232, you’re going to need to knock out some arenas for furious gear. And so forth.
A gear gap is fine, to an extent.
Trying to fight a druid in full relentless gear with Val’anyr equipped when half of your own gear are still blues you earned in icecrown? Not so much.
It isn’t fun to fight people far, far beyond you in terms of gear and watch them destroy you solely because of that gear difference.
It isn’t fun to fight people far, far behind you in terms of gear and obliterate them solely because your weapon’s top end damage hits for 20% of their hitpoints.
Sure, it’s pretty funny the first time you one shot a druid with 14k hitpoints or the first time a warrior still wearing account bound stuff tries to fight you. But the second time? Third time? Eventually you just treat them like a shaman totem. They’re annoying, you’d rather not have to deal with them, but they’re buffing your enemies or debuffing you and you have to get rid of them.
I’d much rather just ignore the druid with 14k HP, but he’s rolling lifeblooms on his comrades. I can’t just ignore the healer, and with only 14k HP, I can kill him with one button and save my polys and counterspells for the discipline priest standing over there. It becomes as automatic is eliminating a mana tide totem.
I don’t like that. I’m sure the druid didn’t like being destroyed in a single GCD either. It’s not his fault, it’s not my fault. Gear is at fault, and the fact that gear can even make a difference that huge in something that isn’t even supposed to be about gear is flat out appalling.
There’s always going to be people entering battlegrounds with 16k hp and getting destroyed. There’s always going to be the guy in full, current season gear facerolling everyone else.
What I’m saying is that it’s fundamentally ridiculous that you either wear iLevel 187 blues then upgrade to 213 epics, or you do something that has absolutely nothing to do with PvP to gear for it.
Being required to PvP in order to raid was met with intense hatred by raiders world wide last expansion, there was much QQ, and the necessity for it has been removed. There are still a few anomalies here and there (faction champs, paladin librams), but generelly speaking if you want to raid you never have to even look at PvP.
Strangely the opposite is true for people who want to PvP. If you don’t raid, you are at a severe disadvantage in battlegrounds in arenas, whereas if you do, you have a massive legup on your fellows. How, precisely, is that fair in even the slightest?
No wonder people don’t like PvP.
(You can interpret this as ret pally QQ “oh noes I’m still using a 219 weapon wahhh wahhh”. I’m getting a Quel’delar in 3.3, so I’ll have a nice 251 weapon to swing around. The fact that I have to do something that isn’t PvP, isn’t even related to PvP, to get a half-decent weapon is just dumb. Couple that with the fact that I can just use my raiding weapons on my mage and rock peoples faces… it ain’t right.)
Yeah, I really wish they would just give you decent PvP gear. I spent a while grinding out BGs to buy Ret PvP gear before deciding I didn’t like Ret PvP. I’d switch to Holy PvP, but the thought of having to grind out all that gear over again is just too depressing. Unfortunately, I can’t see that happening. In the long run, rated BGs should keep fresh 80s separated from people wearing full sets of the latest PvP gear.
I’m opposed to being just “given” gear, but I do support having more options between 187 blues and 213 epics.
As a certified altaholic that loves to pvp i can only agree with you. When you get to your 4th or 5th lvl 80 that you wish to try and pvp with, you are hit by the brick wall that is lack of gear.
And grinding hundreds of thousand of honor in BGs where you get one shotted just isn’t funny. And going in with pve gear isn’t far from it. You might pew pew some people but you will be utterly ganked as soon as anyone looks at you funny.
In my opinion they could upgrade the crafted pvp blues to ilvl 200 at least so you had somewhere decent to start with at least that wouldn’t be to hard to come by.
Win Eye of the Storm? Have a trinket.
Cap a flag in WSG? Here’s a pair of boots.
It’s not like I want the good stuff handed out for easily completed content.
It’s stuff that is 13 levels behind the current content, and serves as nothing more than a bridge for people to access the good stuff.
You know, like what doing heroics and raiding does for PvE players.
Perhaps the rated BG system will help? Maybe?
I seem to recall that they were talking about for the “random PvE pug daily dungeon cross-faction LFG thing” there would be an effort to match people around gear level as well. I could be making this up, don’t quote me.
But, IF that sort of thing is possible, perhaps they could expand it to arena as well – not only would you be matched based on the 20 different ratings they came up with, but also add a quick gear match as well.
The arena ranking system is supposed to have people with similar gear levels fighting each other, due to locking higher gear behind higher ratings.
The reality is that you fight opponents with 245 weapons at any rating higher than about 1550, and many, many teams feature warriors, ret paladins, etc, who are carried by the sheer fact that their weapons are awesome.
I totally and completely agree with you.
This is what I find so striking about WoW PvP, coming from a gaming perspective. Gaming, as in, somebody who plays other games. I’m used to “PvP” where skill is the *only* factor. Yes, there are a few games out there where you get gear and move up and become better in death matches and whatnot, but not really.
You don’t get better equipment in Halo multiplayer because you play a lot. You don’t get better moves in Street Fighter 4 because you beat up a bunch of people. That would be, quite frankly, a horrible idea.
So, it is jarring to see that kind of thing in WoW, and why I’m never going to be a serious PvPer in WoW (although it is can be a fun diversion for me). I understand why its like that. Loot upgrades is part of what makes an MMO an MMO, after all! But, without progression, the point of loot in PvP is completely different than that in PvE. With PvP, loot upgrades are 1) to keep up with the curve and 2) to kill those who don’t.
It’s as if when 3.2 came out Ulduar was gone, and the Trial was all there was. Hope you got your epix! If not, gg!
“It’s as if when 3.2 came out Ulduar was gone, and the Trial was all there was. Hope you got your epix! If not, gg!”
haha…perfect analogy. (for PvP weapons anyway)
@Euripedes
Hear, Hear! I’ve been an advocate of everything you are talking about for a long time. (TBC era) The frustration you get every time your toon is face rolled by an over-geared player is epic. (notice I said toon because it has nothing to do with your skill – as you pointed out)
Having a stepping stone straight out of 80 would be lovely. What would be even more lovely is if they removed all means for a player to do PvE content and get PvP gear. (down with VoA and badge-for-deadly)
Also, give us a friggin’ weapon for cryin’ out loud. I hated running around in full deadly/furious with 850 resil, 28k hp, 275 ArP and the Edge of Ruin. Come on with this already!
My priest is in the ‘almost not getting face rolled’ category simply because:
a.) He’s got about 500 resil
b.) The rest of his gear is decent PvE gear (i.e. 2400 sp)
c.) He’s disc
Yet, he still has no weapon and is a ways off from getting it. >:(
@Arioch
I was thinking the rated BG system might help as well. Unfortunately I don’t know much about it though. Is it designed to be premades or pugs? God help us if I get into a rated BG with a 14k hp resto druid.
“removed all means for a player to do PvE content and get PvP gear.”
Agreed. I’ve purchased both the furious robe and shoulders on my mage, and it feels pretty cheap. Technically, it is an upgrade, and it took many weeks to earn the badges for that, but shouldn’t I be spending badges I earned while raiding on raiding things?
VoA is, in my opinion, a stupid idea. It never should have made it past the idea stage.
Well said.
This is strangely topical… my Warrior hit level 80 last night and I almost cried.
This is my original “PvP character” – I solo grinded (grounded?) Rank 10. I would have had R11 if 2.0 had dropped 1 week later.
When this warrior hit 78, I immediately bought the crafted Savage Saronite gear and started pounding away in WSG. And it was a BLAST.
I have to be honest – part of the fun was the fact that I was sitting at 19k HPs with 300 Resilience while fighting level 70-75 people who had NO IDEA what they were doing.
But another aspect of the fun was that I could go into a fight and know that – with one exception* – I wasn’t going to be destroyed in two hits.
There were similar players in the BGs. Players who were serious about PvP, with the gear and skill to back it up. There was a couple of Frost Mages who made me look like I was lvl 70 again. There was a Hunter who reminded me of how much I hate traps. Then there was the DK who I simply couldn’t hurt. I don’t know if he was in a tanking spec, or what, but he may as well have been immune to physical damage.
*There was a 76 Shaman in a few WSG who would just sit in midfield and implode anyone who came close. Dude was wearing what looked like full Brutal gear. The fact that he had a similarly geared Disc Priest helping him made it worse. I never won a game when that guy was in game.
ALL THAT TO SAY -
PvP gearing still needs help. I can gear up for PvP by running badges FASTER than I can by straight PvPing. Oh, and heroics would get me gold, trash drops, greens, reputation, and Stone Keeper Shards (which can convert directly into honor!).
I’d like to see this addressed in Cataclysm.
“I can gear up for PvP by running badges FASTER than I can by straight PvPing. Oh, and heroics would get me gold, trash drops, greens, reputation, and Stone Keeper Shards (which can convert directly into honor!).”
It’s stupid, isn’t it?
And I forgot to finish my original thought…
“This is strangely topical… my Warrior hit level 80 last night and I almost cried.
When this warrior hit 78, I immediately bought the crafted Savage Saronite gear and started pounding away in WSG. And it was a BLAST.”
I hit 80, trained up, grabbed my new glyph. Went into another BG – and died 5 times before getting my first kill.
Thus the tears.
Patch 3.3: “All level 71-80 Battleground daily quests will now award 25 Arena points in addition to their current rewards.” Will this help out at all? It sounds like you’ll be able to earn some Arena gear before and after hitting 80 just from battlegrounds. I’m not up to date on the rewards for PvP nowadays. Also, do you have any advice for coming back to a level 60 Mage?
Don’t spec fire when you do Hellfire Peninsula.
Very bad idea.
The arena points thing will help, making it slightly easier to pick up the high end PvP gear.You won’t really be able to buy much with it if you don’t already arena, but if you do, it’ll help.
People talk about blue Ulduar, talk about gear not mattering; but there’s nothing I can realistically do to stop several-k crits from taking my fresh 80 apart. I love how Wrath has made PvP more accessible with Wintergrasp and all, but gear is still a hurdle. I didn’t step into a BG at 80 until I’d been running Wintergrasp consistently for two months so I’d have respectable gear. Otherwise two-shots were the order of the day.
I am comforted by the slow but steady move towards separating PvP and PvE that Blizz has been taking, with changes to pet avoidance and resilience and Deep Freeze and such. Maybe we”ll eventually see the two separate proper.
To be honest, I’ve never liked the idea of an ostensibly skill-based competition that requires a major time investment to be competitive in the first place. As has been said above, once you learn the controls and the interface, FPSes and RTSes and pretty much all other big PvP-centric games only require reaction, timing, communication, planning, foresight, tactics … you know, skill, not 800 resilience and a weapon from Heroic Hard Mode 25-man Whateverthehell.
I’d love it if Blizz designed a single extensive Gladiator set covering all slots/specs/classes and forbade the use of any other items within the arena, rather than the current tiered system. A high rank would be its own reward, same as it is in Starcraft.
there are some options. granted, they are imperfect options, but they are options.
you can buy pvp gear with badges, but that will require for you to run instances (as a side effect if you run said instances while you own VoA, you can also get some stone keeper shards that are tradable for honor). you can do Wintergrasp dailies, and even though you will probably get your butt kicked a lot, I think they reset twice a week and they give you considerable honor. 2 of them don’t even have to be done as pvp. you can level through pvp and buy your starter pieces before you even hit 80 with honor you acquire and since in leveling BG’s you are a lot more equal gear wise, its not as frustrating of an experience. if you have a main and are equipping alt, those commendation tokens from wintergrasp? they are bind on account, so that helps a bit with your alt’s honor grind.
its far from perfect and weapons are still an issue and someone who’s been playing longer gets an advantage over a new comer, but its the same system when it comes to pve. you can catch up given enough motivation and time, you won’t alwasy completely catch up, but at some point, gear gap becomes less noticeable and you actually CAN win through skill.
Then again when I’m going up against furious gladiator faction transfer ret pally with loads of experience, who knows me personally, have seen me play and therefore knows most of my weaknesses and there I am in my conquest badge pvp gear, just starting to get into pvp, with less then optimal playing set up – even tenacity will not save me there, it will just let me live for a minute instead of dying in seconds. but lack of gear was the least of my problems in that case :/
aaanyways. I think “pvp is not fair and never will be” is an official World of Warcraft pvp motto :/
I have to agree with you. I love pvp, but I don’t do arena’s. I guess I need to start doing dungeons, my hunter is all decked out minus weapons, I have the staff from the argent dailies and the Nessingwary 4000 that I’ve had since the start of LK. It’s sad that I have yet to see 1 dungeon in Northrend, I mean thats probably the biggest part of the game… sad really
@ Jesse: I think even if BG’s give Arena points you still need a certain arena rating to purchase the gear. That’s my understanding, right now, to get the really great arena gear like weapons you need like a 1800 rating.
Awesome post. Agreed. Pvp should be more skill orientated than 90% gear.
I think this post and these comments are walking a tight line. You can’t compare wow to games like halo and call of duty because we are all not using the same characters. And thank god because that would be boring as hell.
Also, although I do enjoy the actual act of pvp, getting better gear and knowing you will survive longer and do more damage is a huge part of the fun for me as well.
Just like in raiding the better raid guilds down better content and get better gear because of it. In arena the better players will win and have access to better gear. If what you say is true, that it should be only skill that separates players. Then the players who are decked in full relentless gear would in theory still beat the players who have just started to pvp because of the skill level anyway. Not to mention it is taking away the whole point of mmo’s which is building up your character.
I think half the point to wow is the more you play and more time you put in the better your character gets. If you pvp for a year I think you’re character should have an upper hand on someone who just hit level 80.
Seeing your character get noticeably more powerful, going for being two-shot to three-shot to four-shot to competitive, is fun to watch and legitimate within the context of an MMO—even if I don’t like it. But I have to point out that if you pvp for a year, you ought to have plenty of advantages over some fresh 80, even if you have identical gear. These advantages you will have gained from hard experience and practice. And to my mind, that’s the way it should be.
I don’t mind having different tiers of gear. That, I think, is necessary.
Going from 187 blues to 213 epics, then to 232 and 245, is dumb. The latter part is fine, that’s natural progression, but the first part?
It also isn’t fair at all to people who just want to PvP that they have to deal with bigshot raiders bringing in their stuff that they did absolutely no PvP to get, and it’s way better than anything the actual PvPers have access to.
Allowing PvE weapons and trinkets into arenas and BGs is a huge error, and not providing alternatives through PvP is an even bigger one.
How right you are. It just isn’t right. Since I don’t raid, I’m stuck with heroic weapons on my rogue…which are useless against a warrior’s ToGC face-roller…God help us when Shadowmourne hits the fan…
I actually said something similar to my wife today.
Right now my warrior (mentioned above) dies to raiders and PvPers alike. Raiders may be soft, but they hit so damn hard – and I have so little resilience – that I die before I can kill them. And, of course, PvP-geared players have resilience AND massive hit points.
So instead of starting that grind, I went back to my Paladin. With my Prot build i have 33k HPs and 800 resilience. Casters can still kill me pretty easily (though that can’t just ignore me), but I’m all but immune to physical damage.
But oh how I will miss the joy that is Charge, Intercept, Intervene, Bladestorm, Intimidating Shout, Pummel, Shield Bash… /sigh
I could not agree with you more, Euripides.
My pve main is a boomkin. Boomkin are Absolute Shit in serious pvp. Yet because she’s a pve main, she has 4 pieces of Relentless gear from VoA25 runs, plus a 258 weapon to go with it. Worthless. I’m terrible at boomkin pvp and that gear goes to waste.
My pvp toon is a rogue. Rogues murder a lot of classes by facerolling, and can handle some other classes simply by putting thought into said facerolling. I genuinely adore rogue pvp, and do my research. Work. BG/WG as often as I can stand it. Doing 2v2 for lols this season; we’ve gotten 4 piece Furious so far, but even though it’s only a season old, Furious is not Relentless gear. Also, her weapons? lvl 200s, because she’s not a raiding main.
I do better in most pvp situations on the druid than I do on the rogue, even though I would say I’m infinitely more skilled at rogue than druid.
^ something is wrong with that picture.
“I get that this is an MMO, and that gear matters. But this… this is PvP. It should be decided by player skill (in whatever form you wish to define that), not things like gear.”
What would happen if gear was equalized? I don’t see how this would be possible to implement given the multitude of different choices for gearing to fit certain playstyles within a classes spec. However would removing the gear requirement make PVP more about skill instead of gear, or would it highlight class imbalance more, or something else? I don’t know, I’m just wondering out loud.
I don’t really see PVP in WOW as an especially skillful game, or at least it has a low skill ceiling. There is no aiming mechanism for example. Once you know what to do, the implementation is easy. The major difference I see between skilled and unskilled players is knowledge.
I’m not advocating gear equalization. I’m advocating a fairer system where being a raider doesn’t automatically give you a huge advantage. I’m advocating a system where gearing up for PvP can be done through PvP, not just some slots, but all slots. I’m advocating a system that allows that and balances that.
Preferably, I’d like to outright ban PvE gear in PvP, and ban PvP gear in PvE. To me, that would be an excellent system.
I actually have a 78 Horde rogue right now who’s pvping his heart out to earn some honor points for when he hits 80. He’s decked out in all but 1 of the blue level 78 pvp items just so that he won’t get destroyed in .1 seconds when he enters the 80 bracket (instead, it may be around .2 seconds, but what a crappy extra .1 second of existence that’ll be when his life flashes before his eyes and all he can think is “Dammit, I shouldn’t have spent all that honor on level 70 pvp gear!).
I’m lucky, in that I earned around 70k honor points before I even hit level 60 but that still isn’t going to help me nearly as much as it would have otherwise.
I guess my point is that I can relate to this, and since my rogue is purely a pvp toon I have no idea where to even begin on the front of getting a decent 80 epic weapon OTHER than the titansteel one : /
This is purely observational, but I feel that the time it takes to get enough honor to buy PvP gear is longer than it takes to get emblems for new PvE gear.
I think a solution could be that PvP gear from 2 seasons ago should still be available at a reduced honor rate. Making raiding more accessible has lead to more raiders, with the toughest challenges still only achieved by the most elite few. Making moderate PvP gear available for a casual PvP would lead to me PvPing more, without being any threat to those who take it much more seriously.
I know where you are coming from. During BC is was a somewhat respectable PvPer on my Warlock getting into the 1800s in arena. I hit 80 and I was as squishy as can be. Now that I have picked up a bunch of the 213 stuff, I can actually win fights.
Why not just get rid of gear in PVP altogether? Make everyone who enters the BGs default to a battle-gear configuration, or give people a “vendor” at the start to outfit their toons to their preference.
In Arenas, create tier brackets where people are provided better and better suits of gear as their rating improve, but you continue to play against people of similar gear (and thus presumably better skill).
The problem with WoW pvp is that it’s attempting to shoehorn FPS-style gameplay into a system built around rewards and gear progression. What is the motivation to play a game like Halo or Modern Warfare 2, or Team Fortress? It’s not gear.
The concept of gear as the carrot here is flawed. People like our beloved OP PVP because they enjoy the challenge, else why be complaining about the gear gap? The gear being awarded for the ‘commitment’ to PVP seems to be simple pandering to our baser human need to dominate another human being.
I say get rid of all of it. You want to PVP? Great. Level playing field all around. Let strategy and tactics and excellent execution win the day, not gear. The long-term PVPers will STILL destroy noobs because they will know how to exploit their class’ strengths and shore up their weaknesses. But no more of this absurd lol-no-gear-u-die nonsense.
Give people rewards that provide prestige and visual wow-factor, like amazing mounts, or other in-game benefits like free repairs in your home city. Hell, provide real-life rewards like t-shirts, mugs, or even paid trips to compete at official tournaments every year.
So here’s a question, if not gear, what would be the best motivator for players to PVP?
Skill died in PVP when mages complained about going OOM before they could kill people (vanilla wow).
At that point player health greatly outscaled damage (unless you were in T3 or GM/HWL gear – and you had to bust your ass to get this stuff) and players just couldnt zerg down a target. Healers were near invincible.
The Blizz solution: more damage output. Now players in raid gear blow someone up in one GCD. We are at the opposite end of the spectrum. Zero skill is required if your target doesnt know you are there, just fire off a nuke or two and you win.
Understanding the fundamental problem outlined above, the issue of gear just makes that problem more visible because the number of players that are undergeared (for whatever reason) when compared with the people who take PVP seriously is just overwhelming, so Blizz caters to the masses.
On a positive note: the undergeared player is FORCED to use CC and every trick they can come up with to even have a chance. When they are able to catch up (gearwise) they have the advantage of better understanding their class abilities and know how to better handle opponents, resulting in winning more. So in my opinion, the gear issue is a non issue, because of the tradeoffs involved.
Hopefully Blizz can find the balance between DPS/HP/Mitigation such that skill will once again be required for success.
True, that. I BG’d as fire for the longest time, going in for a few dozen rounds of AB or WSG or whatever every ten levels. Getting 3 killing blows per BG was roughly average … but it taught me to use every ability and trick I could think of.
My Druid, on the other hand … damn. While the class feels so natural to me, I know I’m not taking full advantage of its flexibility. Most fights are over too quickly for it to matter.
As to the ridiculous DPS we see now … we can see equally ridiculous mitigation from well specced, well geared tanks. Trying to kill a PvP geared protadin with 40k hp takes forever, and that’s if he doesn’t have a healer.
It’s really the weapons that bother me. You can gear up pretty well in some reasonable PvP gear without even stepping foot into a proper BG, just hitting WG. But there is just NOTHING for weapons between first hitting 80 and getting to 1800 in arena, outside of PvE. My resto shaman is almost entirely kitted out in relentless/furious gear, but I’m still using a blue ilvl 200 shield. There should be _something_ I can get. My 5s team is making its way to 1800, but we’re at 1730 now and with the holidays I have no idea if we’ll make it before season end. I just want a decent shield with some PvP itemization, is that so much to ask?
The solution could be as simple as putting some decent gear in that can be purchased for battlegrounds marks. And the purchases should be cheap – I’m thinking something not-great-but-better-than-the-crafted-blues for 5 marks.
WG lets you fill in a couple slots for as little as 15 marks. And every season they keep putting in new gear that is a higher tier.
The new battlegrounds, strand and Isle of Conquest give marks, but is there even anything you can buy with them?
I think the tournament realms are what we/I want. Gear is equalized, and it all depends on skill alone.
There’s should be a year-round way to PVP (included in our standard $15/month) that’s fair and equalized like the once-in-a-while $25 tournament realms.
The only problem is that I don’t like arenas as much as I do BGs. If there were a 365-day BG tournament realm, I’d be all over that.
I understand the other posters and how this is a progression-based MMO. But BGing in 187/200 gear is like going into Ulduar 10 minutes after hitting 80. I agree with Euri… that first step is a HUGE gap to overcome. And I don’t understand why we’re forced to do it.
The only issue I see is that on my battlegroup we have a few BGs going at once, but I’m not sure there’s enough people for a multi-tiered BG system.
Ultimately I dunno what the best solution is… all I know for sure is that I’m frustrated as I’ve just leveled my 4th toon to 80 for PVP and it’s hurting.
The only glaring flaw I see is weapons. Between arena, wintergrasp, and bg’s it is easy enough to kit out an 80 in deadly gear and all the offset pieces… but then what? My baby lock has almost full pvp gear and is still using the BoA pvp staff. I don’t have the stomach to farm ToC anymore for gear I want to do PvP. My rogue is pretty much the same way. But then I bring in my ToC raid geared mage and hunter… and I can faceroll over my opponents. I don’t think they should seperate pvp from pve because that lengthens the process of gearing a new toon.
I do however advocate that we should be able to get arena weapons. Tie an arena rating to it. Say for deadly weapon you need 800 arena rating 20k honor and 800 arena points. Furious you need 1300 rating 30k honor and 1k arena points.
I don’t want gear handed to me but it would be nice to actually be able to hit 80 and have the capability to get to 1800 rating without having to run any PvE content at all. As it is now that task is completely impossible because you cannot get weapons without having an 1800 rating.
Especially since icecrown heroic will give 232 gear… why can’t we get furious weapons from a mid rated arena team?
I found your blog by trolling the WOW PVP boards. This article was cross posts ed there and while it was generating an interesting debate, Blizzard apparently frowns upon cross posting and promptly deleted it….twice.
Here was my comment there…
Fun read…especially the newb vs elite comparisons.
The real issue for PVPers is not gear its weapons, especially for a rogue.
I easily got to ilvl 232 in gear through BGs and WG with honor, but my weapons are still iLVL200. Having purchased Wotlk in May I just got my throwing weapon last week. Yes it took me 6 months to amass 25 Triumph badges mainly by running 25 man VoA weekly, but its done and before S7 ended.
All Blizzard needs to do is reintroduce Honor weapons and the gear gap will be palpable. As is it now, I installed Gearscore just so I knew how much weapon imbalance I would be up against.
And now Ive found a new blog to follow and one that talks openly about PVP in WoW. Nice.
This is true to some extent, but it mainly applies to DPS. Healers can get away with creative talent specs, stam stacking for sockets, alternative enchants on lesser gear or PvE gear and judicious use of cooldowns and peels from DPS. A fresh 80 Resto Druid can stack some crazy Stamina and if theyre decent at prehotting and LOS’ing, can stay alive pretty decently.
DPS can’t do that. DPS -MUST- grind PvE to get minimum acceptable weapon (HToC), which usually means that they need to be carried to that weapon or spend alot of time grinding heroics to be able to get on a HToC group.
The imbalance here really comes from an already acknowledged issue with ilvl scaling where Blizzard has already made clear that they scaled ilvl way too quickly with all the heroic and hard mode gear. Back in TBC, gear didnt scale as dramatically and even in Season 4 with merc glad gear (S2) we could still kill stuff reasonably well with decent survivability.
Idk Euripedes, I’ve read this blog for a while now and I agree with most of your posts, however, this one I’m not so sure about. I have paid my dues and gone through an incredibly lengthy grind on my rogue, I raid with a serious guild about 18 hours a week, I have done arena at a competitive level starting in hatefuls.
Even though this might get flamed for being selfish or narrow minded part of me thinks that other people should have to endure some sort of moderate grind to get places. In my opinion with the wg dailies and the badge turnins etc it’s pretty easymode to get pvp epics. As for the raiding weapons, you SHOULDN’T be able to get them overnight, that must be a grind as well.
Splitting pve gear from pvp gear is like forcing players to go through 2 seperate grinds. You can go into a bg with top end raid gear and own face I guarantee it, or you can go in with moderate grade pvp gear and own face. By letting you pick the grind you want you are given options. Banning pve gear from bgs and vice versa requires everyone to manage 2 grinds instead of choosing the one they prefer.
We disagree on that last part. To me, PvP gear has no place in a raid, and PvE gear has no place in any sort of PvP.
It’s obvious Blizzard wants us (meaning PvPers) to use the PvP gear to PvP, just look at the massive buff the PvP set bonuses are getting in 3.3.
They just aren’t enforcing that nearly enough, and it’s leading to a lot of very strange issues.
And yes, I am endorsing having two separate gear grinds.
I see your perspective, and having a second grind wouldn’t be a big deal for someone like me because I spend a lot of my weekly time on this game (college, yay).
But for casuals with limited time having 2 grinds would only contribute to the gear deficit in an entirely different manner.
Honor weapons. Nuff said.
Htoc gives ilvl 219 weapons. That is certainly not an insurmountable gap from high end pvpers, in fact most people in bgs are using around that ilvl. In a weeks time the weapon you need is almost guaranteed to drop.
If you are, say, a warrior, you can pick up Edge of Ruin from from HToC, or even nab Ironsoul from Flame Leviathan in 10-man Ulduar.
When 3.3 hits, you’d be able to get Quel’Delar, a massive 251 weapon, for running the new heroic.
It isn’t really that difficult to get decent weapons, especially if you raid frequently.
The question is, why is that necessary at all? Why do you have to raid and run heroics to grab gear to do something completely unrelated?
yeah.. I wasn’t too thrilled to find out there you can’t get a pvp weapon without that arena rating. I ended up spending on the usual titansteel stuff :/
The problem lies deeper than most people realize.
In most people’s minds PVP is competitve, supposed to be fair, balanced, and depend on skill.
MMORPG PVE is all about time-investment, grinding, and “working” towards rewards in the game.
Those two are clearly incompatible, and trying to force them together is just gonna piss off one side or another.
Like above, someone is complaining that other’s should have to grind harder for gear for PVP purposes. This is also spammed endlessly on the WoW forums as well. And of course they think so, they have the PVE mentality of “working” for gear, and they don’t want people to have easy access to it… even if it’s for non-PVE purposes.
@ Artaxis
They WERE compatible in vanilla WoW where BOTH PVE and PVP required a roughly equivalent amount of time and insane grind (with the PVP version being the more severe), just ask any GM/HWL. The required PVP grind was nerfed first, now the PVE grind has been nerfed too.
@ Everyone complaining about weapons: You have the same disadvantage as the scrubs of the opposing faction. Feel free to beg Blizz for more free epix.
If you run WG (and do the quests) generating honor points is a joke. Add in the daily BG quest and you’re even further ahead. The “honor” gear is more than sufficient to make it POSSIBLE to have success. The gear differential (outside of that) only changes the margin of error. If you screw up less than the opponent, you win (call it luck/skill/whatever).
The question is, in an MMORPG is something like the tournament realm appropriate? It makes PVP fair, balanced, and based on skill alone, all other things being equal (ignoring the imbalance between comps).
The players of other PVP games would laugh their heads off at WOW PVP, because at lower levels it’s so gear dependent (ie based on time-invested). You can be the best PVPer of all time and have trouble breaking past 1700 if you turned 80 just 10 minutes ago.
While I never played Guild Wars, I think they got the idea right. But of course, that comes at a sacrifice of PVE. WOW will probably never make PVP purely skill-based because it goes against everything an MMORPG stands for IMHO.
ALSO, most people agree that the old PVP grind for titles/gear was horrible. It required no skill, but purely time-invested. At least in current WOW PVP skill will *eventually* get you somewhere. Back then, skill was irrelevant.
That grind was designed purely from a PVE perspective. I’m glad, in a way, that arena was introduced so that skill > time. But to be truly fair and competitive, WOW PVP still has a long way to go. And I don’t think it’ll ever get there.
(Can’t wait for GW2, if it ever decides to come out.)
In BC they had Honor weapons and PvEers cried endlessly that they had to PvP in order to get a decent weapon. Which was true as the PvP weapons FAR outstripped the PvE ones (as far as accessibility&utility) Blizzards response was to lock the weapons behind arena rating and the Raiders cheered. Now PvPers need to raid to get decent weapons and the QQ is endless. The mistake Blizz made is not that they removed the Honor weapons, it is that they seem incapable of finding that middle ground. What they should have done is simply have the PvP weapons match the difficulty it takes to get them. For instance running heroics nets you Deadly gear so running BG’s should net you a Deadly weapon. From there you have weapons accessible for arena rating starting at 1000-1200 whatever is just past the Furious armor requirement.
Blizz reminds me of Mayor Quimby from the simpsons..
“So they want the light? Then light they shall have!” *sets the dial to Perma-noon*
With all that money Blizzard has, and I assume therefore all that staff, you’d think they’ve be a little more intelligent about this.
Granted, I’ve never worked in the gaming industry, so who knows, maybe this stuff is harder to balance than it seems. But sometimes I wonder if WOW is designed by people who don’t even play the game.
The PvP weapons were perfectly viable for raiding then, too.
Nowadays, PvP weapons are still decent, though generally inferior to any PvE weapon of the same item level.
A 245 weapon is a 245 weapon, no doubt, but a 245 raiding weapon is better suited to raiding then a 245 PvP weapon could ever be.
I still think simply banning PvP gear in raids and vice versa would be the best way to go.
I can see banning PvE gear in Arena’s. There are already a lot of things that don’t work there. However, there’s still a lot of world PvP out there, and I see that as roughly similar to BGs in “feel”.
Personally, because of the group I play with, and because I refuse to pug – for reason’s you’ve highlighted recently – PvP was the only way I could get decent gear to run instances when we can get together to run them. Otherwise, I’d still be in blues. As an off topic, I don’t like a paradigm where I have to suffer asshats to get decent gear. At least in a BG, I *expect* to die, and I don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to repair, and it’s relatively infrequent that I have to listen to how bad we suck from the “master” who knows it all, but doesn’t seem to make much of a difference on the field.
TWhat I’d like to see is a reasonable back and forth crossover. What you’re talking about, in that you can outfit yourself for PvP by PvPing, and for PvE by PvEing, but if the items cross over, they are at a distinct disadvantage in comparison with similar iLevel items that are “native”. And really, all that’s needed to do that is to get some honor weapons, that are loaded with PvP stats, and have the gladiator sets from a couple season past available for honor purchase. I’m running in Deadly and Furious pieces, with few titan-forged items, and I do *okay*. Not great, but okay. It would be nice to be able to advance the weapons like I have the armor.
[...] CriticalQQ served me a dose of humble pie when he explained his reaction to being attacked by a stealth Rogue, and at what point it’s time to escape the stun lock: [...]
Go watch mercaders skill vs gear 3 in it he takes on other 80′s with nothing but full tuxedo set a brewmaster hat and dual herrings yes fish and destroys people in the process these people are wearing mostly epic 213 ilvl and higher but I am not saying everyone can do what he does cause let’s face it he is quite skilled but the proof is in The vid that just cause your not geared doesn’t mean you don’t stand a chance
That is very impressive but I’d like to correct a few of your assumptions.
1.) There is no way most of those players are wearing ilvl 213 epics let alone pvp gear. How do I know this? Pally with 15k hp – new to 80 in questing blues at the most. Enh Shaman with 16k hp – again, questing blues and a few epics (likely ilvl200). The list continues. There was a warrior in there with 25k hp, which was an impressive show but the vast majority were in blues.
2.) There was only one player, that I could tell, that was pvp spec. None of the rogues were and it was painfully obvious.
It doesn’t surprise me that a rogue could pull this off due to the very nature of their gameplay (surprise attacks when people aren’t ready) but put a tux on a warrior and some fish in his hand and I don’t care how good the warrior is he’ll get face rolled.
Most of those fights were also while people were in the middle of killing a mob. He took the opportunity where he could, but that doesn’t equate to skill that’s just attacking at a vulnerable time.
3.) He chose people with absolutely no idea what was going on to target. Most videos are designed this way, of course, but it doesn’t showcase the skill of the player but the lack of the opponent. Take that DK as an example…casting AotD while fighting a rogue – clearly the DK has no idea what to do.
The argument stems more around people who know what to do with no means to get pvp gear vs people who know what to do who already have pvp gear. By the inherent design of WoW the people without gear have little to NO means of getting gear.
If that rogue were to try that against somebody who either knew what to do or had a pvp spec there is nothing he could do. Nothing whatsoever and that is the point of the argument. Not that gear brings skill but rather that no amount of skill can overcome the gear gap.
Level a character to 80, spend time doing arenas and BGs and get the arena weapon. It’s not going to happen. Why? Because you are going to be using some questing weapon in the 1800 arena bracket because there are no weapons that can be obtained doing PvP aside from the top-end weapons.
warms number broadly
away , http://www.armstrong.com , year , http://en.wikipedia.org , part , http://www.cleanairgardening.com , revolution
It looks like you guys know everything. So I thought I’d ask you about stretched ceilings. There is a company in New York called Plafond Group that specializes in stretched ceilings. Their website has all the information about stretch ceilings and much more. The web address for their site is http://www.eurostretchedceiling.com