The start of any expansion is a rough time for PvP. I only have two expansion packs to draw on here, but they both followed the same pattern.
TBC didn’t have any starter PvP gear. Nothing. If you didn’t still have your old Warlord gear from 60, you didn’t have anything. You PvPd with whatever you could glean from quests, heroics and Karazhan, picking up pieces where you could from there. It was possible to find nice pieces here and there, the odd quest reward or instance drop with resilience or a crafted piece of gear like the Unyielding Girdle.
Lich King was similar. Not exactly the same, but similar. Starter PvP gear existed, all easily crafted if you had a lot of gold to spend or a lot of time to farm and were or knew a crafter with the same. Hundreds of gold later you found yourself with a nice set of gear that was vastly inferior to the stuff raiders could get.
The overall trend, then, was that everyone PvPd with whatever they could pick up from heroics and Karazhan Naxxramas. Why spend hours and hours getting a PvP set together when you could just raid (which you were going to do anyway) and use epics 13 item levels higher?
The end result was an arena season that defined everything wrong with burst damage. Nobody was wearing resilience, and if they were it was only in small values, but everyone was wearing top of the line raid gear.
No resilience? Low stamina? Little to no survivability.
Raid gear? Very high DPS stats? Extremely huge burst. (more…)
Critical QQ 