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February 15, 2008

PvE Tokens and Badges Tradeable for PvP, Arena Gear

Late-breaking news this evening reports that the latest achievement on the Sunwell Plateau on the PTR unlocked a vendor that will exchange tier tokens and badges for different seasons of arena gear. I talked a little about patch 2.4 altering the pvp gear progression path to move people back into instances yesterday when discussing purchasable, reputation-based pvp blues that will be added to the game, but it looks like Blizzard's changes are set to make this even more dramatic. Here's the current exchange rate:

  • Tier 4 tokens = equivalent Season 1 pieces (gladiator set)
  • Tier 5/6 tokens = equivalent Season 2 pieces (merciless gladiator set)
  • Badges of Justice = Veteran's boots (40), bracers (25), belt (40)
  • New T6 tokens = equivalent Vindicator's gear (boots, bracers & belt)
I expect a lot of QQing about raiders getting free epics, but the truth is that the current pvp gear progression is even more time consuming than raiding -- a serious pvping friend of mine who's leveling a warlock for arenas did the math and figured he'd need to log 100 straight hours of Alterac Valley to gear his character up for Season 4.

While this change might even be a bit too far in the opposite direction, I still maintain that increasing the pace and means by which players get pvp gear is going to make all arena play -- not just the high end -- much more about skill and much less about who's managed to log enough pvp time to get ___ amount of resilience.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

"much more about skill and much less about who's managed to log enough pvp time to get ___ amount of resilience."

You're right, except now instead of how much PvP time you've logged, you can substitute it with PvE time. Makes sense, right? PvE for your PvP gear and PvP for your... wait, you can't do that. Well shucks. Either way, it's still a grind to get the gear. If you want to boil the game down to skill, give everyone sticks to fight with. But then it'll be class balance issues rather than gear issues. In the end, the only way PvP will ever truly be about "skill" in a RPG is when there is no such thing as a class, or rather, everyone is perfectly equal. But no one wants that, so we'll never see a truly balanced RPG for PvP. That's why this whole "e-sport" phase of WoW is terrible.

Just my two coppers.

Oh and maybe I'm nostalgic, or was PvP more fun before resilience? Even if you had gimp gear, you could still burst someone down. Now...

Girl Meets WoW said...

While there's a certain amount of truth to your argument, what you're overlooking from the "PvE time instead of PvP time" perspective is that at least for the reputation-based gear, the time involved is negligible*.

My hunter's an excellent example. Since he entered outlands, he's gone on exactly 2 instance runs: Ramparts and Shattered Halls. He hasn't even finished all the soloable quests at 70, but he's already honored with Cenarion Expedition and Honor Hold, 365 rep from honored with Lower City, 975 rep from honored with Sha'tar, and neutral with the Keepers of Time.

Even with that rep, he may be able to pick up two pieces of "season 0.5" gear as soon as patch 2.4 hits, and with no more than three hours of work, I could make sure that he can pick up all three pieces of honored-level gear.

Three hours of PvPing, in contrast, currently gets you what... one third of a pair of bracers, if you're lucky? But of course the rate of honor acquisition will go up with the patch, which was exactly my point: easier to acquire PvP gear, from both PvE and PvP, is going to make arena games outcomes less dependent on gear in general.

Of course, whether that just exacerbates class balance issues is a point that remains to be seen...

*I expect the S1 and S2 token swap will be much less common, because no raid in its right mind is going to let people take pvp gear over pve gear, and other than Badge-a-zhan runs (which still tend to take lots of alts, in my guild), there are few raids that keep farming zones when they have no PvE use for the drops.

Madmantwo said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Madmantwo said...

I hate to be the snide PVE'er but i can't help but feeling a sense of vindication, from this. It's very frustrating that while working on PVE the only gear you get is from completing the encounter, where as with PVP even if you lose constantly eventually you will be rewarded. Now there are such things as rep/faction rewards which will reward you regardless of winning over a long enough period of time but even there its a few pieces at best. There is nothing more disheartening than seeing a rogue in 3 pcs of S3 gear and an weapon with a < 1500 arena rating.

I remember a time when the tiered set pieces were revered and only went to those who were raiding and took the time to get those pieces. Now anyone who has a pulse and can hit the arena que button will get gear that is pretty f-in good no matter how you slice it. Not only does every single warlock in the game have that stupid winged demon helmet, half the NPCs are wearing that gear now. Apparantley Illidan sent his NPCs into SSC and TK for T5 loot, and Kil'jaedan sent his minion into BT and Hyjal to get T6. But not to stray into persecuting Blizz for their retarded strategy of never modeling new armor.... The bigger issue is that in alot of cases the gear from arena is just as good as the gear from PVE. I was just as guilty. When we were doing SSC we couldn't get a Lightfathom Scepter to drop for anyone. I got a S2 healing mace (Merciless Gladiator's Salvation, i think) and I used it till I got the Priest Staff from Gurtogg Bloodboil (Staff of Immaculate Recovery)

Even decked out in T6 gear i cant survive in an arena game even if i just wanted to go in there to have fun. At least this way it may become more enjoyable for those PVE'ers who wish to PVP occasionally. Alot of us see it as the tables have finally turned the other way.

Logan said...

I am personally looking forward to these new changes simply because they will allow me to get my foot in the door with PvP. My main is a raiding lock and I probably spend 12-16 hours per week raiding and an additional 4 hours or so per week farming and doing dailies to support my raiding. I'd like to toy around with arenas and semi-serious PvP a little more than I have, but it's tough to do with my current gear level. Yes, I can farm honor to build a full S1 set, but I simply don't have the time to do that. Being able to use token drops from kara badge runs and Gruul's pugs, as well as being able to buy rep gear to supplement my PvP gear will make progressing in PvP a lot more reasonable.

It's unfortunate that currently you have to commit somewhere in the neighborhood of an entire 40-hour week to be able to be legitimate in both of the major WoW endgame pursuits. I, for one, think that these changes are a step in the right direction.

Relmstein said...

This was probably a necessary response to the growing importance of resilence in PvP. Raiding gear has such a mininum effect in PvP compared to Arena epics that it was a joke. Hopefully, this change will make it so getting into a battleground with a raiding guild isn't so much a death sentence.

Still it smacks of favoritism that you can't PvP to get PvE raiding gear. They only reason I see Blizzard allowed it is that they probably want people to collect PvE gear in the expansion as they level and not have everyone running around in T6 and not having to upgrade until level 80.

Logan said...

@relmstein:

There actually are some highly desirable PvP pieces for PvE raiding, but they are few and far between. From a caster's point of view, the Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade is only bested by about 4 or 5 PvE caster one-handers. The Vengeful Gladiator's Spellblade only pales in comparison to one weapon (the blade from Archimonde).

Speaking from personal experience, I've been running ZA nearly every reset trying to get dragonhawk's blade and hoping against hope that Leotheras drops his sword for a couple months now, all to no avail. It seems like the only guaranteed way to get a caster weapon suitable for tier 6 PvE content is to do arenas and save points for my Merciless. Because of my lack of PvP gear and supreme squishiness that results, I'm looking at around 8-9 weeks of solid arena-ing to amass these points... oh, and forget about Vengeful. Try getting an 1850 personal rating with 120 resilience and 9.5k health. These new changes will make it so that other players in my situation won't have to suffer through loss after loss in the 1500-1600s brackets because they just don't have the time to build up their resilience/stamina sets. :-/

And I don't think these changes are really going to rock the PvP world. While having a full S1 set might help players who are newer to arenas get out of the 1500ish brackets, there comes a certain point where skill overtakes gear and the players who don't deserve to be there will start to fall off.

Anonymous said...

I think this will be a great new addition, can't wait for 2.4.

@madmantwo
You have to remember there are people who want to do the later end game instances such as BT and Kara but don't have the time to grind for all that gear, some have what is called "Jobs" and "School" and "Lives" I understand that those that can manage to get the stuff by hard work are mad but don't just look at one side of the issue.

Anonymous said...

Let's face it, Blizzard has the uncanny ability to constant piss someone off when they are attempting to make other people happy.

I personally think it's horse s**t that Hunters get the Vengeful War Axe as a no-rating-required option because it is not considered their "main weapon", meanwhile warriors are hard-pressed to gain and retain a hard, high Arena rating.

I am disgusted at the fact that every challenge in the game is being nerfed so that players can progress more expeditiously, preparing them for the $30+ dollars they will be spending at the end of the year for WotLK. I mean, after all... who would buy an expansion if they don't have the means to survive there? But wait! I did that with BC. LOL

I hate that fact that you can make 20 runs into Karazhan and never get the drop you want, yet in those 20 runs get enough badges to buy 2-3 Tier 5-equivalent gear pieces. (Though now that we farm Kara for badges, I don't complain as much. LOL)

I hate... I hate... I hate...

Things in this game will ALWAYS find a way to piss you off at one point or another, because they have such a large user base to accommodate. So, those who play warlocks, love the OP and those who battle them hate it. Hunters love their new debuff on Arcane Shot, the other end of that shot thinks the debuff is bulls**t. But no matter how much they piss you off, you continue to play and love the game and you continue to line the pockets of the Blizzard execs with your hard-earned cash, right? Am I right? I know I am because I am just like you and everyone else that plays and hates and plays some more and in the end, 4 simple letters sum up our only option, and they are.

S. T. F. U.

Yep, that is all we can really do. :)P

SuraBear said...

"PvE for your PvP gear and PvP for your... wait, you can't do that."

Actually, there are PLENTY of people who PvP for the PvE gear. I recently did 12.something thousand honor worth of battleground grinding to get my S3-equivalent bracers to maintain uncrittability in my bear tanking gear. And I'm pretty sure there are more arena weapons swinging in a typical Prophecy raid than there are raid-dropped items.

Sure, Season 3 epics aren't as good for raiding as Hyjal/BT epics, but they tend to beat the snot out of Karazan epics (Well, except for the fact that now we're going to be seeing people with BT quality gear they bought with Kara-dropped badges. . . )

Anyhow, when you get right down to it, you're only getting some entry level PvP blues from the reputation vendors. Just like PvE blues, they should get replaced when you actually start doing PvP. And just like a raider in blues isn't going to do as well as a raider in epics, a PvPer in PvP blues isn't going to perform as well as one with PvP epics.

Anonymous said...

@surabear.. You did the grind to get 12k honor to get bracers to maintain your uncritability?

What bracers from honor have defence rating?

Rob Dejournett said...

Ah let the QQing commence. Personally I think this is great. Who cares if you can get T6 gear from kara if you clear it 5 times (that's 5 weeks folks). Dittos for badges. If you can do that 5x clear, you can probably get started on decent S1 gear meanwhile.

WHen will people realize that all this stuff isn't going to make it easy to do what we want, just doable. I've been doing arena, for, what 2-3 months, i have my blessed S3 hunter axe, and finally enough points to buy one more piece of gear. That's 2-3 months of losing, alot. I don't want to be the best PVPer ever, i just want to have some fun and get some gear.

Personally I'm fine if they let you start buying T4 stuff from BG vendors, and T5/T6 stuff from arena points. Its going to take a month or so to get a single piece of gear, most likely. Hardly game imbalancing.

Lets think about the T4 stuff, the honor point costs are about 60,000, let alone the marks requirements. That's at least 60 hours of PVP, at best. Probably more like 120 hours. For 'casual' players, thats 12 weeks of work for 5 pieces of T4 gear. You see how this isn't imbalancing?

A similiar situation would be when you have kara or SSC on clear, and you take in one guy with greens, and get him T4/T5 gear that week. Does it happen? yes (not often). Does anyone care? No.

Anonymous said...

I really hate doing pvp but it is now the easy option.... In the old days it used to be ooo nice he has full epic but now anyone can get epics. The game now requires no skill to have good gear

Anonymous said...

It is also very anoying that tanks dont get this "easy option" they cant just leech the av's like other players... to get good tanking gear you have to work for it. And then the experienced tanks who can play the game well have worse gear than some newbie who can't play his/her char

Anonymous said...

To the guy questioning the bear. The thing about druid is htere is a severe lack in bear defense gear. So you can make it up in a few diff. ways.

1. Resil gets u uncritable a lot faster than defense will. Admittadly you are giveing up a little dodge for it but who cares
2. gems and enchants. ---who wants to waste precious slots and chants on def. when you can gem for agility for dodge and let the resil take care of uncrittablity
3. Neck pieces and rings. Okay here you are prolly fine except now alot of taning jewelry has expertise not defense. And we all know how much expertise is prized among all tanks. :p THANKYOU FOR YOUR TIME