Raid gear is largely why Arena died (Long post)

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Wall of text incoming :melting_face:

I’ve never seen the raid-gear issue mentioned at all here. This surprises me, since so many of my TBC arena partners quit WotLK PvP over raiding or gear drama.

Mainly I see threads about rating-gated gear turning off casuals from participating, which is definitely a big issue.

We all know if you queue Arena in Classic without the correct PvE loot, you’re basically trolling.

If you refuse to pursue these items, or they simply don’t drop, you won’t be competitive.

Wrath has far more items that are not only more of a chore to obtain, but more “required” than TBC items ever were.

S5:

  • Betrayer, Torch, Sinister Revenge (Literally an ilvl of their own, zero alternatives)
  • Living Ice
  • Dying Curse
  • Bandit’s
  • Greatness card (Thankfully it can be bought, but still far more expensive than any TBC BoE used in arena - even factoring gold inflation)

S6:

  • Val’anyr (ironically, funneled by default to Pal/Sham, the 2 most-represented arena classes, making S5’s stale meta even worse) - This item alone caused many Priest pvpers to leave the game
  • Mjolnir, Dark Edge
  • Comet’s / Dark Matter, Fang
  • large amount of various off-pieces
  • Cunning deception legs
  • Scale / Flare (Good luck getting Scale before your guild’s DPS as an Hpal)

S7: Actually decent in this regard

  • Trinkets, this is where trinkets start to get insane in arena
  • Cloaks are nice, but underwhelming and by no means required

S8:

  • Shadowmourne (especially required for DK or they’re simply a non-factor in arena, as proven for years on warmane) Good luck obtaining Shadowmourne as a DK or a Warr who PvEs as prot
  • The infamous DBW
  • Fanged Skull
  • Bauble
  • Bloodsurge/Terenas (mega drama items especially when healers want to roll since Trauma refuses to drop)
  • Too many 277 offpieces to list

Ruby Sanctum:

  • Scale trinks
  • 284 offpieces

In comparison - TBC “must-have items” COMPLETE list:
Please feel free to add to this

  • Mage MQG (mages from classic already had this) (nerfed anyway by blizz after only 2 seasons)
  • Rogue Sun King mace (contested by PVE warrs and, bizarrely, even shamans)
  • Stormherald (requires 8 dungeons and some raid trashfarm, but doesn’t require any raid boss kills or real timegating, and cheaper than Darkmoon card)
  • Crystal Spire (simple drop yet game bis lasting 2 seasons)
  • Skull
  • Rogue Glaives. So many Rogues hit glad in TBC classic S3/S4 without Glaives, but this may just be showcasing how strong TBC Rogue was. Offhand was uncontested . Horrible drop rate
  • Vial of the Sunwell (uncontested healer item in a 5man dungeon)

Side Notes

  • Blizz majorly buffed PVE iLvl during S6. PVP gear was only slightly buffed. Wintergrasp pieces were completely forgotten.
  • Humans now need double PVE trinkets unlike TBC
  • PvPers wanting to try different specs like Preg or Prot pala, or Destro/UA, often require loot from specs that they don’t play in PvE
  • Spellpower change made healers and DPS casters contest many of the same items, causing more friction in guilds harboring PvPers
  • “Resil cap” is far easier to hit in WotLK than in TBC, leaving more slots to be filled with PVE gear (mainly affects healers and Warlocks)

Another rarely-mentioned contributing factor to Arena’s decline - entry cost

  • Tryhards race changed to Human for s5, again to a walljumping race once sewers jump became popular in S6, then back again for S7 after blizz finally nerfed the jump after 8 months of radio silence. Don’t want to buy the current FotM race change? You won’t be competitive.
  • One boost per account. Want to arena on another alt? Ready to pay $50 for another boost? You need to sub a second account, or else spend literal hundreds of hours leveling 1-80. Yes, Blizzard want another $15/month just to unlock the privilege of giving them $50

Browsing ironforge.pro random glad chars from TBC, half of them quit in S5. I’m talking glads, not R1s for whom the game is often their livelihood. I avoided looking at resto druids since that spec fell off a cliff anyway

I think Warmane’s arena scene is propped up by 3 things: instant-80 option, being able to (slowly) obtain PVE loot via PVP, and the PVE loot cash shop. No other private servers offered all of these since, leading to the false conception for years that Arena players somehow preferred WotLK

Classic PvPers came out of TBC willing to adapt to WotLK’s different meta and playstyle, but being forced to do so much raiding every single season has been a deal-breaker for many.

Edit: This was not meant as a complaint nor asking for any changes, but merely to explain why many mid-tier and higher players have dropped out of participation

6 Likes
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Complaining 15 years too late…

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Needing 1 healer for 2 or 3 people is why arena died. You can’t sustain that ratio. Even on retail with solo queue you get huge queues.

They should have went harder on bgs if they wanted to please the larger crowd.
In bgs it doesn’t matter much if one guy has Shadowmourn you still need group coordination, I’ve seen blue geared coordinated groups beat really geared people and being able to get really good rating in bgs but hardcore pvp players do not respect bgs because their single player skills doesn’t matter as much.

2 Likes
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I don’t know that, but I’m just a 2200 rated casual.

A lot of people I PvP with regularly don’t PVE at all.

5

Decent points but missing the bigger picture: the barrier to entry is too high. PvE gear is required for high-end meta play sure, but casual’s can’t even get a full set of normal pvp gear. The fact PvP gear was barely buffed in S6 combined with WG gear being ignored combined with rampant bugs and cheating meant that over half the player base quit. The only people still playing are those who’ve been doing arena for 10+ years. No new faces.

10 Likes
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As someone playing a Disc priest, hearing they’re making Shadowmourne even easier to get and continuing to do nothing for PvP is making me question the point of next season even for my friends. It already took most of this season to feel somewhat not paper, and I even got giga lucky with getting the ToC trinket first try on a PuG.

I also hate feeling like I need to “play the game” and find the best players and comps to get gear to go back and play with my friends with. I just want to play with the boys, but playing at a huge gear disadvantage sucks so hard.

Like JFC drop the rating reqs and put in PvP scaling like retail has. Make PvP gear the undisputed best choice for PvP and make the honor gear only like 10 ilvl behind the conquest gear. This means everyone still has something to work towards collecting conq pieces, but they can more or less get started with a nominal honor grind and be mostly competitive.

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Woah bro… did you just use logic to justify proper gameplay??

We don’t do that here - Blizzard

8

arena sux

rated bgs are truly competitive and balanced, because the open nature of it with varied strats means that classes don’t need perfect balancing.

your not humping a poll for 15min either

5 Likes
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No, instead you have the 2400 hunter with a lazy eye that falls asleep at farm the entire climb. The fact there is so many people and the ease of being able to carry dead weight is why “RBG hero” is a thing. There’s no personal indication of skill, it’s a large team effort with the results having little in way of skill expression. Arena is in your own hands. 5v5 is also a bracket that falls victim to that same issue of dead weight carry.

OP is correct s8 has a lot of pve gear that drastically changes how viable a character is, especially compared to tbc. It’s wotlk though thats what we said we wanted to play. Changing all of this just for the last season seems unrealistic.

I still can’t believe we only have 4 arena maps, no RoV and no word on if we will get Cata’s less buggy version of RoV. That’s something that has time to be effected, not something like changing the entire way gear is balanced for the very end of the xpac lol.

1 Like
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arena sux. not fun, not balanced, too restrictive, ppl take it far too serious, toxic af, and to top it off, literally no incentive to do it for most

thus dead

you could remove all pve gear, would still be dead

hell you can buy gear with gold

3 Likes
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:slight_smile:

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Arena was never “alive” to begin with. The reasons I do not personally arena are…

1.) Rating restrictions on gear were far too strict from the get. Locking weapons behind a rating requirement, sure that makes sense. But locking entire sets behind a high rating requirement was a silly decision.

2.) The game is solved. This affects PvE, but it REALLY hurts PvP. TBC everyone knew to go Rogue because they were broken. WoTLK everyone knew to go War / Holy Paladin because they were broken. You just end up facing the same comp again and again and again.

3.) It’s toxic af. Rampant cheating, smurfing, and generally attracts the least pleasant people in the game’s community. This prevents the lower skilled players from playing and therefore you’re only facing the tryhards.

9 Likes
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Arena has never and will never be “alive”. It’s kind of funny to have this long post about all the “mandatory” PvP gear, when WoW has tried a TON of PvP gearing systems throughout the expansions.

WoD probably had the best system with the PvP item levels, gear was super easy to get, and you could get the entire season’s gear worth of conquest points in TEN games at the end of the season. AND ARENA WAS STILL DEAD.

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Don’t worry. We BGers share the same disdain for arena players like u 2, who show up to our BGs.

And I find it interesting that the 2 of you are putting down BGers when BGers fight with lesser gear than arena players…

You sit high atop your perch with only gear you can get, and you still have the gall to put down those that have no access to that gear.

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to be honest, I’m not sure if I agree with the idea that wrath has a higher emphasis on PvE gear in arna compared to TBC. In both expansions, the meta has been to wear 4/5 pieces of the main PvP set with mostly entirely PvE off-pieces gemmed with resil depending on spec/comp. I recall the last 2 seasons in TBC getting completely gapped by teams due to the fact that I did not participate in raids. Especially at the end of the game when you get stack the set bonus from both the 4 piece PvP set and the 4 piece Sunwell teir.

Plus IMO gear is actually a little more accessible in WOTLK. At least for me, a lot of my PvP has BIS comes from 10 mans thus far… which wasnt a thing throughout TBC minus the first phase.

Glaives were also a nightmare in arena. A rogue mage with glaives and skull and all the other gear could kill someone in a DR sheep and a cheeky counterspell easily. And if you went up against a mirror comp with optimal PvE gear and you had mostly PvP gear, it sure was an uphill battle.

Also as a stealth class in TBC, human perception was disgustingly OP not to mention the blue stealth detection goggles. I played feral/rogue with a dwarf. If the gates opened and a human rogue was in the arena with us, it was pretty much GG

3 Likes
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Agree with OP. Great post. Thank you.

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Because you are TERRIBLE at the game lmfao
Its not like people good at arena were given gear and you weren’t. You are NOT good at the game so you sit at 1400 and cry on the forums about it instead of taking steps to improve yourself. You specifically are one of the most pathetic people who post here.

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Tbc stealth game is a meta all to its own. I mained rogue to duelist. You have to have JC trinket + stealth boots + cape enchant + blue eng goggles and if its an alliance team pre-vanish as you approach for higher stealth level and spam arena 1/2 shadowstep sap. You could absolutely beat human teams if you did all of this, but yes if you didn’t you never got opener.

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Cuz bad? All my alts are full relentless and pushing glad on main, what’s the problem getting gear? It’s literally just a knowledge gap you refuse to close. You could watch better players and take their strats, you could research your comp etc, but no here we are saying theres no point lol. 2.2 on deadly geared rogue, 2k on war i got 80 this phase with deadly gear, you literally have zero excuse it is just a knowledge/skill gap that you have to work on if you want the gear.

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Yes that is why. I don’t know why this is so hard for you to understand that rating requirements are bad for participation.
It DISCOURAGES people from wanting to learn and get better.

Must be nice having the knowledge already.
For those that don’t, having the gear deficit AND the skill deficit makes it extremely hard to close the skill gap.

When you don’t have the damage to do the strat and you aren’t perfect at the game and make mistakes, those mistakes are extremely devastating for an undergeared character.

2 Likes