RIP TBC Arena

How would everyone be running around with S1 weapons? You realize it takes people who lose games 2.5-3 months to get a 2h weapon right? Whereas you go into Kara every week and afk weapons. Hell half the crafted weapons are better then anything you can get out of raiding or arena.

The higher rating makes a lot more sense in Sunwell where less people will be completing the raid content.

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I hate the rating lock change, I’ve made a post, and many comments about it.
Someone told me they are equivalent to black temple in raw dps, and if that’s the case, they should either be delayed to later seasons or nerfed. But that’s a change so idk what the right answer is, but the fact is that only 1-3% of players will ever see 2050 rated.

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Season 1 weapons are not even close to BT. However you can craft gear that is when you’re in season 2. Like stormherald.

After looking it up it looks like s1 weapons are ~91 dps for 1handers, and early Black Temple weapons are ~100dps for 1hander.

I play this game for pvp, I don’t think the weapons should be rating locked, especially not at 2050, but idk the right answer where that wont mess things up. /shrug

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The Isle of Quel’Danas has a badge vendor that sells wildly OP epic weapons right outside the raid. By T6 ratings on weapons don’t matter - everyone just buys the badge ones. It killed my carry business almost overnight. It was a huge controversy back in those days because people thought it trivialized the traditional item progression pathways, same as this discussion.

2h weapons are 3750 arena points. A 1500 rated team is getting 300-350 points a week. That would take about 10 weeks, yes. But the second you start to get even a little bit of rating the arena points flood in. An 1850 team would be getting about 900 points a week meaning one month. That’s… a pretty piss low rating. A halfway decent team playing 10 matches a week (let’s call that a 1 hour time investment) can get a 2h epic weapon in one month or about 4 hours of effort, guaranteed.

Now compare that to Karazhan. Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix had like a 6%-10% drop rate, and you’d also have to win it / buy it with DKP whatever. Statistically, you’d have to run 3-5 months of weekly Karazhan to get that bow, and that would NOT be guaranteed and it would be more than 4 hours of effort.

Let’s not pretend like the S1 weapons aren’t ridiculous. They are.

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its only an 8 resi upgrade for the legs, its not that big of an upgrade

You’re talking about my demographic there, son.

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Always found it weird that s1/s2 didn’t have rating requirements /shrug.

They added them in S3 when they realized the problem. In Season 2 you could buy an S1 gladiator epic weapon FOR HONOR and it completely trivialized weapon progression. The S1 weapons aren’t super far behind T5 weapons, let’s alone T4 weapons. Blizzard didn’t predict every Tom, Dick and Harry would BG for an afternoon for a weapon that put them halfway through the expansion with weapon progression.

Imagine if in Classic you could essentially buy Ashkandi for 50g once you hit Rank 4.

Well, tbf, you can still buy S1 gear for honor and no rating in S2 in tbc classic.

That’s not what I’m replying to, though. I’m replying to why you find it weird they didn’t add ratings until S3. It’s because they didn’t predict the problem. The change was reactive.

It’s not just rating. It’s teams, new teams starting at zero, no cross-realm, no LFG. Gear ratings are another barrier for entry.

I look forward to all the “it’s no big deal” people QQing by mid season when they experience all the hassles Blizz created.

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But that’s what your entire post was about lol.

Adding rating in s3 had nothing to do with buying prior season gear with honor. My guess is that you’re correct in a different way, they didn’t want people just grinding their way to that kind of gear.

With no rating you can literally make a team, play 10 games, if you lose too much you can just make a new team the next week.

This is literarily what all the gearing guides were saying to do lol.

The ideal option would be tweaking their power level to kara levels, and maybe lock it at like 1750 or something. But that’s more changes, and #minimalchanges

Right. The problem is this intersection:

  1. S1 Gladiator Weapons are SUPER strong
  2. S1 Gladiator Weapons are guaranteed
  3. S1 Gladiator Weapons require fairly little effort

Raid weapons are #1 and #3 but definitely not #2. Crafted weapons are #1 and #2 but definitely not #3. So Blizzard had to change ONE of those three for the arena weapons. They decided to change #3 and make them require 2050 rating. They’re still very strong. They’re still guaranteed. They’re just now slightly more difficult to get (if TBC ratings reflect traditional retail ratings, 2050 rating is the top 6% of teams - quite out of reach for most people).

They could have changed #1 and nerfed the weapons into the ground and then never added a rating to them. They could have changed #2 and made them a very rare drop rate out of an “arena loot box” or something. I think, given the options, changing #3 was the best of the bunch.

Ofc, a lot of people will still argue “they shouldn’t have changed it at all!” but clearly Blizzard is changing things this time around (drums, Seal of Blood etc) that they think will coax the experience into a better one. Clearly, Blizzard realized they made a tremendous mistake in original TBC by not locking these powerful weapons behind a rating requirement - a mistake they swiftly correct in Season 3 of the expansion. It makes sense they want to correct this mistake from the beginning this time around, no?

Why do you think 1850 is a piss low rating for a season 1 weapon?
In wrath for example T1 weapons were 1800, T2 2200. The difference was they had actual hard mode challenges for raids and not 1 size fits all.

T4 weapons are similar to S1 in strength(125ilvl T4/123ilvl S1) but are incredibly easy to get in comparison. Not sure where you get this idea that S1 weapons are insanely op compared to the ones you get out of T4.

With how simple it is to craft things like Deep Thunder, Dragonmaw, and Black Planar gating weapons in S1 at that high of a rating is just a terrible decision by blizzard.

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No not really…
Since NO ONE EVEN THOUGHT TO BRING IT UP…

I do remember they resisted for years bringing back classic.
I do remember retail being stagnant trash and classic sub counts dwarfing it.
I do remember these things…

Sorry jayteam… YOUR version sucks.

I mean… a couple guys in a basement provided an ultra smooth running game with 1000 people in if…
Runs smooooooth.

Now contrast that with sw waiting for ahead drop and tell me its not intentional…

Usually people put money BACK into the product they made billions on…

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They also realized late in TBC that there were no early TBC options for an offhand prior to t5. They undid that for, “authenticity”, but then made this arena change which directly changes the early game power levels.

We agree on this. The rating addition to S1 arena weapons fundamentally changes early-expansion power level and gear progression pathways. You just think it’s for the worse and I believe it’s for the better. I’m pretty firmly aboard the #NoChanges train. I would have been fine if they hadn’t made this change. Hell, it would’ve been easier to gear my alt rogue as those weapons are awesome. But I can at least understand WHY they made this change and I think it will probably improve the S1/T4 landscape. After S1/T4 it won’t even matter, either way. But yeah, it will definitely lower participation and increase carries. For sure.

Disclaimer: I only play WoW for the PvP these days. I am playing TBC expressly for the PvP. I will be getting the S1 weapons whether they have no rating, they have 2050 rating or they have 2200 rating. This change doesn’t effect me in the least. I am just objective enough to see why Blizzard considers this the right choice of action.

I don’t think it’s going to have much of an impact on T4, it’ll be easy as it is, but it will have an impact on Arena participation.

Why bother with it if only 3% of players get the best rewards? Especially it’s known how badly balanced it is.

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