Hi All,
As I begin planning my characters for Anniversary realms I find myself torn between two things I want: (1) I want to keep hanging out with my friends on Alliance, and (2) I don’t want to be stuck with sub-par alliance racials in arena during TBC.
I suspect many other people are facing a similar dilemma. If private server populations and prior experience in the more recent TBC release have taught us anything, its that population choice tends to skew HEAVILY horde in TBC, largely because of their superior racials in arenas.
With the above in mind, I’d like to suggest a small edit to the way arenas will work in TBC that could at least help to alleviate the PVP imbalance between the factions - I would expect that narrowing the gap in competitive performance between the factions would at least help to even out the populations between them.
The change I’m suggesting is this: add a single NPC next to the arena ques that allows a player to select their racials/racial spells ONLY while they are playing in the arena. That means an undead warrior could select “gnome” and thus get escape artist (but lose will of the forsaken) only while they are in arenas. At the same time, a gnome rogue could select “undead” and would get will of the forsaken but lose escape artist.
You could further lock racials so that both players have to have the same faction of racials (i.e., you couldn’t combine dwarf priest racial and undead rogue racial on the same team), but I think leaving the options open would create some more mix-and-match fun in the arena that people could experiment with.
There are more extreme changes that are possible: like allowing people to choose racials at all times. However, I think the minimal change I recommended above strikes a good balance between (1) maintaining the original flavor of the game out in the world and (2) ensuring everybody can play they way they want to without sacrificing viability in hyper competitive areas of the game.
Finally, I’d like to suggest committing to making this change in the future now - before vanilla launches. That way, when people are selecting which faction they’d like to play in vanilla, they can choose what they want to play for RP or personal friendship reasons without having to worry about faction imbalance and arena viability in a year.
This is all my two-cents, hopefully other people agree.