How was gear obtained?
Was PVE gear better?
How does the balance compare to Shadowlands PVP?
Edit: Didn’t expect this post to get this many replies lol
Pretty much everything was worse but you didn’t have idiots running around one shotting you so easily so it made the game better.
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Resilience made it so you should use pvp gear in pvp.
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Uhhhh huh. Right.
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Pvp was fun in TBC. Until you faced an SL/SL lock and play a 30 min game while he mana burns you or your healer.
Then you play against double healer warrior comps in 3s where the healers never go oom and the warrior never dies.
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I’m definitely playing sl/sl warlock so I can do my part and kill the hype. Hope I find a good war and druid
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My friend and I used to play dual SL/SL in Arena.
It was a wierd, funny, but very oppressive comp.
We did quite well, but some regular well known comps like RMP would still cream us if they had half a brain.
Fun times!
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Ret itemization was so bad that we didn’t have resilience on our PvP gear. All my resilience came from a caverns of time trinket that was rep gated.
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PVP gear was almost equal to PVE gear in terms of output in raids. I had no trouble keeping up with our top dps in almost full PVP gear.
However, PVP gear was best in slot for PVP because it had resilience which reduced the dmg you suffered from a critical attack.
Gear was earned by points each week and a new piece of your gear could be redeemed by those points based on your rank.
It was actually one of the best pvp systems because each rank unlock an item. 1800 was your sword, mace, etc and such 2100 was shoulders. Nothing past 2100.
So, there wasn’t a massive power gain between those at 1800 and 2200, unlike we have now in shadow lands.
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From what I understand, s1 will be released during t5. Which means, unless there’s a change or something I am unaware of, pve gear will be 1 tier ahead of pvp gear.
Will pvp gear still be good being 1 tier behind? I don’t think so. Will that make ctbc pvp trash? Yep.
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A lot of players were bad back then, it will be a completely different game with the skills we have today. pve gear still had some use like the mana drain bow from illidan and the crafted mace known as stun hearld. tier sets were also really good for some specs. the strat to beat warlock was actually mongo down their pet then prevent them from rezing it lol.
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I’m a big fan of early wow class design, especially tbc and wotlk. So I’m biased when I say I absolutely love TBC pvp. I really like that each class is properly individual and the homogeny between gameplay and design isn’t so blatant.
It’s a completely different beast from other versions of wow. Wotlk made a lot of QoL improvements from TBC. And TBC made a lot of QoL improvements from vanilla.
It was really cool seeing classes get developed in a way that made sense and felt like natural growth from their time in vanilla, and it was exciting to have the talent trees expand ontop of this.
Class balance isn’t the best in TBC. There’s no sugar coating this. Rogues, Warriors, and Warlocks are the kings. S+ tier. Everyone else is anywhere from a solid A+ to C. Although I don’t think I’d put any class in tbc as an F tier where as, Mistweaver, for example, or demo warlock, probably F tier currently.
There’s no Death Knights, Demon Hunters, or Monks. It’s just the base classes, like in Vanilla.
The race-class combinations are still fully intact with blizzards original “lore-friendly” restrictions. That means no dwarf shamans. No troll druids. No human hunters, among other restrictions.
Priests have Race-Specific spells. So for undead, that means Devouring Plague and Touch of weakness, but for say, a dwarf, this would be chastise and desperate prayer. These are racial spells, that priests have access to ontop of their normal racials.
Lots of post-wotlk / cata changes haven’t been implemented. Like, Shadowmeld can’t be used in combat. Human Racial is Perception for detecting stealth, and not a cc breaker. Dwarf Racial doesn’t have an internal CD share with trinket. Belf racial has two components. (mana Tap & arcane torrent.) etc.
Hunters use mana, and have a dead-zone. Warlocks, hunters, and preists, can all drain mana. Mana efficiency can’t be over exaggerated.
Dispel is absurdly potent. And a huge part of the meta. Trash buffs are important. And using low-rank spells to cover your buffs is worth remembering.
Mass dispel has no cooldown, and has a .5 second cast time. It can be resisted, and doesn’t remove cyclone.
It’s just a really different game. This isn’t even scratching the surface of all the differences in gameplay. It’s a much slower, but by no means less complex version. If anything i’d say it’s just a different type of complexity. A different muscle than modern wow. Using a different part of your brain.
But, to be short.
PvP was unbalanced, but crazy fun. It’s like classic, but with blizzards first attempt at actually balancing for PvP in a competitive sense.
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They already said they are moving S1 to match T4 and so pvp and pve will be on equally standings.
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Playing demo lock I enjoyed banishing other demo locks.
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You forgot resto druid in S++ tier.
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If Joseph Stalin played in TBC he would have been a restoration druid.
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TBC Ret Paladin here.
One fun fact no one remembers is Ret was the only spec in the game which didn’t have Resilience added on their PVP sets until Season 3.
During Season two I purchased warrior gear (boots, gloves, etc) in order to obtain some. Used the core Ret pieces for Set bonuses.
Absurd really. Ret wasn’t remotely close to being considered “good” but Blizzard for some reason felt resilience added with their survivability wasn’t fair. Yet Holy Palaidns got it…
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only late tbc. early tbc it doesn’t have enough spirit to ascend to godhood.
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TBC rated pvp
it was the first time arena was introduced and a new pvp gearing system after a pretty long period in vanilla where naxx gear had made raiders destroy everyone with colossal power advantages. PvP gear was pretty strong in vanilla until Naxx.
Arena and the new pvp gear was supposed to change the completely burnout honor-decay no-sleep pvp grind of vanilla.
So you had to get certain rating to unlock certain slots of gear. The pvp gear had resilience which reduced the affect of crits on you. However some classes barely cared about crits which made this pvp stats pretty bad for balancing. In Cata resilience was changed to reduce all dmg taken.
The fights were generally long and healers were constantly drinking to maintain mana, kills were hard to obtain unless healers were oom. Certain comps had easy time drinking and priests could mana burn healers. Balance was completely wack but it was a HUGE upgrade from vanilla pvp gearing (although the end of vanilla changed it but pvp gear wasn’t competitive by then).
The system was an upgrade but was super unpopular due to rewarding rating with power, the unbalanced resilience stat, and the bad balancing on the meta of the time, and was thus thrown in the trash and replaced with fairer systems.
Resilience was later changed to just reduce all dmg which was much more balanced. PvP gear was changed to make gear available to everyone (no rating needed, just need to play) except one weapon upgrade that came at 21-2200, I forget which one. This was also eventually dumpstered for a system that never rewarded more power for rating, just cosmetics.
By far, the highest participation and system satisfaction with pvp gearing and balance was in MoP and WoD, which was soured only by the onset of massive botting cheats which automated the responses and cc chains of players.
The founders stated that after long experience with the various systems it was clear that rewarding power to rating was bad for the ladders and the pvp game overall.
Compared to shadowlands:
PvP gear and gearing alts took WAY less time, but this is applicable to pretty much every single expansion that didn’t have borrowed power systems.
For the vast majority of other expansions, healers were much stronger in pvp compared to shadowlands except at the very beginning for a bit. They usually had to be oom for a kill unless they just played poorly. Bliz slowly changed the meta to make emergency healing cost tons of mana to speed up the sometimes very long matches. But then a meta of hybrids and drinking strats become super strong.
Overall though, there is a sentiment among most pvp players that they only do arena to get gear to have fun in ‘real pvp’ in battlegrounds. Arena isn’t actually liked that much, and never has been. The carrots have always been huge though and lots of pvp players would rather gear up via pvp over pve which makes them burn out from boredom.
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Drinking didn’t have a lag time either so the second a healer dropped combat, you could sneak a tick or two
Double healer comps were all over
People didn’t die until healer mana bars ran out for the most part
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