I’m a casual and new to the arena scene. Never been higher than 1400 so far, had switched around a lot of partners due to circumstances.
The honor grind was annoying but not particularly as bad as some say, consistently doing battlegrounds and honor objectives gave me most offpieces and a few set pieces, which I replaced with glad gear anyway at the season’s end. If I were to do the grind from the beginning again I wouldn’t even bother with the honor set pieces, just get the offpieces and save points til S2 for the rest of the S1 gear. Or get the rep pvp gear if there are still slots to be filled.
The weapons I consider to be gated harder than the rest of the gear. The honor weapons frankly suck, and for rogues in particular is unnecessary — dragonmaw (crafted) and spiteblade from kara are similar to S1 glad weapons as it is. That being said, going forward I might exclusively focus on getting the season’s weapons, whether I can push to 1850 (unlikely) or simply bank points to the end of each season to grab them first. I don’t think I’ll find a raid spot as a pvp geared rogue for SSC or beyond so my options are kind of limited in getting better weapons than the ones I have.
Anyway, the biggest obstacle though has been trying to find people who want to stick around and do games to climb rating and get better. Everyone is either pugging weekly (like I have) or playing with already established partners or looking for new ones at a much higher level (everyone apparently is a retail multiglad with 2k+ xp). Perhaps this is a symptom of the retail-like changes, though I’ve also been told it would be worse without them.
people are better, less people play arena so the few people playing it are the ones trying really hard. It isn’t like back in the day where a lot of people didn’t raid and got their gear from pvp only. PvE is much more accessible so its PvP that is the harder venue for gearing. PvP is dead for the most part man
Yes the casuals no longer exist in arena. A lot of people blame the honor grind, which is awful, but people also need to point the blame on the PvP community.
It’s not fun when all you play is WLD, Double healer warrior and RMP. There is no off meta comps at all. If you don’t play the meta comps good luck climbing.
The changes to arena rating, namely the gear rating requirements and the switch to starting at zero rating with personal rating mean that a lot of the casual people who were essentially padding the lower rankings aren’t playing leaving only the super competitive arena players.
The pool of players is much smaller and there are virtually no casuals because blizzard implemented a borked system and a bunch of idiots on these forums supported it despite the outcry from the majority of us.
i did my ten games a week last season and had enough to buy a piece. i missed like two weeks of the season. then honor is terrible to farm as alliance, probably not great for horde either.
the way to gear up now is save all your points for the end of the season and buy gear at half price. then you get TWO pieces a season. along with that get 200-400 honor per av game and then gain ab/wsg/eots marks one at a time. or to really win just don’t pvp at all.
This version of the game is also different as TBC had constant patches, buffs/nerfs. For example as a Hunter the Cobra Reflexes and Avoidance abilities for pet weren’t added until BT patch but in this version we got them before TBC was even out, with the pre-patch. There are lots of other things like that this is just one example.