I stepped into the Arena last night for the first time since the expansion. It was a frightening experience, mainly because I don't have any resilience gear yet. If I want to wear any I have to put aside my PvE epics and don blue battleground armor, the idea of which bothers me, so I skipped it.
The thing is, a lot people are in this situation. In a complete turn-around from the Burning Crusade, where players could simply run battlegrounds and gear themselves up with PvP epics, you now have to do Arenas for epic PvP gear. We've all been taking advantage of easier PvE content and have kitted ourselves up with some fairly decent gear, but now find that we have to almost start again in terms of PvP gear. Luckilly, most people are in the same boat so there isn't a huge chance you'll come across a team who are fully decked-out in resilience gear just yet, but the change is coming.
Ghostcrawler spoke about this on the official forums earlier, continued after the break:
The thing is, a lot people are in this situation. In a complete turn-around from the Burning Crusade, where players could simply run battlegrounds and gear themselves up with PvP epics, you now have to do Arenas for epic PvP gear. We've all been taking advantage of easier PvE content and have kitted ourselves up with some fairly decent gear, but now find that we have to almost start again in terms of PvP gear. Luckilly, most people are in the same boat so there isn't a huge chance you'll come across a team who are fully decked-out in resilience gear just yet, but the change is coming.
Ghostcrawler spoke about this on the official forums earlier, continued after the break:
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 I don't think I have ever said "wait and see" though it gets quoted a lot, so maybe I did. I have always said that everyone pretty much agrees that resilience will make things better and the question is by how much.Resilience is our primary reward for PvP gear. It is what keeps PvP gear from being uber in PvP gear and also discourages players from using PvE gear to PvP (more on this in a sec). Part of the Arena design is basically that if you win it gives you access to gear that lets you win more (that is actually the PvE design too if you think about it). If we give away resilience too readily, then the Arena rewards don't feel as valuable. We know a lot of players are wearing PvE gear right now in Arenas. That is happening for a couple of reasons: |
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| Blizzard Quote: (Source) |
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| First, they have that gear. We made the early raiding content very approachable, but we also gave players access to it long before the Arena season started. In early BC it felt like the PvP epic gear was far easier to get than the PvE epic gear, which sent a strange message to a lot of players from which not all have recovered. So in that respect it is nice to be able to say again that PvE is a valid path to epic gear. Unfortunately, we probably went too extreme in the other direction and now the "welfare epics" are from Naxx. (I also want to add that badges and Archavon are great sources for PvP gear without you having to PvP, and Strand and Wintergrasp give a lot of honor if you want to PvP but don't want to Arena. There is also a lot of good starter PvP gear out there but it is blue and some players hate the thought of taking off their purple gear from a few seasons ago. But I digress.) Second, when nobody has resilience gear, it allows for a strategy where you can just burst players down in a couple of GCDs. Since the attacks never take much damage, resilience isn't highly valued. What will happen is that once some players start to get resilience, everyone will have to. Once the healer (to use an example) can't be destryoed in a couple of GCDs, the attackers are in a very weak position from the rest of the healer's team. It's an arms race in essence. Once one person putson their survival gear, everyone has to. Now I do realize in the past this wasn't true of every spec, especially rogues, though we've tried to avoid that problem this time. I also realize that some players think they die too easily without resilience or will die too easily even with resilience. I'm not trying to wave away all of that feedback. The question was whether resilience was valuable (or perhaps even too valued) in PvP. |
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I personally hate the way they do this. The way I would like to see it is that all PvP gear contain the same bonuses to resilience, but every upgrade has more stats. This way the fights are more dependent on skill and not who has better gear.