Altitis

With the Season 1 gear now added to the normal BG honour rewards, the nerf cries about Welfare Epics are back with a Vindication. Yes, I spent some time on the o-boards, poor me.

The current gripes haven’t really evolved much, except there appears to be a slight streamlining of the various arguments:

1. Some raiders will come straight out of their inner ganker closet and admit plain and simple that they want to be able to crush PvPers in their raiding gear.
2. Some raiders will hold the argument that PvPers shouldn’t have access to gear as good as PvE, and that it shouldn’t be just a recolouring of the PvE set, and that anyone having epics makes them, well, not epic anymore. I’ve addressed this here for a partial solution, for that matter.
3. Some will complain that gearing up through arenas allows people to cheese out in the raid progression and skip all T4 instances straight into SSC / TE content.
4. Some still stick to the dead horse that it takes zero skill and effort to get arena gear and will come up with ludicrous examples of how someone managed to get full S2 kit sitting at 1000 rating the whole time (never mind that you’d need 66 weeks in 2v2 to get enough points for that, and S2 lasted what, 22 or 23 weeks). They will usually also contrast the no effort for guaranteed returns vs. the randomness of PvE drops.

So let’s look at these statements and address them one by one.

“I dominate PvE so I should be able to dominate PvP as well”. First and foremost, this complaint isn’t really about the accessibility of PvP gear but one about game mechanics, specifically resilience, which makes PvE gear pretty disadvantaged vs. Arena gear in terms of PvP effectiveness. And let me state first and foremost that this is a good thing.

For the readers who started WoW post patch 2.0, what these guys are longing for are the days where you, the average-geared level 60 player, would enter a BG around 23:00 or midnight and suddenly face a premade clad in BWL to Naxx gear who would totally crush you within a couple of minutes. The second best thing about it was that it tended to be over fast, and with a bit of luck, you wouldn’t get matched up with them again. The best thing was taking note of their server and guild name, then visit their website and cackle with glee reading how they had wiped over and over on whatever boss they were attempting that night.

Sorry guys, these days are over and never coming back. There are several good reasons for that, one because us more casual players don’t pay 12.90 € to provide frustrated raiders a conduit to vent off steam. The other major reason is also tied to the rebuttal to the second statement, a bit further down. And what goes around comes around – if a hardcore raider should be able to dominate PvP in his PvE kit, the reverse should also be true. A hardcore PvPer who spends 40+ hours / week in arenas and BGs surely must be able to dominate the PvE aspect of the game, right?

Of course not. Framed that way, everyone including the hardcore PvPers will agree that this is a silly proposition. Which only shows how some of the more aggressive raiders holding this position are of utterly bad faith.

“PvP shouldn’t have access to kit as good as PvE and anyway, it should look different”: Regarding the cosmetic aspect, if it stops some of the QQ, I’m all for it. About the quality of the gear, this is demonstrating that the raiders who hold this argument simply do not understand the competitive PvP game, and how it fundamentally differs from top raiding.

In PvE, gear is an important complement to skill. For any encounter, there is a relevant threshold below which no matter the skill a player has for extracting the last bit of DPS or healing of his kits through cast optimization / buffs / synchronization or whatever, an encounter cannot be beaten. If a boss requires X amount of DPS to be applied within Y minutes, and the raid’s DPS team cannot deliver that minimal amount X, no matter how skilled they are, they will wipe. Once everyone is potted up to the max and the best buff combo has been used, if you’re still below that X number, the only choice is gearing up. Gear remains an important factor and the better the gear, the better the performance, the lower the risk of wiping and the lower the repair bills at the end. Let me hasten to add that synchronized execution is obviously also very important, but gear plays an important role as a facilitator – and the better the gear, the more room for less-than-perfect execution there is.

In PvP, the higher you get, the less gear become relevant – once your team is hovering at 1800-1900 ratings, everyone will be in the best gear available, and it becomes a mere affair of skill vs. skill. Below that, skill is also a predominant factor, as the rating system in itself will ensure that whatever team with the better combination of skill + gear goes up while the team with the lesser combination goes down (yes, this is my Obvious Post of the week). In order to compete at the best of your ability among your peers, arena just has to give new teams means to reach the gear cap as fast as possible. As this one raises every season, adding the S1 to honour rewards also ensures that the barrier of entry doesn’t become too high, because otherwise you would effectively create an elite cadre of people in S3 gear which can never be joined by a freshly minted team. S1 can be honour-farmed for throughout a character’s leveling career, so that you get a decent entry point as soon as you decide to start arena.

In order to compete at the highest level, a PvPer needs to ensure that he fights on equal terms with his opposition, in other words, at a level where all gear is equal and only skill matters anymore. Pre-TBC, the best gear in-game was available exclusively through PvE, something the competitive PvPers resented massively. If you don’t enjoy raiding, you shouldn’t have to raid in order to be competitive in PvP, that was the major gripe, and Blizzard obviously shares this reasoning nowadays. So the best kit for PvP is now attainable through PvP, and resilience ensures that PvP loot is more desirable for this than raid loot. Through itemization and stat allocation, the reverse is true as well: a full S3 + Vindicator’s set simply won’t allow you to contribute to a MH/BT /SWP raid in any meaningful manner (with a couple of exceptions as usual), because the kit will lack, among others, +hit to ensure your damage actually lands, relevant mana sustaining stats to ensure you can keep on casting or healing, and in general because there is no tanking kit available through PvP by design.

With perhaps the exception of the PvP trinket for Archimonde, no raider has to PvP to get access to the best PvE gear. And no PvPer should have to PvE to get access to the best PvP gear… except that there’s still the new badge trinkets which forces you to run instances or 10-men to get to the very last bit. The inequality is still in favour of PvE on that score.

Some will immediately object that for several classes, the best weapons are the S3 weapons. In an ironic twist of fate, these particular people will actually object that locking them away behind a 1850 rating forces them to engage into competitive arena in order to get them. And you know, that’s actually a valid complaint, but it has nothing to do with arena gear, and everything to do with poor PvE itemization. Let’s just state that since 1850 isn’t a rating you can attain casually, the S3 weapons are effectively to be considered unsuitable for PvE, and the itemization gripes should be brought up on the suggestions forum. This is a PvE problem, not an arena problem.

“Arena gear allows some people to skip T4 raiding content and jump straight into SSC / TE”. Wow. Basically, arena widens the recruitment pool and lessens the need for Tier-2 progression guilds to re-run Kara / Gruul to get new recruits from quest blues up to par with the rest of the raid, and diminishes all the drama tied to siphoning geared players off Tier-3 guilds trying to lift off Kara. More options for everyone and people are complaining about that? That’s on par with the people cheering when a class gets its healing capabilities nerfed. I think the term Terminal Idiocy applies here.

Now if I were a recruitment officer for a Tier-2 raiding guild, if I had two applicants, one of them in ZA or even Kara gear and one in S2 / S3 kit, I’d probably rather pick the former. The guy knows how to raid, has been there, his kit proves it. But if you have only an applicant who has part S2/S3 gear and part PvE gear (mainly whatever makes up for the itemization issues), would you turn him down? I’d take him on trial, and if he’s halfway decent in a raid setting, have him patch up his itemization gaps through the content my raid is currently clearing, instead of returning to content we have beaten several weeks ago.

How is that a bad thing? You don’t have to recruit an arena-clad player to your raids, but it can come in handy nonetheless.

Further, the way gear segregation has been set with TBC, you will have raiders who are actually interested in raiding, not PvPers who have to be there to get access to competitive gear and are hating every single second of it (and probably performing worse than a motivated raider).

“I can /dance in Arena all day long and will eventually get a full set of epics, whereas raiding has no guaranteed returns”. The part about /dancing is probably a new twist to the old “lose 10 games a week and end up in T5-equivalent” (now T6). I stand to my previous point on that matter, if that is a problem to you, you are just a loot whore. And another thing. I now have more than 180 rated games under my belt, and have been in Arena since July. I’ve dropped as low as 1323 rating and then gone up all the way to 1680, and started over twice at 1500. Not once have I seen that mythical dancer team. Arguably, 4 times the game was over for lack of an opposing team the moment the gates opened, and while loading issues have granted Steptoe and me automatic losses a couple of times too, that’s 2.2% of the games played where we might have faced a team AFKing its way to an epic. Or server issues. Every single other team has at least made a honest attempt at beating us.

I have explained above why the gear acquisition in PvP is appropriate for that particular setting. The fact that you can raid for months without seeing a specific drop is frustrating, but this is also, again, a limitation of PvE, not an indication that PvP loot acquisition is broken. A suggestion here is to extend the trend of adding tokens / badges to the whole instance loot. Allow for a trade-in to redeem tokens from lower raids to higher-end content. Make it so that a player needs 7-8 clears to get all the armor and the weapons he wants if you want to artificially stall progression so that the raiders don’t spend 40 weeks out of 52 crying for new content. To avoid the cheesing out factor of someone raiding Kara over and over again and eventually buying T6 by tokens without ever entering BT, put in a simple reputation check – one that you will cross the very second you have killed a boss in MH or BT (or in that specific case simply verify that they have completed the attunement if it makes more sense, haven’t looked into that specifically since I’ll never see the interior of top content other than on YouTube).

Some raiders have argued that a simpler solution would be to limit using PvP gear in arenas and BGs. This is silly, for several reasons. First of, most PvPers still have to do a certain amount of PvE, for instance because they need to pay for 300 riding skill to use that nifty mount they get if they’re a season’s top brass. Barring them from using the kit they actually worked their arse off to get is totally mean-spirited and vindicative, and will also force them back into your PvE groups. Unless you make it equal for everyone, of course: raid gear is only available in a raid instance. Imagine the cries on the o-boards if it came to that. But beyond that, how do you handle PvP servers?

And then you have players like me. I log on at 11pm server time and play for 2-3 hours per night. Mostly PvP because it fits my casual playstyle. But some evenings, my guild is in Kara, one of the healers has to leave while the rest of the team would be willing to push on. If nobody but me is around, currently I take my mix of PvE and arena kit and hop into the instance. I’m probably a liability compared to a full T4 healer, but compared to merely quest blues not so much. If you stash my gear away in BG, 9 other people stop raiding because there’s no other healer online.

I suspect there’s a vast amount of players who actually don’t just either hardcore raid or hardcore PvP, but do a bit of both. Locking us out and forcing us into just one activity will either make us quit, or, surprise surprise, deplete the pool of raiders even further. Because yes, raiders are complaining that with the arena, they find it harder and harder to get players to raid. Only thing is… if the vast majority of the playerbase would rather arena than raid, chances are that raiding isn’t actually fun for them. And this, again, is an issue with PvE, not with PvP.

Apologies to whoever got this twice through his feed reader, the first one had a little bit too many typos and, after re-reading it a couple of hours later, seemed worse off on grammar than what I usually slap together. I decided to remove and start over.

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