I am a raider. I enjoy PvP as a diversion every now and then, but aside from the random forays into AV or WG, I mostly stay away from that aspect of the game. I personally find it repetitive and boring but again, that’s me. It’s not that I’m bad at PvP or that I lack the skills to take out other skilled players (as many of the pro-PvP epics people tend to claim); it’s just that the PvP aspect of the game doesn’t interest me very much. To each his (or her) own.

Anyway, I don’t have any problem with people being able to purchase epic gear with their honor/arena points. Besides, epic just means that they’ve colored the item name purple. It’s what the player does with the gear that’s important. Why should I care if someone who bought his/her rating is decked out in purple arena gear? From my point of view, I will rarely interact with that person outside of the PvP setting, and even if I do, the good gear doesn’t make the person a good player. All that extra resilience just means I’ll have to take a few more seconds out of my time to kill him/her. No biggie. And in all likelihood, a player who buys his/her epics with ill-gotten arena points is going to be little use in a raid anyway (which is what I spend most of my WoW time doing in the first place).

So what’s the big deal, then?

I think the main issue is that raiders feel like players who aren’t putting in the real time and effort are being handed gear that they didn’t work for. This is not the case. All the purple arena gear in the world doesn’t make up for a lack of raiding experience. Likewise, all the Tier 6 gear in the world isn’t going to earn you an 1800+ arena rating. I have yet to see a person epic’d out in arena gear jump into raiding and start downing bosses in Black Temple. I have also yet to see the top raiders in the game just jump into arena and start pwning everyone in sight. Both aspects of the game take separate sets of skills that take time and practice to develop.

My only qualms with the new PvP gear are these:

1. I am annoyed with Blizzard’s laziness in just reskinning the tiered gear as arena gear. Speaking from a warlock’s perspective, the T6 helm is (in my opinion) one of the coolest looking and most unique pieces of gear in the game. I can speak for a lot of locks when I say that this one piece of gear was a big goal in raiding for a lot of players. The day after S3 gear came out the number of warlocks running around my server with horns and demon wings easily quadrupled. For me, this was very disappointing. I could care less about the stats of the S3 helm. I just wish that Blizzard had taken a bit of time to design NEW gear for the arena rewards. This gear could look equally as unique and cool, but it would not look the SAME as gear that some players have been spending many, many months of their time working to get. Besides, with new designs for the new gear, we’d have two separate sets of gear that each represent their own levels of prestige in their representative aspects of the game.

2. Some of the new pieces of gear are a bit “overtuned” in terms of their quality as raid gear. That is, they work better in raids than much or all of the gear currently out there. This issue, i believe, is simply a matter of Blizzard working hard to take the PvP player’s experience to a new level while not taking their current raiding situation into account. No biggie, as obtaining said gear as a serious raider still requires a fairly sizable chunk of time taken out of an already busy raiding schedule. For those people that are really going to put it to its maximum raid use, the extra time and effort will be well worth it. And again, who cares if the “welfare” people get ahold of it and try to raid? Odds are they’re not going to be able to use it to its full potential anyway. Maximizing burst damage and PvP survivability is a much different skill than maximizing DPS and situational (read: boss encounter) mobility.

So anyway, yeah… the point is that Blizzard shouldn’t have just copied the visuals of the old gear. Lazy bastards.