Arena Points Alternative

I just picked up my relentless weapons last week. Our current goal is to push for a 2000 rating once we pick up more gear. We are happy with the amount of points that we are obtaining per week currently and are happy to be in the top 1000 teams in our battlegroup with our gear. All of us have obtained every piece of gear that we wanted short of our relentless main set pieces.

Now the waiting begins. Currently, to complete my relentless set (not including the t2 weapon), it will take 8500 arena points to buy that gear or 10 weeks at our current rating. Obviously at some point we’ll have to get 2000 and higher for the gear and that will cut down on some time. Overall, I’m still looking at at least six weeks of waiting for arena points to calculate. This amounts to very little time spent working on this during a week.

When you are used to grinding out honor for offset pieces and playing a bunch of arena games for practice every week, then you hit the arena point wall and suddenly have no reason to log on anymore. Our gear is not good enough to push for above 2k right now and we are not trying to farm anything else. I find myself logging on and working to get random achievements and doing other frivolous character development.

So what can be done to fix this? The ability of obtaining arena points faster is currently based on your team rating. In a lot of ways, this means the better geared the team, the faster they get points. This leaves new teams and new characters in the dust to wait for the gear so they can be competitive. The immediate solution would be to allow points to be given out faster than once a week.

Rated battlegrounds will help this a little bit but will also suffer from the same limitation. The limitation is there because obviously you don’t want someone to be able to get a full season of gear within the first week if they play enough. There is no accomplishment to that and it makes the gear trivial to most people.

I have thought about this quite a bit recently and can not think of a decent alternative to the current system. If anyone has a good idea, please let me know and definitely send your idea to blizzard.

“Raid” on SW

We randomly started to harass some Alliance players the other night. By “we” I mean 5 of us and by “some” I mean over 20 Alliance characters. There were at least 5 prot paladins, 2 prot warriors, and 3 DKs who showed up for the fray. We were able to push past the entrance and into the wall of SW, but were forced back out because of going OOM and the sheer amount of Alliance who were defending.

Overall it was a blast and I was reminded about the nature and mindset that a lot of WoW players have. It doesn’t seem to matter how bad you outnumber the opponent or how many times they killed you, you must show your superiority when you get that one kill on them. Our group makeup was double rogue, mage, resto druid, and me (disc priest). We were able to pull off over 60 hk’s before one of us was killed because of the chain stuns/silences from the prot paladins. Immediately, the paladin dropped a flag of ownership on Darafeln’s corpse.

It was pretty funny that the paladin left the scene feeling victorious over us even after we killed him multiple times and dozens of his friends. Notice how this is a common theme in WoW. Watch how other players will brag about their skill or superiority no matter how much of a lie it is.

TBC vs WotLK

Patch 3.3 will introduce the final raid content of this expansion pack. In Ice Crown Citadel, we will most likely fight the Lich King. Looking at the games current state in PvE and looking back to TBC and vanilla, does ICC and the Lich King seem as epic of an achievement as Illidan or bosses like Twin Emporers in AQ40?

I just don’t get that feeling like I did in TBC where the final boss of the expansion was only really killable by the best raiding guilds on your server. It wasn’t just anyone who strolled into the Black Temple and killed Illidan. It was even an attitude that if you didn’t have Illidan on farm status, your guild was a joke.

I think that some of that attitude will remain, but overall the “hardcore” side of the game is dying out. I don’t think Blizzard is to blame for this. I get the feeling that the current player base is getting more casual every month and Blizzard is just accommodating for the largest common denominator. I kind of miss those times where the hardcore were somewhat a resemblance of the word instead of the current state where it is equally conceivable to say “I’m hardcore at Candyland”.

I feel that PvP has gotten more hardcore with the age of the game and PvE has tapered off. PvP still is challenging and refreshing to me where as there are very few bosses that really would challenge me as a player.

I am excited for Cataclysm because of going back to vanilla areas. I just hope that the old feeling is not gone by the time I get there.