Project Lore

A new season of PvP is upon us! Along with all the great new armor for arena players, there is a lot of gear you can get without ever stepping foot into the arena. The entire Deadly Gladiator set is available for honor only, and many pieces can be attained in the Vault of Archavon. The chart below should be a handy reference for what pieces you can pick up. Its sorted first by rating required, with the first dozen or so not requiring any rating. This means you can get them from just doing battlegrounds. The "honor required" and "arena required" columns are non-exclusive; that is, a piece with an entry in both columns means that you must pay both the honor and arena points cost. For some pieces, you have a choice as to whether to use just honor or honor and arena points. Those options are listed in the "option two" columns. The VoA column shows the pieces that drop in the Vault of Archavon, with E25 standing for 25-man Emalon, K10 standing for Koralon 10-man, and K25 standing for Koralon 25-man.

Item	Rating Required	Honor Required	Arena Required	VoA	Option Two: Honor	Option Two: Arena
Deadly Gladiator's Idol/Libram/etc	0	15300	0
Deadly Gladiator's Gloves	0	31600	0		7200	200
Furious Gladiator's Wrists	0	31600	0	E25/K10
Deadly Gladiator's Shoulders	0	31600	0		9600	275
Furious Gladiator's Necklace	0	38000	0	E25/K10
Furious Gladiator's Rings	0	38000	0	E25/K10
Furious Gladiator's Cloak	0	38000	0	E25/K10
Deadly Gladiator's Legs	0	49600	0		12000	350
Deadly Gladiator's Tunic	0	49600	0		12000	350
Deadly Gladiator's Helm	0	49600	0		12000	350
Furious Gladiator's Belt	0	49600	0	E25/K10
Furious Gladiator's Boots	0	49600	0	E25/K10
Furious Gladiator's PvP Trinket	0	49600	0
Furious Gladiator's Idol/Libram/etc	700	6400	350
Furious Gladiator's Gloves	800	7200	400	E25/K10
Furious Gladiator's Legs	900	12000	700	E25/K10
Furious Gladiator's Tunic	1000	12000	700
Furious Gladiator's Helm	1100	12000	700
Relentless Gladiator's Wrists	1200	39400	0	K25
Relentless Gladiator's Belt	1250	62000	0	K25
Relentless Gladiator's Boots	1300	62000	0	K25
Furious Gladiator's Shoulders	1350	9600	550
Relentless Gladiator's Gloves	1400	0	1300	K25
Relentless Gladiator's Neck	1450	47400	0	K25
Relentless Gladiator's Rings	1500	47400	0	K25
Relentless Gladiator's Legs	1550	0	2150	K25
Relentless Gladiator's Tunic	1600	0	2150
Relentless Gladiator's Battlemaster Trinket	1650	62000	0
Relentless Gladiator's Cloak	1750	47400	0	K25
Relentless Gladiator's Weapons/OH/Wands (Tier 1)	1800	15000+	1100+
Relentless Gladiator's Helm	1900	0	2150
Relentless Gladiator's Shoulders	2000	0	1750
Relentless Gladiator's Weapons/OH/Wands (Tier 2)	2200	0	1245+
Relentless Gladiator's Tabard	2350	0	500

What are you going for this season?

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Anub'arak is not pleased

In what may or may not be a grand coincidence, there are going to be major PvE and PvP occurrences after this weeks server resets on Tuesday. The final boss of Trial of the Crusader (ToC), Anub'arak, will be available to fight, allowing players to unlock the Heroic difficulty setting for the raid. In addition, the seventh season of the Arena will be starting, handing out Frost Wyrms and titles to the most skilled combatants and bringing in a new tier of PvP gear. The events were likely made to coincide to avoid what happened with previous seasons, where it was easier to gear up in raids than it was to in PvP and players played in PvE gear. For those unaware, Trial of the Crusader comes in 10 man and 25 man versions. Each week since patch 3.2 launched, a new encounter has been added, and Anub'arak will be the fifth. If at least one player in the raid has completed either the 10 or 25 player versions, their raid can enter the Trial of the Grand Crusader by setting the raid difficulty to heroic. It is unknown if the bosses are any different at this point in this mode, but I imagine that they must be much harder than their regular versions. The raid will have 50 attempts to clear the instance, that is, if the raid wipes more than 50 times, they are locked out of the instance. If the raid can complete the instance without wiping too many times, they will get a chest with loot that is better the less that they wiped. Its a new take on the Undying style of achievement. In addition, because Season 7 is starting, Koralon the Flame Watcher will be spawned in the Vault of Archavon to drop some Season 7 loot. The loot table is not yet confirmed. In addition, the achievement Earth, Wind, and Fire will now be obtainable. I've been thinking about different strategies for this, and I'm still not sure on how it could be possible, especially on 10 man. We will have more details on this on Tuesday. We may see a minor patch on Tuesday in case some of these things were not implemented in the very early patch 3.2, and we may even see patch 3.2.2 live on Tuesday.

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The PTR datafiles have once again been mined in order to give us a preview of what the newest Arena season has to offer. MMO-Champion has posted screenshots of the latest armor sets available to the top Arena competitors next season, and I have to say, most of it is pretty good looking. In fact, I have no issues with any of the sets except one. The Shaman set has to be one of the ugliest sets I've ever seen. My only hope is that there are some changes coming up for the colors, at the very least. It could be that I am just overly critical of Blizzard's decisions that affect my class, but in my opinion every other class has a nice evolution from the Season 5 and 6 sets with decent looking gear that generally fits the overall feel of the class. I can't say the same about the Shaman set. Blizzard's design philosophy behind arena gear in Wrath of the Lich has been less flashy gear that has been made by the top crafters that gets better as the seasons progress. While the shaman set certainly didn't start out pretty, it seems to be getting worse. Take a look at all of the sets over on MMO-Champion, I'd love to hear if other players (shaman and non-shaman alike) think I'm just being too particular about gear that I probably will never get - especially the helmet and shoulders.

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Wintergrasp barely got a mention in the first draft of the patch 3.2 notes, but the outdoor PvP zone will in fact see some major changes in the new patch. The updated patch notes show the following changes: To provide players with a more transparent notification of when Wintergrasp battles occur, as well as better control zone population and stability, several changes have been made.

• Players now have the option to queue for Wintergrasp from a Battlemaster in any capital city or by simply entering the Wintergrasp zone.
• Queuing will begin 15 minutes before each battle. If chosen, you will automatically be teleported to the zone. Any players in the zone who have not been chosen from the queue will be teleported out when the battle begins.
• The queue system remains active for the entire battle. As soon as a player leaves, a new one will be chosen from the queue.
• Trying to enter Wintergrasp during an active battle for which you have not been chosen will teleport you out. Please note that, as you are now able to fly over Wintergrasp, you will only be teleported out if you try to land and join the battle.
• Level 80 players get higher priority in the queue than lower level players. In addition, a random selection of queued players will be taken from both the Battlemasters and the zone itself.
• The queue will accept up to 100 players from each faction, resulting in a maximum battle of 200 players at a time.

There are several major implications of these changes. First and most obviously, servers with a large discrepancies in faction populations should have more balanced fights. Blizzard's original strategy to combat population imbalances in Wintergrasp was to adjust the Tenacity buff, but even with 20 Tenacity stacks, the server-side and client-side lag made gameplay difficult, and CC spells like stuns overwhelmed the underdogs. Tenacity is (presumably) not going well, and I think the mechanic will remain useful and should be expanded to Battlegrounds. One hundred players on each side is still a huge number; that's two and a half raids on each side if the battle is full. Horde players on the Proudmoore sever occasionally need a second raid, but I doubt we often break 100. The Alliance, on the other hand, well outnumber us, and getting capped at 100 will increase the Horde's chance of victory significantly. Most Horde players on Proudmoore don't even try to defend Wintergrasp as the Alliance almost always captures it. Since 3.1, Archavon's Log reports that the Horde has defended Wintergrasp 7 times and captured it 303 times, while the Alliance has defended 673 times and captured it 302 times. This is almost certainly a product of sheer numbers in this case. It is unclear if the queue will try to put players in at the same rate between factions; that is, in battles where only 20 players of one faction show up, the other faction's numbers will be limited. I've never played Wintergrasp on a low population server, but I imagine if they implement this change, it will be well appreciated. Gear checks, like the ones used in Battleground queues, could also be implemented to ensure that the factions have similar numbers of well geared and not-so-well geared players. They already select against lower level players, and they have the infrastructure to do gear selection from their Battleground code anyway. I think this could be valuable as well; Battlegrounds with similarly geared players is more fun, and they already showing wants to match similiar players in PvP, such as matching twinks with twinks. Another major implication is where players will be when Wintergrasp is starting. You can almost always see people huddling around where the portal will open before attacking Wintergrasp. Now, those players can queue, go do other things, then get ported to Wintergrasp when it starts. This will be especially handy for Battlegrounds, especially if you are on a server that is likely to have a wait to get into Wintergrasp. It will be interesting to see where players who aren't queued get teleport to if they attempt to enter Wintergrasp; perhaps they will get a debuff warning like when you fly into a no fly zone then sent to Dalaran near the Wintergrasp portal. Its a sort of a reinstatement of "ghetto hearth", where you get a free "teleport". I wouldn't be surprised if these "Battlemasters" become queues like the battlegrounds and you are returned to where you entered from after the battle. Additionally, with the teleport in place for the start of the battle, where will it place players? Its very strategically valuable to get positioned at a Workshop before the battle starts to capture it or start churning out vehicles. There are many unanswered questions, and I'm sure we'll hear more once the PTR is up. Are these changes necessary to balance Wintergrasp, or is capping it taking away from its original purpose? Will you be angry if you are doing your fishing daily and get kicked out of Wintergrasp?

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Patch 3.2 is bringing sweeping changes to all sorts of PvP. Blizzard has been trying to push arenas to give WoW an "e-sport" status, perhaps hoping to follow their Starcraft model for longevity. As such, patch 3.2 is bringing major changes to PvP to extend the meta-game of arenas, notably hitting the issues that Ghostcrawler outlined. The first major change to note is the resilience mechanic. Resilience's major selling point has been reducing the chance that the player will be critically hit and reducing the damage players receive from critical strikes. Its lesser benefits include reducing the effect of mana-drains and the damage done by DoTs. Now, instead of only applying to DoTs, the damage mitigation applies to all damage done by players. This is a huge buff to resilience. Most players don't even notice a survivability difference from having resilience until they are at at least 500 resilience, and don't even think you will be effective unless you have at least 800 in this season. However, with all the stats you have to "sacrifice" by using PvP gear instead of PvE gear, many players go into arenas with tier 8 and clean house by bursting down the other teams with no problem. With this resilience change, Blizzard doesn't have to worry so much about itemizing resilience to take less of an item's allocated stats. Players will see much higher returns from resilience much earlier on, and resilience will become much more valuable in arenas, to the point of trumping every other stat. Expect price hikes on resilience gems! Another implication of this is higher survivability overall. Its a subtle nerf to RMP (rogue/mage/priest) in 3v3 as well as as cleave teams (teams that focus on damage rather than survivability). RMP has dominated the 3v3 bracket for quite awhile now and its hardest matchup has been defensive teams with good survivability. The viability of cleave and RMP teams is going to tank, and it its viability is always going to fluctuate proportionally to the survivability vs. damage trade-off. The second huge change to arenas is the change to the 2v2 bracket. The new tier of gladiator gear will require ratings in either 3v3 or 5v5, not 2v2. Your 2v2 rating can still be used to purchase furious gladiator stuff going into season 7, but if you can break 1500, you are going to need a 3v3 or 5v5 to get the new gear. Casual arena players who can't break 1500 won't care, but 2200+ players that have all of the furious gladiator gear already probably won't bother too much with 2v2. For those players or those who can play 3v3 or 5v5 as well as 2v2, the only reason to 2v2 is if their 3v3 and 5v5 can't net them things like the Gladiator title and Frost Wyrm. With less serious competition in the 2v2 bracket, I predict that 2v2 ratings will be easier to get in season 7, and arenas will continue to be more accessible. Blizzard has been trying very hard to push 3v3 and 5v5 since everyone is so concerned with 2v2, such as with the 3v3 and 5v5 rating buffs. Its difficult enough to balance classes to work in both PvP and PvE, let alone battlegrounds, 2v2, and the larger arena teams. This officially gives them an alibi to not have to balance 2v2 as carefully and make some sacrifices to 2v2 balance in order to ensure that the top tier of players playing in 3v3 and 5v5 have the best experience possible. The maps have also gotten some tweaks. The two new arenas in Wrath have been considered to be terrible, gimmicky, buggy, and random by the majority of the player base. They are even disabled for some tournament play. Dalaran sewers is getting a little bit of love. Its getting 25% bigger and the LoSing (line of sight-ing) on the crates is being adjusted. Mounts are also now usable in this arena. This gives this map more room to breathe and a better mechanic for LoSing instead of those tiny crates that are too close to the edge. Ruins of Lordaeron has had some terrain issues fixed with the tomb in the middle, and a couple of gravestones have been added for LoSing, while the starting alcoves have been removed (I wonder where players start after this change...). Finally, lets not forget the profession changes. Alchemy has a whole new mechanic and all the professions are getting buffed. Is this the best patch for arenas yet, or could you care less?

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