My rant on PvP gear.

One of my blogging heroes - the Big Bear Butt - had a rant about PvP gear a couple of weeks ago and while I don't completely disagree with him, I don't completely agree with him either.

Back in the day, I had an Alliance mage (Gifteye) who I got to Rank 10 for the blue PvP gear so that I wouldn't embarass myself when I went on raids with my new guild. Two days (not kidding, two days) after I got Rank 10, I got a Tier 2 helm from Onyxia. After a while, he started getting more and more and more PvE gear... To the point where I didn't even have any of the PvP gear any more. I'd go into a battleground with 7/8 Tier 2 and blast the horde to hell. One time, I got jumped by a Grand Marshall hunter in the Eastern Plaguelands and completely handed him his hat. Whenever I got jumped by a warrior, I'd school them. Get them down to about 5% health and sheep them until they healed to full (back when sheep didn't break after 10 seconds in PvP) and then polish them off... Just because I could. I'd pick a fight with anyone. I killed every undead of every level I saw. I killed each and every rogue I saw out in the wild. Why? Because I could. My gear was just that good and unless you were raiding, you couldn't compete. To get gear that good, you had to PvP 20 hours a day for months on end and get the High Warlord gear and even then there were probably only 60 or 70 horde with that kind of gear on the server... Hell, even the Grand Marshals in our guild ditched their PvP gear for raiding drops.

I'll say it... It was imbalanced. If I could polymorph you or hit you with a pyroblast-fireblast combo when you weren't expecting it, there was really nothing you could do. On a PvP server, things had to change.

And they did. It started with the release of the GM/HWL gear for honor points just before Burning Crusade. Then with BC came Gladiator gear. The first set was OK (but I missed most of that, I was leveling my horde druid during most of season one) but the second set... That was nice. I had saved some points from the first season (I started playing the last few weeks) and I was just starting to main tank for my guild for 5 mans. When I joined they were stuck on the second boss in Shadow Labyrinth. I got a smattering of instance drop blues and some quest rewards and had an OK tanking set. But I'd been using a set of green shoulders that +57 stamina and no other stats for... Ever, basically.

So I spent my first 1400 or so arena points on the Merciless Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders. After gems, I lost a little stamina, but I gained about 1000 armor (after the dire bear form multiplier), some dodge, crit, threat generation and crit immunity. Plus, I could justify getting one of the good shoulder enchants from the Scryers so I gained a little more crit immunity and even more dodge. Suddenly, I went from being a solid tank to a crit immune, hard to hit, damage mitigating, threat generating machine. Over the last few months, I've replaced every piece of gear two or three times... But not those. I still wear them and they're still awesome.

I ground out arena points for 5-6 weeks to get those. Now you can get them in 3 days of battlegrounds... Two if you happen to catch a couple of rainy days on an Alterac Valley weekend. And that gear is a LOT better than anything you can get out of Karazhan AND it's a lot more predictable. We have someone who has been waiting for the Shard of the Virtuous for months. He could PvP for two weeks and get something even better now. _I_ would prefer to do Karazhan because even though I have a nearly full set of PvP epics for all three of my horde toons, after a while, PvP gets boring. The Alliance zergs the horde base in AV and steamrolls the two mages who stayed back to defend for an instant win time after time after time. The horde taps the farm and then runs to wherever the fighting is and doesn't defend what they've captured in AB. The horde rushes to the middle to grab the flag (and all too frequently fail) while the Alliance sends 6 people to the Fel Reaver Ruins in EotS. Warriors (R 4 fite) running the flag in Warsong run headlong into the Alliance zerg (or run out the tunnel to find them waiting for us or just fight in the middle and don't try to grab their flag or return ours). I'm sick of the battlegrounds.

Here's _my_ problem with the PvP gear being so easily available: I can't get my guild to Karazhan because it's too hard. It's a committment of 3 hours to maybe down 5 bosses in Karazhan and maybe get to roll on something that isn't exactly an upgrade to something they "earned" through PvP or arenas. I have to find a night where 10 people are willing and available. PvP is something they can do on their own time and even 20 minutes a day will get you a noticeable return.

So... I don't have a problem with PvP gear being availble for non-raiders. PvP wouldn't be fun for everyone otherwise. I don't mind the demise of the old honor system with decaying points (I _did_ mind the first day when they opened the Officer's quarters up to everyone and some 12 year old kid playing a druid sat on the one vendor I wanted to buy something from and refused to move until someone asked him to move and said please. I swore at him for 20 minutes. Not kidding) because that was just insane. I'm surprised no one died of malnutrition or exhaustion trying to get to rank 14. What I do mind is that there's no incentive to raid. Hell... Even I really have no incentive to raid on my druid or my mage. They're both geared to the teeth. In fact, the druid has a great tanking set AND a great healing set. There aren't upgrades for either one of them until about Tier 6 and even those are nominal upgrades.

What's REALLY frustrating is that with all of these awesome PvP epics floating around the guild, we could steamroll Karazhan if we could just get people there.