Season 5 Has Arrived
Yesterday saw the launch of the much anticipated fifth season of Arena play. With it comes three new tiers of gear and a pricing system a lot of people appear to be having a hard time coming to grips with. I’m going to ramble on here about this new season from the perspective of a hunter with just over 16,500 honorable kills who is totally unamused by Arenas and refuses to participate in them.
Mandatory Arena Play
The major armor sets that are worth a damn all require arena ratings this time around. You can buy entire sets of Savage Gladiator gear for honor only but realize two things: the price is about 5x as high if you go the “honor only” route and, quite frankly, the gear sucks.
Anyone looking to be competitive in PvP is going to need to form an Arena team and earn their Hateful Gladiator and/or Deadly Gladiator sets with a combination of honor, Arena points and Arena Ratings.
Casual PvP
I’m a casual PvP player in the sense that I only participate in battlegrounds. The main reason for this is that I’ve never had an equally leveled friend to form an Arena team with. The other reason is that a hunter in the Arena is basically a useless force meant only to boost the Ratings of other teams using the “right” classes.
With Season 5, the final nail in my casual PvP coffin appears to have been driven. While some of the higher tiered gear can be bought with honor alone the major pieces are just out of reach for a player in my position. That’s unfortunate but it’s just a fact of life I have to deal with as someone who abhors the idea of Arenas.
It’s Not All Doom and Gloom Though
Of course, even as a BG only player there are still pieces of PvP gear I can buy. Yesterday, after the maintenance was over, I hopped on and picked up the Hateful Gladiator’s Sabatons of Triumph and the Hateful Gladiator’s Cloak of Victory as both seemed like quality upgrades over the crafted gear I was wearing in those slots. I was honor capped at 75,000 and I still ended up having to blow through most of my extra badges to get enough honor to buy both of those pieces.
Moving Forward
There are a few more pieces of honor only gear I might pick up if I don’t start seeing some better luck in Heroic drops but for now I have no motivation to continue playing BGs. That’s really a shame because it was one of my favorite activities when I was at the level 70 cap.
It looks like I’ll be sitting this season out for now. Maybe when season six rolls round they’ll either change this mandatory Arena policy or the current gear that requires Arena participation will be lowered to honor only. We’ll all have to wait and see.
Related posts:
AllianceGirl on December 31st, 2008
I stumbled across your blog and wanted to thank you for this post! I am also an avid BG’er, but an anti-arena player. I play on a server that isn’t in my timezone and don’t get to participate in a lot of raiding or pick up groups to get gear and the Battleground gear was always an option for me to gear myself up and then still be able to compete on DPS with the PVE geared folks when I managed to be home in time for a raid. I really don’t want to be forced to do arenas. :/