Your target is Dead

Unfortunately there will be some changes to the Season 4 Epic rewards as you can read here on wow-insider.

The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:

Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none

This is bad news for everybody who doesn’t play with a cookie cutter setup, or who just isn’t very good as pvp. Teams below 1550 rating (the majority I would think) won’t get any rewards. This will probably change the Arena landscape, as I assume a lot of people will just not bother anymore with Arena. And this will leave the hardcore pvpers battling it out amongst themselves, and they might be struggling to get a decent rating.

Has Blizzard thought this through ? You would think so. I really wonder what the mindset it of the people that come up with this stuff…

Nice discussion on Tobold’s blog

Keep your esport out of battlegrounds

Usually we have an Arena Night once a week. My balance druid Morpheus plays with a hunter and a mage. I started out with the hunter Ruryk as a duo at the start of Season 3. He was still in quest blue and greens and I had a few S1 pieces and some blues. And it was quite an experience ! Totally different from the pvp we were used to and needless to say we went 1-9 in the first week and seriously doubted we should continue. Luckily we found a friendly mage who wanted to join us (and our guild) and started 3×3 saving the 2×2 for practise.

We formed a 5×5 team last week, when a hunter and a warrior joined our guild. Unfortunately that left us with no healer, which is a disaster in 5×5. Ruryk’s priest alt in Kara gear then joined us, which made it a little more bearable, but we still went 2-8. This week however there wasn’t a moment all 5 were online, so we did two nights of 3×3 with mixed results. We had a very nice winning streak and finally got above 1400 rating, then lost a bunch in a row and we’re back to 1376.

At this rate we gather about 280 pts a week, and the nice gear is about 1800 pts. Some stuff is cheaper, like the gloves (and the hunter’s axe ;)), but still it takes about 6 - 8 weeks for a not so great arena team to get an Arena epic. Not that I am complaining though, but the term wellfare epic is, in my opinion a bit misplaced ;).