rusttle wrote:
I hate to say it (as I'm bouncing off the walls trying to find a decent weapon set for my pvp toon) but it's actually pretty reasonable locking the pvp weapons the way they do.
PVP gear is called welfare epics for a reason - it takes almost no effort to get it. Even the current 251 arena sets are relatively easy to get - do a 2m arena 10 times a week (40m total time if you hit it during peak hours) and you get what, around 240ish honor if you loose all 10 fights? So do that for two weeks and then win a BG once a day for the bonus 25 points and you've got enough arena and regular honor to buy any 251 armor piece you want. Fill in the rest of your slots with the 264 non-rated pieces on the PVP vendors in the capital cities and you've got yourself a dangerous PVP toon in no time.
Now imagine if it was that easy to score a 251 weapon as well?
Getting a 251 weapon isn't just easy, it is trivial, if you raid.
And raiding Marrowgar in 10 normal which drops a 251 weapon is easy enough that it can be done with an AFK offtank in the encounter.
I did put 1 char of mine in PvE for this reason. I find PvE gear to be far easier to obtain than PvP gear with the exception of RNG gripes.
Comparing...
Getting into ilvl 232... PvP side you have to go into battlegrounds where everyone outgears you and just destroys you from just staring at you, even if you have 8 times their skill.
PvE side you go into dungeons, where many of the people you team with will outgear you so much you pretty much get carried by them even if you have 8 times their skill. The supereasy to farm emblems of Triumph also give you access to 245 gear.
Getting into 251... PvP side you can get some from arena, and some from daily bgs, if you're constantly losing it will take what? 2 weeks per piece? for a 5 piece set. -still no weapon-
PvE side you're looking at Frost Emblems you get from 5-man heroics so brutally easy it's scandalous. In addition you get more from the weekly raid which is also very very trivial. The frost emblems give you access to the 5-piece set of PvE gear in addition to ilvl 264 trinket, chest, glove, belt, cloak. -still no weapon-
PvE side if you're getting just a little little bit braver, not by much, you can do ICC10 normal. Any mismatched PuG will full clear the first hall. Bosses are supereasy to kill and drop 251 gear including weapons. If you only farm it for a bit you're into gear to start farming the 25-man version which isn't any harder than the 10-man version.
Getting into 264... If you're doing both 25-man and 10-man version of only the first hall + heroic daily + raid weekly you'll be getting frost emblems at a rate so fast that you get the 251 pve gear much much faster than by doing arena points with a losing "points team". And the 25-man version will drop ilvl 264 gear and weapons. Even from the very first boss.
In addition, if you're progressing into PvE you'll find that there's crafted ilvl 264 gear to really give yourself quite a boost up there and there isn't any crafted ilvl 264 resil gear.
The ilvl 264 gear you can get from honor and from not winning is cloak, bracer and trinket slots. The trinket being the mandatory PvP trinket for removing movement impairing effects.
Finally, when you're looking at how gear performs you have to look at the content it is intended for. When you're engaging into your entriest entry level of PvP your looking at average opponents in average gear ilvl 245 who will totally destroy you, you don't get content that is friendly to you having less gear than that. 245 is entry level for BG. 251 is entry level for Arena.
When engaging into your entriest entry level of PvE you're seeing 5-man heroics that you can very comfortably do with average gear ilvl below 200 but you involuntarily get teammates in ICC gear which is like getting level 90 teammates for level 80 dungeons. For ICC-10 normal first hall pugs 245 is outgearing the place, and 251 is outgearing the 25-man version.
And they can't be Welfare Epics because they aren't Epics at all, they are
entry level gear.
Edited, Sep 18th 2010 2:03am by xorq