RIP Elite Sets

[Krusza]

I got happy when I read about them thinking about making it obtainable again, thought not shocked when they didn't go trough with it. I'm sad I can't collect all the sets now, but that is as far as my emotions go. Life goes on, I just wish they then made ALL gear exclusive to that particular season/expansion. It would up the game about collecting current tiers/mounts/pets, because you can't go back and get them.
But imagine the shitfest of crying that would cause, if they did the same thing to PvE gear, that they do to PvP gear.

Yes and so do I, that was my point I wanted you to find out for yourself that I've made clear many times.

I do not want PvE GEAR to be exclusive, because that is an entirely different thing to elite gear. Elite gear, as a cosmetic reward, is comparable to the the titles and mounts that each raid has. I think those PvE cosmetics should be made exclusive to every tier, it's a shame to see something like "Twilight Vanquisher" or "Kingslayer" become a stereotypical scrub title.

If they did it now, I think you'd see the same thing as this. The more hardcore players would advocate for titles and mounts being exclusive and the more casual players would oppose it.

The difference is that while only a small percentage of the playerbase is able to buy elite gear, pretty much anyone can clear normal raiding content which would have a different title from mythic.

[Redecle]

I don't get your desire for making old rewards worthless by reintroducing them. Wouldn't new rewards be better?

Why do you want recolours of old sets so badly?

If I may answer to that in a word, transmog.
But it's not just that simple, i can see you are passionate about the pvp aspect in the game, as some others are about the pve aspect.
So think about being in the shoes of someone who puts that same passion to transmogs, they don't give a duck about pvp in the game or bragging rights or earning shit and respect, they don't give a damn about ahead of curve raiding, they are here pretty much solely to make transmogs. Not just to wear ready full sets, but to combine different parts of different sets to create their own and this is where the recolors come quite handy. Well actually pretty much the life line. There's an unspoken rule that in order to make your own set, you cannot have more than 2 pieces of an already existing set.

There's actually a third group of people in this game aside from the pvp and pve crowd, a group that seems long forgotten by the others and even the devs (cause well on top of the sandbox world to live in, the last update this group got was the transmog system), this group is the roleplayers. This being an mmorpg after all, it must be shocking that someone is only here to play dress up. For that transmog is one of the better tools in the game. I'm sure most people think that's the stuff that happens in Goldshire inn, but to be honest what happens there has nothing to do with rp.

Anyway this is actually coming from a guy who wore level 60 gear or actually it was level 50 back then at level 80 cause it looked better suited for the characters features than new gear did at those times (cause stats and ilvl had zero meaning), or when i wanted to try out some raiding in TBC and intentionally wore nothing put pvp gear cause it looked way better than the pve gear did, obviously the raiding didn't go that well, but hey at least the character looked good, which was all that mattered. Currently that doesn't matter anymore cause you can wear almost anything you like and have reasonable stats if you end up fiddling with pve or pvp sometime.

[Coconut]

Yes and so do I, that was my point I wanted you to find out for yourself that I've made clear many times.

I do not want PvE GEAR to be exclusive, because that is an entirely different thing to elite gear. Elite gear, as a cosmetic reward, is comparable to the the titles and mounts that each raid has. I think those PvE cosmetics should be made exclusive to every tier, it's a shame to see something like "Twilight Vanquisher" or "Kingslayer" become a stereotypical scrub title.

Cosmetics such as armors, weapons and mounts take a lot of time to create, especially when they are completely unique. They are an investment on Blizzard's part to keep people playing. Keeping them in game is the intelligent choice.

On one hand because the same asset they spent resources creating serves as incentive to all types of gameplay along the way: organized raiding, casual play for skilled players who are first to solo or 2-3 man a boss, and finally a farming piniata for the masses. Nothing goes to waste, nobody can complain that content wasn't made for them.

On the other hand, the fact that the old elite rewards eventually become super accessible, like Ashes, Invincible, etc., is pushing competitive players to run the latest content instead of resting on their laurels once they beat a tier and get something unique. The message is clear, Invincible doesn't matter anymore, go get a Hellfire Infernal if you're that good.

The final benefit (possibly most important) is that the older the game gets, the more options you have to cosmetically customize your characters. This actually encourages people to make alts and farm sets, weapons and mounts that make them look exactly like they want to look. It's a goldmine when it comes to driving people to play.

Titles are less of a development investment, but it's still very easy to run out of cool titles. "Kingslayer" is cool, "Defender of a Shattered World", though? "Liberator of Orgrimmar"? Meh.


@ Redecle

There's also the Collectors, who want to own transmog pieces and especially mounts just for the hell of it and the thrill of the hunt. Every time I hear someone says "it's just a mount" or "it's just cosmetic" I know they are clueless...

[Deleted]

-snip-


No one can seem to form a relevant analogy in this thread. You can't compare a school lunch to something you were exclusively rewarded.

Wait what....

I and several others have explained why many times before with decent analogies comparing it with mythic, a high end piece of content in the SAME game.

You even stated you were ok with recolors being released (page or two back), which means you are already ok with ppl having the same gear, it just cant be the exact same (special snowflake alert!)

[Coconut]

Krassz, let me ask you something, what would you do to increase participation in PvP? Most importantly, how would you motivate inexperienced players to set out on the road to becoming decent?

[Coconut]

I have a couple of endboss hc mounts that used to be 100 % and I haven't used them once since they made them wellfare. Stay bad and complain how "hard" mythic pve is, you entitled spoiled brat.

What stops you from never using the Elite sets again once they become widespread? Can't you just get the latest one?

- - - Updated - - -

Seems like a really good solution to me, but the pve casuals would crash the forums with their salty rivers.

In other words, why would the pve casuals play the game? Why subscribe?

You seem to think being good at the game entitles you to everything the Blizzard art team makes, but you have to realized they're in the business of attracting customers, not designing challenges for entitled brats and rewarding them for winning.

[Drusin]

First thought: "who cares" (Can't say that will get infracted.)

*Infraction proof activated*

I don't believe that this will devalue the effort put in by pvpers when it was current and as such see no issue with it nor do I believe others should have an issue with it.

*infraction proof deactivated*

[Coconut]

Those were good times. PvP gear was gated behind rating and it was often rather good in PvE. You know why it got fucked up? Because spoiled entitled millenials started crying how they can't get gear because 1600 was too hard and it was unfair.

And that's also when Elite gear was introduced, because spoiled entitled snowflakes wanted to feel special for playing a game.

[Coconut]

My take on it is that the casual entitled pve millenials cried rivers and fucked up pve. Old pve= shit. Good enough anwer?

People not wanting to pay 15$ a month to play peasants to your lord and having the self-respect to tell Blizzard that they should benefit from the company's development time as well if they are to keep paying for the service is what you call "casual entitled pve millenials"? Get a fracking grip.

The only problem with PvP is that it never got the memo that it needs to engage the casuals as well if it wants to stay relevant, and now is slowly dying. Every season, lower participation, every season the same reasons: wall to hard to climb, not worth it, toxic community.

[Noxina]

My take on it is that the casual entitled pve millenials cried rivers and fucked up pve. Old pve= shit. Good enough anwer?

And how exactly did your "millenials" fuck up PvE? By making it accessible to everyone? That is just great. It should be. How it was back in Vanilla and TBC was awefull, only selected few got to see all the content. Same thing with PvP now, not many get a chance at Elite sets, it takes more skill than the average Joe got, and if Blizzard had made this change live, it would be exactly how it is now - not many getting the sets.

Those of you who are defending the Elite sets, seems to believe everyone and their damn grandmother can get to 2.2k rating. They can't. Most of the PvPers are stuck in 1.5k-1.8k rating, adding ALL the Elite Sets to the price of reaching 2.2k would only increase the lust to get there. In worst cases you elitist pricks who think you are so godly, would earn some quick gold by boosting "entitled pve millenials" to 2.2k so they can collect their Transmog pieces.

Geez, I don't understand why you need to have these sets so damn exclusive. They aren't that special, same as Mythic gear isn't that special, or even CM weapons/gear are special. I hate the fact that Blizzard puts time into creating content, then removes it after some time. I honestly just don't see the reason to put in hours of work into something, to just remove it.

Fuck it, add a 2.4k rating needed to obtain them, just let us have a damn chance at it. They did with the old GM/HW gear and RBG. I'm not crying over that, even though suddenly everyone could wear the same transmogs that I had obtained back in Vanilla. I find it amazing that others get a shot at obtaining it.

PvP just doesn't award enough for the effort it takes. Which is the reason it is slowly dying every season. More now with Legion, when all gear being damn RNG.

[Krusza]

Krassz, let me ask you something, what would you do to increase participation in PvP? Most importantly, how would you motivate inexperienced players to set out on the road to becoming decent?

Well, participation is low for mainly one reason: poor gameplay. The gameplay has been dumbed down progressively since after cataclysm and it's still following that trend. Gameplay is not fun or engaging anymore.

Another reason is that the community is too closed. It's incredibly hard to find partners that will stick around, especially for a new player. I remember spending all day every day my first season playing trying to look for people to play with. That's part of the problem, many people want to play but simply don't have the partners. Once you get to higher rating, it's even harder to find people unless you are actively playing. If you skip a few seasons, you will have a very hard time finding people.

These issues are mainly community issues and cannot be tackled by Blizzard, at least not easily. One issue with the community that CAN be fixed by Blizzard though is the wintrading, cheating and boosting. The RBG ladder since WoD has literally been filled to the brim with kickbotters, flyhackers, ddosers and the like. What's the point in playing when these issues went out of control for quite a long time during WoD? It even happened in arena, hence the two or three banwaves that went out.

Those things are mainly affecting people who have played PvP for a long time and are not currently playing anymore, though. Those are the issues that made people quit.

But about bringing new players in? Let's look at the current rewards system:

What's good about the current reward system is that there are tiers so pretty much anyone can get a reward. When I first started PvPing, the only thing I hoped to get was the 300 wins Brute Force tabard.

There are now 6 vicious mounts to get from just purely playing arena, no rating required. These work quite well as far as I can see, because I see a lot of people in premade finder looking for a team to just farm the mount.

The RBG system works really well because it actually gives you a feeling of progression using actual rank names, and they're paced evenly at 100 rating each step.

Tiered rewards need to make people want to progress to the next tier, and I feel like RBGs does that quite well. What arena needs is more tiers in their reward system. Instead of lowering elite gear to 2k, I'd rather they kept it at 2.2 and made another reward for 2k instead, one that isn't as good. Many people play just to get their elite gear and it being only at 2k now means they don't have to play much, because you have one of the best rewards at such a low tier point. It literally goes from:

Vicious Mounts (no rating)
Tabard of Brute Force (no rating)
Elite Gear (2k)
Glad Tabard (being added back in again next season, presumably 2600 still)

You see where there is a big gap? Between the elite gear and tabard. The gap is so big that even glad is sometimes lower than the rating you need for the tabard. There are so many people that play simply for their elite set and that's no doubt because of that massive gap with no extra rewards between 2k-2.6k. Increasing the elite gear to 2200 or even 2300 would make people have to push more, I feel like it's too good of a reward for how low it is in the reward system, especially with how hard it used to be to get in the past it still has the prestige attached to it from those days. If that were to be bumped up and another rewarded was added for 2k, that would work much better as a reward system.

Ultimately, the reward system is what gives incentive for people to play. If you were in the top 0.5% of the ladder and had nothing to show for it, no one would care about it.

But the rewards shouldn't only be at the top, it seems out of reach for anyone without any tiered reward system for them to bother with. Think of them as stepping stones that provide incentive to get to the next step.

[Noxina]

They had to, because suddenly for pvpers there was nothing left between 0 and 2600.

And honestly, you're making yourself look really dumb by parroting me. The pvp players aren't the ones that are spoiled or snowflakes. YOU are. YOU. You want stuff that you didn't earn. Furthermore, someone quoted fight club before. “You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

Here's the thing though, we actually ARE special as far as WoW goes. We're high rated, you're not, you feel bad about it and try to defend your hurt ego by dragging the ones that set themselves apart down to your own shit level. There's actually a name for that, egalitarianism. It denotes a society where noone is allowed to be special and if anyone tries, the majority will forcefully drag them back into the shit.

You do know the idea was that you had to achieve high rating to buy the sets, right? It wouldn't be handed out to everyone. You would have to get 2.2k rating, then farm the Marks of Honor to buy the sets. So it wouldn't change anything really, except the fact that now you had access to ALL the sets when you reached that "magical level of impressive skills it takes to be as good as Helltrixz"

[Sencha]

Do you realize how dead WoW would be if that was the case? You would kill the entire collector and casual communities. There would be absolutely no reason to play unless you raided or did high ranked arenas.

And what about the players who already have 6 tiers worth of exclusive content, who can mog every slot with an unobtainable item from a different expansion, and still have a bank full of prestigious stuff collecting dust. What reason would they have to get the current things? They're already set for life.

Transmog didn't exist for a long time, when the game was more focused on relevant stuff like raiding and pvp. Now that transmog+wardrobe have been implemented, this game has turned into a casual whining fest because all entitled kids think WoW is a collection game.

[Rafal]

Aw I was kind of excited about this change. If this is really going to be the case I wish they would add some cosmetic items to PVE, as a mythic raider my teir and mount are always under valued as time goes on

[Snegovik]

Totally agree with OP, blizzard fuked PvP hard this xpac, the participation is all time low, now they trying to fix it with a knee jerk reaction. Back in wrath elite weapons were 2350 cr....i still xmog those weapons and in past 3 xpacs I never met anyone with those weapons, now as OP pointed one some nubs doing PvP rotation can get 2.2k not cuz they are good but cuz they comp is OP and catch up with PvP in prestige gear who spent 10 years of constant high end arena participation...this is just dumb. Devs don't PvP at high end...so I am not even surprised...

[Coconut]

*snip*

The dumbing down is debatable. Could have helped, it did not. I suspect they did it in order to close the skill gap a little bit, because in my opinion it's one of the biggest deterrents to new PvPers, but if classes aren't balanced all it does is artificially push some of them higher through sheer brute force and ease of play.

- To start with the basics, I think there are core issues with movement, LoS, targeting, and pathing in WoW that make PvP kind of suck. You can adapt and be "pro" at them, but they're just kind of shit. Hard to fix these, except to make the game more about reacting to abilities and less about movement, which wouldn't be very good either.

- Other than that, the first thing that should be done as a sign that the devs are taking PvP seriously is to introduce enemy cooldowns as a default element of the arena UI. All pro plays revolve around knowing this information, but the default UI doesn't show it, so unless you enter arena with the proper addons, you might as well be playing blind.

- Disable the arena target macros. This offers a huge advantage to people with gaming peripherals or who can otherwise handle a very high number of binds, and it's something I'm not keen of doing because it means filling my UI with buttons I'm not going to use outside of PvP. You want to interrupt a different play than your current target? Actually spend the fraction of a second it takes to select them instead of having a macro automate it for you. This is drastically speeding up reaction speeds and is a needless barrier to many players who probably don't macro at all.

These changes, especially the last two, would help level the playing field between someone who is PvP-savvy and someone who is trying to learn, and it actually removes the need for pruning.


As far as rewards are concerned, I see you're still gravitating towards the higher ranks

The Vicious mounts are effective, I can attest to that since they were what actually got me to do rated arenas at all (I'm a mount collector), but you still get very little value for the hassle compared to other mounts.

The main negatives are that they're not account-wide and you can't get more than one per season per char, which makes you place them on an an indefinite backburner, especially now that they're adding so many. So far I never reached any decent rating from the 100 wins in spite of > 50% win rates, and I didn't feel the need to continue doing arenas once I got the mount. If you could get another saddle at 200 wins with the same char, it would be a lot better.

My idea was actually lowering the requirements for rewards rather than increasing them. Forgive me my casual lack of edge. Hand out the gear at 1.8, tabard and enchantment at 2.2 (or vice versa) and the gladiator mount at a flat 2.5 instead of top 0.5% of the ladder.


Also, even though they decided not to unlock old elite sets, and that's fair enough since players might have had expectations of exclusivity back then (arguably), from this season forward I would let them stay.

Use a similar system to what I suggested for vicious saddles: If you reached 2.2 rating or whatever rating they decide, get one token for every 100 wins at the end of the season, and buy 1 set of gear per token. This would limit accessibility rather nicely, don't you think?

- - - Updated - - -

I'm all for engaging casuals. Give pvp hands at 1400. Give pvp legs at 1600. Give pvp chest at 1750. Give pvp weapon at 1800. Give pvp shoulders at 2000. Give t2 pvp weapon at 2200. Give pvp tabard at 2300. Give pvp enchant at 2400.

Maybe then PvP would be as dead as it was in tbc and wotlk, before they got the memo that they need to engage the casuals to stay relevant.

Engaging casuals wasn't as relevant in TBC and wotlk when they still had a positive turnover. Now the new market is spent, it's important to make recurring customers keep coming back to the game, and the last thing you want to do when you're doing that is to push them away from your rewards and make them realize how easy they can live without them.

Casual collectors are the best recurring customers.

[Fenixhart]

Rated PvP died in Cata, maybe you missed it. The ladders collapsed, horribly. Coincidentally (or not), that was the same time when almost everything in PvP was made available to everyone.

The entitled casuals weren't the solution back then either, they actually stopped playing.

It was also the first major population nosedive.

Surely the two couldn't be related.

[s_bushido]

Totally agree with OP, blizzard fuked PvP hard this xpac, the participation is all time low, now they trying to fix it with a knee jerk reaction. Back in wrath elite weapons were 2350 cr....i still xmog those weapons and in past 3 xpacs I never met anyone with those weapons, now as OP pointed one some nubs doing PvP rotation can get 2.2k not cuz they are good but cuz they comp is OP and catch up with PvP in prestige gear who spent 10 years of constant high end arena participation...this is just dumb. Devs don't PvP at high end...so I am not even surprised...

Meanwhile, in reality: People can collect full T2 who never once had to wipe on a progression Vanilla boss to get it. It doesn't devalue experiences I had and the sense of accomplishment I felt 10+ years ago to see someone else rocking the sets I spent months collecting. I'll never understand why PvP superheroes think they're so damned special.

[Deleted]

They had to, because suddenly for pvpers there was nothing left between 0 and 2600.

And honestly, you're making yourself look really dumb by parroting me. The pvp players aren't the ones that are spoiled or snowflakes. YOU are. YOU. You want stuff that you didn't earn. Furthermore, someone quoted fight club before. “You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

Here's the thing though, we actually ARE special as far as WoW goes. We're high rated, you're not, you feel bad about it and try to defend your hurt ego by dragging the ones that set themselves apart down to your own shit level. There's actually a name for that, egalitarianism. It denotes a society where noone is allowed to be special and if anyone tries, the majority will forcefully drag them back into the shit.

This guy really knows how to argue in a sophisticated, mature and sensible manner. I'm learning a lot about how to construct an argument and how formulate that argument in order for other to clearly understand what I'm saying.
On a side note, this guy really should come down from his high (rating) horse - but hey, I guess mad WoW PvP skillz = being better than other in every single way possible. Such an important life skill!

[Reek]

Meanwhile, in reality: People can collect full T2 who never once had to wipe on a progression Vanilla boss to get it. It doesn't devalue experiences I had and the sense of accomplishment I felt 10+ years ago to see someone else rocking the sets I spent months collecting. I'll never understand why PvP superheroes think they're so damned special.

Ok, so what about boss and achievement mounts Blizzard removes after an expac? Or the titles? PVE has it's fair share of unattainable things that were once attainable, PVP should as well. We already had to share titles from Vanilla that were extremely time-consuming to get that now you can get in a day or two of rbgs or arena matches.