cataclysm-pvp
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2200 rating PvP weapons now available for purchase
For those of you who live and die by the PvP sword, there's good news today: 2,200 rating PvP weapons are finally available for sale and use by level 85 characters. This, according to Community Manager Nethaera on the official Blizzard forums: 2200 Rating Weapon Availability Quote: I posted this in another thread but wanted to post here as well so everyone is aware: I'll be brief and direct. The PvP item vendors were a little slow on stocking their shelves. They should have them restocked shortly (give or take a few extra if need be.) They should have these weapons available very soon. We'll keep an eye on things should there be further delays. They should be available now. We'll be watching just in case any further issues arise with these vendors. source Shortly after Cataclysm's release, players' ability to equip and use 2,200 rating PvP weapons was removed from the game. The move was intended to prevent these high-level items from interfering with PvE progression -- Blizzard developers didn't want PvP to be a prerequisite to PvE raiding. Now that more and more players are entering (and downing) heroic raiding content, it appears that Blizzard developers are finally willing to allow these powerful weapons to be used. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
Blood Sport: Gearing up for arena, Cataclysm edition
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Sport for arena enthusiasts and The Art of War(craft) for fans of battlegrounds and world PvP. Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 Gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more. It's the beginning of a new arena season. Recently hitting 85 myself, I noticed a lack of information about the best ways to acquire PvP gear for my upcoming adventures in Azeroth. Well, I've put together a little guide for you that I hope will aid you in whatever your PvP goals are this season. Conquest points are the most important type of PvP currency in Cataclysm -- and they're awesome. They're incredibly easy to get, as you only have to win four or five arena games a week to get to the starting cap of 1,343. The average piece of conquest gear is bought for 1,579.4 conquest points, so even if you never break 1,500 rating, you'll be getting a new piece of epic PvP gear almost every week. Try to save up early for your weapon, offhand, and relic/wand. These three slots are the only pieces of gear that can only be bought with conquest points -- don't make the mistake of buying other stuff with conquest points! You can just get a slightly inferior version of the other pieces via honor, but you might have to wave around that green or blue weapon for a while if you aren't wise about what you buy!
Cataclysm 101: A guide to PvP changes and challenges
There are quite a few changes to PvP in Cataclysm. Let's have a look at how the changes in the past few patches will affect the other aspect of World of Warcraft gameplay ... Resilience is different Resilience no longer reduces critical strike chance but instead only reduces damage across the board. As resilience is the premier PvP stat, this impacts gameplay in a major way. First, critical strikes are back on the table. This means that talents contributing to crit are valuable in PvP again. Burst damage from crits will happen more often, and players can opt to stack crit for PvP without it being devalued ... much.
Spiritual Guidance: Priest PvP concerns in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests ... at least, when she's not AFK. A couple of weeks ago, I promised that I'd return to priest PvP once the PvP-related problems on the Cataclysm beta were resolved. Things still aren't perfect either for balance or testing, but I have more information now than I did two weeks ago, so I'm willing to take a stab at it ... /bleed. Or take a stab in the kidney or something. Overall, I'm going to say things aren't looking too great. I don't think you should panic, granted, but things are pretty rough for priests right now. Mana is a nightmare, options for spell selection suffer due to mana restraint, dispels are essential but you can't afford to cast them, and interrupts and crowd control run rampant. I'll elaborate on all of these in a bit, but before I get started, I want to take you guys back to December 2008. Wrath had just come out, and the start of Season 5 was on everyone's minds. When at last it came, there was a deafening thunder as tens of thousands of priest bodies crashed lifelessly to the ground. Playing a priest was like not playing at all because of how fragile we were (unless you were one of those cheap holy priests who exploited the Glyph of Spirit of Redemption for a short while.) The outcry from the community was one of the more unified responses to priest class balance I have ever seen, as both novice and gladiator turned to Blizzard and screamed a resounding, "WTF?!"
Blood Sport: Cataclysm PvP is theoretically awesome
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Sport for arena enthusiasts and The Art of War(craft) for fans of battlegrounds and world PvP. Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more. Listening Music: José González's "Hand on Your Heart." One of my favorites. Vanilla WoW PvP was very fun, even if the top raiders on the server had enough gear to kill you in a global or two. The speed of combat got progressively faster before The Burning Crusade came on scene; a full tier 3 player could change the tide of a battleground by himself easily. Resilience was added to the game to slow down the game -- and it worked! Arena games in The Burning Crusade took a long time to complete, but they were interesting and definitely had depth, even if they made you miss dinner once or twice. Wrath of the Lich King revamped arena completely by emphasizing burst kills and huge crits. In Season 5, death knights and holy paladins were the best classes in the game because they could sustain damage for periods of time longer than 20 seconds. It was shellshock for arena players everywhere. The 30-minute games we had come to know and love were a thing of the past. Damage was king, and the law was a quick death. Cataclysm appears to be returning to a Burning Crusade era of controlled arena matches. Giant crits and powerful damage combos are unlikely to be making an exit from arena, but their grip on PvP will be loosened when Deathwing's presence is felt.
Cataclysm Beta: Arena Season 9 available for testing
Bashiok has just posted that the Cataclysm beta is now host to Arena Season 9. The developers are looking to test arena games and the bugs therein, as well as the much-lauded rated battlegrounds. Fire up those betas for some awesome PvP action. Bashiok -- Arena Season 9 Available for Testing Arena Season 9 is now running and available for testing in the Cataclysm beta. To help facilitate testing we'd like to ask that those interested in providing bug reports and feedback focus on playing arena games, but also participating in the rated battlegrounds. Please let us know if you find any issues or have any feedback. Thanks. source
Cataclysm Preview: The Battle for Gilneas
Do you like dog men? Do you like zombie men? Do you like dog men who fight valiantly to defend their homeland against zombie men? Do you like zombie men who are very hungry and want to eat the dog men? And then build luxury condominiums on their land? If you answered yes to any of these questions, there's good news! Blizzard just announced new information about the the new-for-Cataclysm 10v10 battleground, The Battle for Gilneas. Similar to Arathi Basin, winning the battleground requires you to capture and hold a majority of the area's resource-rich locations -- the waterworks, the lighthouse and the mine -- long enough for your Horde or Alliance worker friends to collect resources from them. A total of 2,000 resource points wins the match. Just like in the real world, once all the resources are gone, no one cares about the area anymore, the fight ends and everyone goes back home to Stormwind and Orgrimmar, only to requeue and fight over it again ten minutes later. Good times! All you gank-hungry fools can check out the details by following me after the jump. It contains information about Cataclysm, so if you're totally religious about not spoiling anything, don't click.
Blood Sport: Arenas might be awesome in Cataclysm
Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column. Listening Music: Elephant Gun, by Beirut. I've been listening to a lot of Beirut recently. If you don't like it, I don't blame you. It's not for everybody. I normally dislike a lot of brass, but Beirut manages to pull it off with my approval (whatever that's worth, obviously not much). Last Week: We talked a bit about why certain 3v3 archetypes are successful in arena. As I mentioned in the comments, I'll consider going into detail about each archetype. This Week: Maybe I've just hopped on the fanboi bandwagon, but Cataclysm looks awesome. I'm not in the beta, but friends have provided me with ample information about items, dungeons, and overall experience. Not to mention the amount of blue posts flooding the Cataclysm forums recently. Interesting arena matches
Encrypted Text: The new style of rogue PvP
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we discuss how rogue PvP is going to fare in the next expansion. I often see players talking about their experiences in PvP, sometimes in trade chat or a battleground. Almost inevitably, after a few minutes of chatting, the old stereotypes about each class start coming out. They'll start complaining about paladins having three lives, due to Divine Shield and Lay on Hands. They'll label any arena composition with a warlock as a "drain team," even though warlocks are clearly capable of massive burst damage now. If there's an arena team composition that they don't like to face, that comp is immediately labeled as cheesy or unskilled. I don't really care if warlocks get a bum rap, it's up to them to convince the public that they can nuke too. What I am concerned about is that rogues have been stereotyped since the earliest days of vanilla WoW, and we need to break that cycle. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I would suggest watching the World of Roguecraft films. These early pieces of WoW machinima firmly cemented rogues as stunlocking gods in the minds of thousands of players. Even now, with Cataclysm putting the final nails in stunlocking's coffin, we will still be thought of as dirty fighters that need to be nerfed.
The Art of War(craft): Cataclysm PvP
Every week, Zach brings you the World of War(craft), which talks about PvP in all its myriad shapes and forms. It will be humorless and dry and deathly boring because Christian Belt already has the monopoly on funny and because cracking jokes in a PvP column just doesn't work since PvP people are supposed to be asshats, anyway.BlizzCon came and went and nothing is going to be the same again. At least not after Cataclysm, the third expansion for the World of Warcraft. Cataclysm is set to change the face of the game more than anything we've ever seen, it'll almost be like WoW 2.0. The classes are the same, but there'll be new races, new abilities, new mechanics, and a new, revamped world with a renewed faction conflict that will have deep implications for PvP.Gameplay will change significantly, particularly for Warlocks and Hunters, and there will be changes to talents, talent tree passive benefits, racial abilities, as well as entire systems to rate Battleground play. There will likely be an overhaul to the Arena ratings system, as well, perhaps as soon as Arena Season 7 kicks in. Blizzard isn't content to sit idle on its success, but has in fact taken the opposite direction by overhauling the entire game. They're turning Azeroth on its ear, and it's going to be insane. After the jump, we'll take a look at how the Cataclysm is going to shape World of Warcraft PvP.
