Tagged News: arena

A new practice of cheesing the personal rating requirement on s3 shoulders and weapons has been defeated according to this succinct post by Tyren:

Please be aware that with this week's maintenance, purchasing arena season 3 items that have a required arena personal rating will now also require the purchaser's arena team rating to be at the same point values as well.

Unfortunately, this will not be properly displayed within the game; the in-game display will be fixed soon in an upcoming patch.

This change is a response to a new method the always ingenious arena crowd developed. Members make up a team full of their mains and alts, then proceed to win with their mains and lose with their alts, keeping their team in the 1500 range. Since many teams in that range are of the "lose 10 games a week and get your epics" mentality, they can easily farm up their personal rating without moving into the more difficult brackets. No longer so, as now their hampered team rating will prevent them from getting the tastier pieces of gear that were previously available to them.

To continue the explosion of information regarding patch 2.3, it seems that it should be landing on the PTRs in the first week of october. At the same time, there have been some significant changes to the arena gear system that will be heading out with the Zul'aman patch. The rating requirements for weapons have been expanded to include shoulders as well (argueably the most popular piece of arena gear for 90% of the population). Weapons will require a 1850 rating, while shoulders will take a 2000. You will not be required to maintain this rating in order to use the weapons, just to purchase them.

Beyond this a few new things have been announced for PvP fiends, straight from the mouth of Kalgan himself:

As of patch 2.3 all items in the gladiator season 1, 2, and 3 sets will be part of the same set, so you can use those items interchangably and keep the set bonuses (ie: you can wear the season 2 shoulders along with the season 3 helm, chest, legs) and retain the 4 piece set bonus.

At the same time he announced a few new arena items that will be coming with 2.3 to support different classes and specs. The stats are after the bump!

Drysc has revealed some much anticipated information about the upcoming second arena season in World of Warcraft, including a date and the details about the switch-over:

We are currently planning to end the first season and begin Arena Season 2 on June 12, 2007 to coincide with a small patch. Please be aware that this may change to a later date if the patch is not in fact ready by the 12th. We will keep everyone updated if this date does change; however, June 12 is the earliest date that the second season can be expected to begin.

After reevaluating the arena season process and player feedback we will now be resetting all arena team ratings at the start of the new season. Players will still retain their arena points and teams with this reset. The team rating will simply be reset to the default 1500, allowing all teams to once again compete for top honors with a fresh start.

With the end of the first season players who have contributed to at least 20% of the games in the top teams from each battlegroup will receive their end-of-season rewards. These include Arena-specific titles that they can display proudly until the end of the new season, and for the best of the best, an Armored Nether Drake. New high end epic Arena rewards will also be added to coincide with the start of the second Arena Season, as well as new epic Honor rewards.

Original post is here.