Of course gear makes the difference in PVP and PVE. Why would anyone grind for hours or even days to get gear if it didnt matter? WOW is a game based on  getting the best gear, if it didnt help you what would the incentive to get it?

Originally posted by grandpagamer

Of course gear makes the difference in PVP and PVE. Why would anyone grind for hours or even days to get gear if it didnt matter? WOW is a game based on  getting the best gear, if it didnt help you what would the incentive to get it?

As much as WAR, AOC, Aion and w/e game will be released.
That's how things work in the star theme-park segment of MMORPG.

I do enjoy PVPing in WoW.  Can't say that it's as in depth as Ultima, but still enjoyable

Originally posted by Antipathy

Originally posted by SonofSeth

 Skill > Gear > Class

If 2 equally skilled players duel, one with better gear will have the upper hand, if they are equally geared and equally skilled, a class can influence the outcome.

If you think otherwise, chances are you never were any good at PVP in the first place.

 

Oh, and I like it because it's fast paced and I always have a feeling like I have options, fight and use my CC to win, or run and use my CC to get away if I think I can't win. It also helps it just works well, gameplay wise.

 

Interesting - when I enter a battleground with my hunter wearing his pve gear, I'm a glass cannon. I do a lot of damage when no one targets me, but if I'm targeted I die. And I tend to loose 1v1.

 

However, if I put on my PvP gear, my survivability increases immensely, and  I do a heck of a lot better in battlegrounds, and frequently top the kill table.

 

So I guess wearing the PvP gear makes me more skillful?

 

There are some situations where you simply can't avoid taking damage. If you are in greens, that damage kills you - if you're in PvP epics you live, and get a chance to show your skill...

 

For example - a rogue stun locks you and your trinket is on CD - do you live through the stun lock? Only gear decides. Not skill.

 

Or a destro warlock seduces you and starts to unleash his combo. Do you live through that huge chaos bolt? Gear decides. Not skill.

 

Also, is it true that all the druids were skillful in S4, but in S5 the paladins, who were previously a bunch of noobs, suddenly became skillful?

 

Part of the skill in doing BGs is in choosing your fights when you get in. You understand that and that's why you use your skill to determine wich gear is better for PVP and use your skill to understand that when your trinket is on cooldown you are very  vulnerable to stun abilities.

Popularity of paladins and druids you speak of is just a consequence of skilled players choosing fotm classes, not unskilled players having top ratings. Paladins and druids weren't the only classes on top, they were just most popular.

Hence;  Skill > Gear > Class

Originally posted by SonofSeth 

Part of the skill in doing BGs is in choosing your fights when you get in. You understand that and that's why you use your skill to determine wich gear is better for PVP and use your skill to understand that when your trinket is on cooldown you are very  vulnerable to stun abilities.

Popularity of paladins and druids you speak of is just a consequence of skilled players choosing fotm classes, not unskilled players having top ratings. Paladins and druids weren't the only classes on top, they were just most popular.

Hence;  Skill > Gear > Class

Your argument seems to be very circular to me. As if you are saying "Skill is what makes people win. Anything that makes people win is defined as skill". Of course - such circular logic is impossible to disprove. But it can seem a little silly at times !

Oh, Antipathy, you're looking from a 2v2 point of view. Almost every 5v5 had a Discipline Priest and a Frost Mage and well played 3v3 RMP destroyed anything. Druids were not that overpowered in BC, I'd dare to say that current Prot/Holy Paladins are more overpowered. It did take skils to play a resto druid properly in BC, timing feral charge, cyclone, DoTs to not screw up partner's CC, roots, bash, positioning, among other things.

Each class has at least 2 viable PvP specs at the moment. Well, 1 very viable and one semi-viable such as Priest's Shadow Tree or Warlock's Aflliction tree(these 2 specs are fully viable when you get BiS PvP gear), etc. I know people who got 2200 as Shadow Priest/Resto Druid, with welfares and random Naxxramas weapons.Can you call them not at least decent players?

Gear plays a large part in WoW's PvP but it's not that "kinda of a big deal" because:

Welfares+TOTC Weapon(yeah, that 25man TOTC, you can do it with heroic badges gear and underaverage skilled people)=enough for 1800
1800 rating for a few weeks=weapon, replacing offsets with new honor rated gear and finally full new season gear
Now, until 2300, when you'll get the second and best PvP weapon, it's mostly about skill, not gear. Sure there will be players with that 2300 weapon, but if you are that skilled as you claim, then 20 DPS won't make a difference.
At 2600+, where real arena starts, fights are actually quite nice. See people shadowmelding death coils or vanishing abilities, things that require you to have .25 sec reactions and thinking, which is not something easy.

I'd say it's a nice progression, but the main thing: arena shows how decent you actually are. If you get farmed by a mirror combo at 2300 and both teams had the same gear, then it's a skill problem. Assuming players even reach that rating of course, but compared to BC, it's a walk in the park now.

Actually I am, as I said all along, a casual PvPer. I PvP for fun.

Your scale starts at welfare + a very decent weapon and ends in best in slot. My scale starts at the sorts of greens and blues that a newly dinged 80 wears, and ends in best in slot. Because that's the variety you meet each and every day in a typical battleground.

And that's a hell of a difference. All I'm saying is that the newly dinged 80 doesn't stand a hope in hell in a battleground. He gets farmed horribly, because at that level, in greens, it's all about gear, and skill only makes a small difference. And playing like that - at that level - simply isn't fun.

There is skill involved in wow pvp.  It is silly to think otherwise.  In any game out, there is skill involved, just the leveled needed to be good varies.

But ignoring gear completely, saying skill triumps all is very silly.  Gear does play a factor in pvp, larger than whoever that person is before saying it has almost no weight.  I had two priests (I like support classes, and Shadow and disc/heals were so different, I didn't want to respec. Also, this was before dual specs, and respeccing all the time to solo or whatever was terrible.), one which I had since the game started, the other I made post BC.  My first priest did arena all the time, bgs, pve.  She was geared all the time with the best gear.  When I first got my second priest to end level, I went straight into the arena and BGs.

It's hard to put into words how stupid it makes you look, when I look back on the Ginormous difference between the two in any sort of pvp. With the newer priest  Rogues could kill me, before I could get the heal off after the trinket/fear, if that.  Warriors could kill me in 3 or 4 hits.  Pallys could just laugh and already be choosing their next target.  From the gist of your posts, that makes me unskilled and a terrible player.

Yet with my geared priest, I could basically stand there with a hot on geared players all over me and not care and talk in guild chat.

Skill DOES play a large factor, especially the higher up the arena ladder you guy as gear evens out.  And yes, in the arena, there are sometimes people in blues who just made a team, and beat a team that has a tiny bit of gear, but gets it from playing at a meh rating for so long.

Skill is required with the quick pace of the combat in wow.  Very much so.  Some of it is just silly to a point though, running through casters, when they can't stop melee anywhere near as easy.  Some of it very skillful, such as shadowmelded at the exact time needed to save from getting CCed.

For most of the people playing WoW, gear will triump skill in wow.  One of the reasons, is the larger and larger disparity between melee damage vs magic damage, but also the increase in stats/damage between seasons and fresh players to end game.  The longer a fight goes, the much more it supports classes with infinite damage.  The much less it supports classes with finite damage(mana :P)

Originally posted by Antipathy

Originally posted by SonofSeth 

Part of the skill in doing BGs is in choosing your fights when you get in. You understand that and that's why you use your skill to determine wich gear is better for PVP and use your skill to understand that when your trinket is on cooldown you are very  vulnerable to stun abilities.

Popularity of paladins and druids you speak of is just a consequence of skilled players choosing fotm classes, not unskilled players having top ratings. Paladins and druids weren't the only classes on top, they were just most popular.

Hence;  Skill > Gear > Class

 

Your argument seems to be very circular to me. As if you are saying "Skill is what makes people win. Anything that makes people win is defined as skill". Of course - such circular logic is impossible to disprove. But it can seem a little silly at times !

 

My logic isn't any more circular than yours.

Originally posted by SonofSeth 

My logic isn't any more circular than yours.

Sounds cute. But like much of what you have said, ultimately meaningless.

Would you care to explain why my logic is circular? My guess is that you can't. You just said it because it sounded good at the time.

Originally posted by Antipathy

Originally posted by SonofSeth 

My logic isn't any more circular than yours.

 

Sounds cute. But like much of what you have said, ultimately meaningless.

 

Would you care to explain why my logic is circular? My guess is that you can't. You just said it because it sounded good at the time.

It's because you base your argument about skill solely on gear, and dismiss other factors. You claim that freshly dinged character is useless in a BG because other people have better gear. That assumption would be true if only way for that player to contribute to a BG fight is to outdo the epiced out player in what he does. That's just stupid, or to be more forgiving, naive.

A freshly dinged character may try to do that but if he is capable of learning, he will soon find out how wrong that approach is. We know every class has CC abilities and CC is not very much, and in most cases, not gear dependant at all, using your CCs is all about timing, knowledge of other classes, or to be so bold as to use one word, skill. What does a new lvl80 do next, he doesn't go in expecting to solo 3 enemies, he sticks with his teammates and helps where he can, untill he gets the gear with which he can solo 3 enemies.

You are actually so bold to dismiss the whole 2k+ arena rating gameplay where most of the people are on equal footing gearwise and only real diferentiating factors left are skill and class setup. Why do you do that other than because it doesen't effect your casual self.

Definiton of Circular argument goes something like:

"An argument that commits the logical fallacy of assuming what it is attempting to prove."

You are atempting to prove that gear is only thing that matters in WoW by stating examples of where inferior gear actually does make the difference and in the same time dismissing everything that questions such logic.

If your theory was true, than you could take some random gamer who never played WoW before, give him a character with best PVP gear available, and after half an hour of practicing on mobs, that guy could defeat any player, no matter what their skill level is as long as their gear is inferior. That isn't true.

This is how I understood your argument from reading your posts, if I missunderstood something, please show me where so we can continue this discussion.

You completely misunderstood them. Read them again. Your whole post above is based around arguing about things I never actually said.

And you still haven't shown how there's anything circular in my logic :-)

Like almost all MMOs WoW PvP is heavily biased towards those who've been playing longer, and have acquired the better gear. I guess EVE would be the only exception. Too bad EVE combat is boring.

To the guy talking about 2k arena rating. The only way to get 2k arena rating is to get well geared. There are no undergeared 2k teams. Even in heroic gear you are doomed to a sub 1000 score. There is no way a heroic geared person can compete with 2k+ arena teams. You're only option is to raid.

Originally posted by Antipathy

You completely misunderstood them. Read them again. Your whole post above is based around arguing about things I never actually said.

 

And you still haven't shown how there's anything circular in my logic :-)

Then what did you say, if you actually know that yourself?

Originally posted by Antipathy

You completely misunderstood them. Read them again. Your whole post above is based around arguing about things I never actually said.

 

And you still haven't shown how there's anything circular in my logic :-)

I understood completely what he was saying and it applies to your argument spot on, unless of course somewhere between your brain and your fingers a signal misfired. But if you stand by the very words you posted that i read through, then you are truly dense.

Originally posted by SonofSeth

Originally posted by Antipathy

Originally posted by SonofSeth 

My logic isn't any more circular than yours.

 

Sounds cute. But like much of what you have said, ultimately meaningless.

 

Would you care to explain why my logic is circular? My guess is that you can't. You just said it because it sounded good at the time.

It's because you base your argument about skill solely on gear, and dismiss other factors. You claim that freshly dinged character is useless in a BG because other people have better gear. That assumption would be true if only way for that player to contribute to a BG fight is to outdo the epiced out player in what he does. That's just stupid, or to be more forgiving, naive.

A freshly dinged character may try to do that but if he is capable of learning, he will soon find out how wrong that approach is. We know every class has CC abilities and CC is not very much, and in most cases, not gear dependant at all, using your CCs is all about timing, knowledge of other classes, or to be so bold as to use one word, skill. What does a new lvl80 do next, he doesn't go in expecting to solo 3 enemies, he sticks with his teammates and helps where he can, untill he gets the gear with which he can solo 3 enemies.

 

You are actually so bold to dismiss the whole 2k+ arena rating gameplay where most of the people are on equal footing gearwise and only real diferentiating factors left are skill and class setup. Why do you do that other than because it doesen't effect your casual self.

 

Definiton of Circular argument goes something like:

"An argument that commits the logical fallacy of assuming what it is attempting to prove."

 

You are atempting to prove that gear is only thing that matters in WoW by stating examples of where inferior gear actually does make the difference and in the same time dismissing everything that questions such logic.

If your theory was true, than you could take some random gamer who never played WoW before, give him a character with best PVP gear available, and after half an hour of practicing on mobs, that guy could defeat any player, no matter what their skill level is as long as their gear is inferior. That isn't true.

 

This is how I understood your argument from reading your posts, if I missunderstood something, please show me where so we can continue this discussion.

 

 

I agree with this. Yes Gear matters, but that doesnt mean Skill has no eefect in WoW

WoW pvp is very dificult.  the only way i belive to ge good in pvp is to actually pvp.  In wotlk it is evident where the barriers between pve and pvp lies, because theres no way a good raiding guild would take someone in pvp gear.  The Bgs are supposed to help you gain honor to buy arena gear and pvp epics.  these are in no way a replacement to raid quality gear and vice versa.  if you were in full epics and went against a person with the pvp equivilent, you would probably lose.  adding resilience to the game was the marking point in which pvp and pve were seperated.  the only way to get better gear was to go into arenas.  i do arenas for fun but i know some serious pvpers who are in full furious and they do it for fun.  they also have a set for pve because lets face it pvp and pve specs are different in every class.  imo i would say i like it a lot as opposed to other mmo's.  if your saying the game is flawed, what game isnt?  serious people who wanted a pvp challenge got their challenge which was 2K+ rating for gear.  maybe if you tried to get there then you could talk

No one ever said skill doesn't matter. Of course it does. Particularly at the highest level of arena.

However, currently, at least in battlegrounds, gear > skill.

I'm not a great PvP player - for example, my reactions aren't top notch, and I make mistakes. I know there are plenty of people better than me, and I know that if I PvP'd more regularly, I could be better myself. Then again, I suspect the same could be said for 90% of players out there.

However, if I played my hunter in his current PvP gear, which is a little dated (mostly hateful), with an Ulduar 25 bow and Ulduar 10 polearm, then I am absolutely confident that I could beat any player in the world who is dressed in greens. I don't care how skillful he is. I don't care what class or spec he has. Because I'll be walking into the fight with twice his health and more than twice his DPS. And whilst there may be people around who are twice as skilled as me, I sincerely doubt there is anyone who is four times as good as I am. It's simply too big a gap to make up.

Similarly, if I played a character in greens (any class/spec), and some random scrub 1000 rated arena player was given full PvP epics and Ulduar weaponry then I'm pretty damn sure he'd beat me. Again, in that case gear > skill.

That's what I mean by the gear gap being too big. Within a battleground, plenty of fights are won or lost before a blow is struck - simply because one side seriously outgears the other. To me, that means the gear gap is too big. Partly because being in a battleground dressed in low value gear (greens or even blues) is simply not fun. You are steamrollered before you have any effect on a fight, and simply don't last long enough when put under any sort of attack.

I'd also say that the gear problem is worse for some classes than others. It's hard to be precise, since, like almost everyone out there, I haven't played all classes and specs. But I get the strong impression that some classes absolutely need gear to survive, whilst others do not. For example, stealth classes such as rogues and druids can, to a large extent, choose their fights. So they can get a fair number kills just by finding weak targets and exploiting them mercilessly. However - others need a certain amount of armour and resilience to do anything effective. Try playing a low geared warlock who's being attacked by a decent rogue with cloak of shadows up. Most of your spells are completely ineffective until cloak of shadows finishes - so unless you can survive that long, you can't even touch the rogue, much less kill him.

Playing a battleground in crap gear simply isn't fun. We all play for fun. So why should we have to endure several weeks of playing no fun games in order to start having fun?

In PvE there's some sort of progression. If you have crap gear, you can join other people with crap gear and run normals and heroics until you're ready to move onto harder challenges. You can choose to work with other people at your same level of gear and skill.

However, in PvP you are thrown into battelgrounds with full furious people right from the start. There's no sort of progression path. It's like a PvEr having to queue for "any instance" and not knowing whether he'd end up in UP normal or the latest heroic raid. So maybe having some sort of progression would alleviate problems. But it would be better still if the gear gap was smaller - both in PvE and PvP.

Before people misinterpret me again, here are some things I am not saying.

I'm not saying anything about arena and what attributes (gear, skill, class) are needed to get 2500 rating.

I am not saying that someone in greens can't do anything at all in a battleground. However, all it takes is a single member of the opposition to look up and think "greenie over there - easy kill" and that contribution comes to an end.

I am not saying anything at all about low level battlegrounds.

Originally posted by bboytofu

WoW pvp is very dificult.  the only way i belive to ge good in pvp is to actually pvp.  In wotlk it is evident where the barriers between pve and pvp lies, because theres no way a good raiding guild would take someone in pvp gear.  The Bgs are supposed to help you gain honor to buy arena gear and pvp epics.  these are in no way a replacement to raid quality gear and vice versa.  if you were in full epics and went against a person with the pvp equivilent, you would probably lose.  adding resilience to the game was the marking point in which pvp and pve were seperated.  the only way to get better gear was to go into arenas.  i do arenas for fun but i know some serious pvpers who are in full furious and they do it for fun.  they also have a set for pve because lets face it pvp and pve specs are different in every class.  imo i would say i like it a lot as opposed to other mmo's.  if your saying the game is flawed, what game isnt?  serious people who wanted a pvp challenge got their challenge which was 2K+ rating for gear.  maybe if you tried to get there then you could talk

Actually, whilst what you said is largely correct, there are still plenty of exceptions.

Have you seen what a prot paladin can do if wearing 4 x Tier 8.5 PvE healing gear? Those guys can be almost unkillable PvP healers.

And TBH - apart from the very top guilds, going for world firsts, most PvE guilds would be more than happy to recruit someone in full furious - since decent PvE guilds recruit people primarily because they've shown some evidence of skill, not based on their gear - and a 2000+ arena rating does show you have at least some skill.

 @ Antipathy

Ok, I see what you are saying and basicly I agree with you, that's how WoW works. It's a gear centric game and if you do widen the gear gap enough, influnce of skill is proportionally smaller. You could make the same argument about levels too, but I don't see any of those mechanics as good or bad, I just look at them as they are, it's just the nature of the beast.

I should have also put more emphasis on how I don't consider gear gap as the main focus when I say skill > gear, because I thought it was impied that when discussing those two we aren't taking into account the min max scenario, but somewhat gray area in the middle. See, I did the same when I widened the skill gap enough in my example, it's also true, but not really constructive for a discussion about WoW PVP in general.

What do you propose then? A new game with less linear progression, or maybe that WoW is tweaked in a way that gear is more like achievments, meaning for braging rights and not for increasing stats?

I've got no objections to people earning gear and improving themselves. My objections are to the size of the gear gap. Decently geared players should be maybe twice as effective as crap geared players - not many many times more effective.

The gear gap is quite heavily built into the current game. So it would be really hard for Blizzard to change it in WotLK, since so much PvE content would also have to be redesigned. So my main hope would be that the size of the gear gap would be reduced with Cataclysm.

However, there are more simple steps that could be taken now, in order to make battlegrounds more fun. For example - consider the following package of changes:

a) Honour system is split into two. As well as honour points we introduce "Heroic honour points".

b) Normal honour points can only be used to buy hateful gear, whilst "Heroic honour points" can be used to buy deadly gear.

c) When queuing for battlegrounds players could select the "normal" or "heroic" version. Normal battlegrounds would earn honour, heroic battlegrounds would earn heroic honour

d) There should be some system to stop new 80s from immediately queueing for heroic. Perhaps in order to qualify for heroic, some sort of PvP based achievement would have to be earned. Or perhaps people could buy a heroic battleground key with large amounts of honour points.

e) Maybe reduce honour cost of gear, since new 80s would be expected to earn hateful gear before progressing to deadly. And the total cost in time shouldn't be vastly more than the current time to gear up.

The result should be that new 80s are directed towards the "normal" battlegrounds where they gear themselves up and earn the right to qualify for the "heroic" battlegrounds. So the normal battlegrounds would be full of people at lower gear levels and the heroic battlegrounds would be the place the serious arena people would go.

I see that happening, to an extent when they introduce rated battlegrounds. They plan to keep everyone together, all gear groups, just give options for people who want to go the extra distance. It still leaves a lot of room for gear griefing, but at least they are starting to think about ways to allow players to distinguish themselves without forcing a gameplay style on them to do it.

I was thinking more along the lines of what they talked about when they introduced BNet matchmaking. Tiered system where when you move up a tier, you are locked out of the lower tier. This could work great for 1v1 fights and it's obvious it would need a lot more work to pidgeon hole into something the scale of a battleground. I just don't see any other way to stop gear griefing unless they somehow figure out how to separate haves from have nots.

Thing is, all theese limitations could lead to even further compartmentalisation of WoWs PVP, separating it into smaller and smaller niches. 

To the OP

my 4 fantasy MMOs that I have partaken in PVP and i will list them from best to worst from what I have seen so far.

1. Best by far was DAoC

2. From what I have seen Aion is just amazingly fun

3. WAR The open RVR was a blast

4. WOW yep sorry WOW you come in last place

You're right - a rating system might solve the problem - at least for the rated battlegrounds.

Although non-rated battlegrounds (i.e. any battleground that isn't favoured for weekend), would still suffer from exactly the same problems as before.

Actually - the problem may get worse. Since the proposed rating system seems to allow people to gather quite a high rating just by playing a large number of games - and if that's linked to gear then we might see large numbers of no-skill long term players walking around in full furious.

Nothing can save WoW anymore but bring back Sunwell type raids. Raids so hard that you know who's the best just by what boss' heads they have on their belts. 

WoW's PvP has been long dead since S2. You can't honestly sit back and say that Skill > than Gear in Arena's none what-so-ever. I've played that game way to long and I have lvled and raided with some of the best pro-gaming guilds in the US/ world. So I know what I'm saying what I say this line:

WoW's arena's are more about Luck than anything else. Oh yes you WoW loving whores, luck. And you know it. All  you need is for one CC to go off, or to CS one guy and slam you face into your keyboard rolling your head back and forth throwing everything and your mother at that one player to kill him within the first few seconds of the game and if he dies, thats game, you won the match, If  he doesn't then you lost because you just wasted everything trying to kill him. 

"oh but what if their pro-pvpers and don't die in the first few seconds of the game?"

Let me answer that too cause I know someone will bring it up, well then what happens WoW fanboi's? Thats right, everyone runs around in a circle, doing the  circle jerk until....what? OH thats right, someone gets a lucky CC to go off and do the all out nuke to the CC'ed person's hp. There is no skill... if you honestly want to say that running around in a circle for 2 mins before a CC goes off is skill than your guys minds are severely warped. (even though for some of you they are beyond warped)

You know what skill is? 2 teams going head to head, blood for blood, eye for eye, until  someone wins. Not "hey lets run in a circle until we tag someone hehe". Every time I used to Watch an arena match I just laugh because it looked like that Greek circle dance. It's just sad. 

Now one last thing I will add though, is dispite all tthat I've said, I'm not saying all WoW pvper are not skilled. By no means. I've rolled with some of those f'in awesome pro pvpers and I know that you  guys know your shit. And you guys I salute. 

But truth be told, no matter how good I am at WoW or anyone else is, like whoever said above, if a freshly dingged lvl 80 entered a arena, GEAR still outways his skill because no amount of fucking skill can kill that better geared player.... unless he is a fucktard and stands there the whole time letting you kill him.