On Tel'Abim I asked 17 active lvl 60 PvP players on both Horde and Alliance side what they would like to see implemented in the game regarding only the Blood Ring arena and took some notes to give feedback to the TWoW team. I did this because some players never look into the forums, and some do it a lot, and I felt some opinions were underrepresented in "the public". As some of these players are playing on Y'Shaarj now, and with you guys having to plan the development of the PvP environment you want for OctoWoW, the answers might still be relevant. I removed all class balancing suggestions because a) Tel'Abim was at a much higher progression level, b) I know you guys have to focus on other parts of the game first anyway, and c) these suggestions are biased by nature (But just for the record, it was mainly "Nerf the big warlock-pets, shaman, hunter, druid, paladin".) I also removed all answers that were only mentioned once because there were a lot and some were contradicting.
To get everyone on the same page, this is what TWoW had implemented regarding the Blood Ring arena:
- 3 arena battlegrounds: Ruins of Lordaeron and Blade's Edge Arena (both from TBC), Sunstrider Court (custom made)
- Cross-faction Skirmish (unrated , auto-seeding into 2v2, 3v3 or 5v5)
- Non-cross-faction rated formats 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 after team creation
- All buffs got removed upon entering an arena, but not conjured items. (In vanilla TBC, both buffs and conjured items got removed. Some players, including myself, asked warlocks for a new Health Stone after each round
)- Conquest Points, planned to be given out from WPvP events and weekly from active Blood Ring play (in vanilla TBC you got Arena points, based on your team's rating and format, if you played 10 or more rated games with this team in this week. Only the highest rated team of a player decided their Arena point payout of the week.)
- 4 (one for each Armor type) custom "Bloody Gladiator's" sets, consisting of rares (roughly T1 lvl) and epics (roughly T2 lvl), purchasable with reputation-requirements
- 3 custom PvP sets (~T1, T2.5 and T3.5, respectively) for each class - replacing the vanilla PvP sets - with the higher sets costing Conquest Points, a lot of Honor, and the same slot piece of the preceding set. The two higher tiered sets were never obtainable since Conquest Points were never distributed.
I hope I didn't forget anything crucial - I felt this summary might be helpful for players who didn't play TWoW and new players in general, to give context to the following suggestions. These were the opinions and wishes I collected, ordered by count (in brackets):
- Remove the possibility to use non-conjurable consumables in Arena (12)
- Arena play should give rewards for top rated X % of players of each class ("just anything cosmetic, only for the top xy% of players of each class. it's important to make this class-specific so class-imbalance is no issue to get these rewards. and only cosmetics, because when they are rating-dependent, some players would feel locked-out from relevant gear") (9)
- Make Sunstrider Court bigger to match the size of the other arenas (5)
- No BIS item should cost Conquest points ("A player, playing for the level 60 vanilla experience, should not be forced to play arena, a thing from TBC, just to be able to compete") (4)
- Make it possible to queue for more than 3 BG types at once so players don't miss AV just because they queue up for the more frequently played WSG, AB and TG (3) //Not an issue right now with Thorn Gorge and Arena being inactive, but might be relevant later
- Make Skirmish non-cross-faction (2)
- Make Arena queueable via minimap button (2) //TWoW released this change a few days later
- Make set boni of the PvP sets (and of any set in general) more interesting, not just stats (2)
I hope this feedback is helpful.
Now to what I think personally:
The Blood Ring arena would be a great addition right now on Y'Shaarj because there seems to be an imbalance in the PvP player count of the factions. With arena, the faction with more players could queue Arena and play each other to pvp instead of waiting for a bg to enter for 3 hours.