Filed under: PvP

If you're even remotely interested in WoW PvP, and aren't yet following Brian Holinka on Twitter, you really should be. We've been talking about him quite a bit lately here at WoW Insider, as he's the main agent behind the huge PvP changes coming in in patch 5.3. He's also incredibly responsive, open and helpful on Twitter, and seems to set aside a huge amount of his free time to respond to players' concerns, and hold open and constructive discussions, while not being afraid to fire out some sarcasm crits on the trolls that often haunt those in his position.

He's previously tweeted about the return of the skirmish system, and has been very responsive indeed about the 5.3 changes, and lately he's also been discussing some more confirmed and potential changes in patch 5.3 and beyond.

Now, please do take these changes with a pinch of salt, these aren't even PTR patch notes, but potential changes, some of which are being tested and appearing on patch notes, and some of which are just in the pipeline for the future.


Potential Battleground Changes

One thing that caught our eye here at WoW Insider was a very recent tweet regarding some changes in the the larger battlegrounds such as Isle of Conquest and Alterac Valley.

Since Blizzard "fixed" the expansion-long "bug" that allowed players to max out their conquest points through arenas or random battlegrounds, rated battlegrounds, which for the purpose of this column will be referred to as RBGs, have become necessary content for players to max out their cap every week. And maxing out your conquest cap every week is, until patch 5.3 at least, something you would do well to be getting on with.

The trouble is that finding a rated battleground team is not exactly straightforward, especially if you're a player who's a little new to the PvP side of the game, so WoW Insider thought we'd run down some of our top tips for finding an RBG team. Of course, there's no cast-iron guarantees here -- we can't be absolutely certain that, even if you follow this to the letter, you categorically will find an RBG team to play with every week. That's up to you. But we can arm you with knowledge for your team-finding attempts!


Get Geared

This is pretty important, as it's essentially the first hurdle you're going to have for getting into rated battlegrounds. In order to gain entry to a team, whether you're a good PvPer or not, you need to convince people to bring you. Apart from having very high ratings and the like, which isn't usually viable for the newer PvPers this guide is mostly aimed at, one thing people are definitely going to be looking for is gear.

Editor's Note: This arena first appeared under the name Shado-Pan Arena on the PTR. The article's title has been edited for clarity.

It's always exciting to get a new arena to play with, and come patch 5.3, PvP fans will have had two in just one expansion. We really aren't sure what to do with ourselves! The second new arrival is Tiger's Peal, as pictured above in the header image. You can hopefully make out two tiger statues, facing each other, and behind the right-hand statue you can see a dark door, through which the teams enter the arena.

The run from the door to the tiger statue is very short, and therefore allows you to quickly enter cover, as, of course, they provide good line of sight blocking points. You can also see from the picture that, at the other two corners of the map, are two raised platforms, which have fenced edges. These act a bit strangely, and I am wondering if they are bugged or subject to further adjustment.

When looking at them, one might expect that the fence or steps side of the platform would block line of sight from players below, but actually they don't. It is perfectly possible to cast up or down. The fence can easily be jumped, too, so these, at the moment at least, are simply larger, flat blocks which break line of sight on the lower level, but not from top to bottom at any point we were able to discover.

Everyone knows where to get their PvP gear -- it's on the Serpent's Spine -- and with Blizzard's changes to the gear vendor panes, it's fairly straightforward to whittle it down to just exactly what you're after. However, one thing that's not so simple is the rest of the work you need to do. As we all know, gear needs gems, and it needs enchants, and we've struggled to find a place that pulls together all the PvP options for that, so we through we'd make one. Let's get started.


Pure PvP Stats

These, naturally, are items that provide increases in neat PvP stats, with no secondary stats. If you look back at my column which covered the changes to resilience, you can see how important these stats are. Depending on your style, class, and the season, these may be the best choice. There are no Jewelcrafting-only pure PvP stat gems.

Gems:

The patch 5.3 PTR notes brought some big, scary changes to PvP, which WoW Insider explained for its readership yesterday, and now Blizzard's official blog has, as promised, arrived. It deals with a lot of the same concerns as we addressed yesterday, but also adds in several pieces of new information for players to digest. Let's start with that. Here are the changes in full:

I can understand why you did panic. The patch 5.3 PTR notes had a little section of PvP gear notes -- five bullet points that pulled the rug out from under our feet. These changes are characteristic of the bold, sweeping alterations that Blizzard's new PvP Designer Brian Holinka has been spearheading since he joined the company in August of last year. And these are big changes. If you missed the notes, let me repeat them for you here.

Thanks, most likely, in no small part to the relatively recent arrival of Brian Holinka, a Blizzard recruit whose sole job it is to rework PvP, patch 5.2 is bringing in some seriously chunky PvP changes. We've spoken in the past of Blood Sport about the changes coming to PvP gear, and those begin in earnest when the PvP season starts on Tuesday. If you don't want to re-read the old article, the summary is as follows:

Blizzard's recently recruited PvP designer Brian Holinka has confirmed via Twitter that skirmishes are coming back to WoW.

.@bwalterwhiteb We acknowledge many people want skirmish back. It was more forgotten than removed. It will come back, but not in 5.3

- Holinka (@holinka) March 11, 2013

Well-known Warlock PvP blogger Cynwise has posted a typically excellent article dealing with the problems brought about by one of the patch 5.2 changes designed to improve low level battlegrounds. Patch 5.2 added battleground bracket scaling, to all brackets with the exception of the max level one, which caused an uproar among the PvP twinking community. And it seems from Cynwise's post that their fears were not unjustified.

The addition of level scaling, where a low level character's health and base stats are scaled up to match that of the top level in the bracket, was meant to help even out the discrepancies that caused leveling battlegrounds to be anything other than fun. They were meant to even the playing field, but from Cynwise's research, it appears that they do exactly the opposite.

He reports on his level 85 warlock, Cynwise, which is a PvP-focused twink, and the problem's he's faced thanks to the scaling. To cut a long story short, and you should definitely read the long story, among the higher level brackets which span expansions, there are huge problems in place thanks to the availability of gear.

OK, own up. How many times have you done it? You know what I'm on about. You get your friends together into a group, you're planning to do a few battlegrounds, you check everyone's ready, hit the queue button and wait. The queue pops, you take it, and there you are in a battleground all by yourself. You've accidentally queued for a solo battleground, not queued as a group with your friends.

Reddit user Daithe obviously had the same problem, as they posted about this change on Reddit last night. And WoW Insider is so excited about the prospect of no longer abandoning our friends in the relevant Shrine, that we thought we'd share it with you all.

You can see that the PvP interface has had a considerable facelift with the patch, and yes, the screenshot uses ElvUI, but the Join Battle button is still front and center, while the Join as Group button slopes off to the side. But, if you accidentally hit the Join as Party button when in a group, you now get this error screen, asking if you're sure you want to queue as solo. WoW Insider thinks the warning could be a bit stronger, calling the PvP columnist a muppet for yet again clicking the wrong button, or something.

We love it when these little quality of life changes sneak into the game, so own up, are you as grateful as we are for what might be the mysterious, revolutionary, world-shaping, game-changing feature Ghostcrawler was talking about?

Unannounced features are often par for the course with big patches, and this one is no exception. Blizzard Customer Support EU tweeted the following this morning: