We’ve updated several PvP-focused elements of the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Classic experience, and we would like to share them below:
During active Arena Seasons, the Conquest cap will go up every week for all characters. If a player does not reach the cap in a week, they will be able to catch up. This is a change we made in Cataclysm Classic, and we were pleased by the feedback.
For example, if you create a new character and hit max level 4 weeks into the Arena Season, your available Conquest cap will be 4 times the weekly cap, and you can catch up to everyone else without being permanently behind.
We are bringing back Gladiator and Rank One titles and rewards for 2v2s and 5v5s.
We will have a flat cutoff instead of a percentage of players for Rank One and Gladiator slots.
Having multiple alts in the Gladiator range no longer counts towards multiple slots when calculating the cutoff for that arena bracket size.
For example, if you have 4 characters that are all Gladiator in 3s, you only count as one spot and all 4 of those characters get Gladiator rewards.
Similarly, if you have 2 characters that are Gladiator in 2s, 2 characters that are Gladiators in 3s, and 4 characters that are Gladiator in 5s, you count as 1 character in 2s, 1 character in 3s, and 1 character in 5s for cutoffs. All of those characters get their Gladiator rewards.
If you have 2 characters that are Gladiator in 3s, and one character that is not, you count as 1 slot in 3s, your 2 characters get Gladiator rewards, and your character that was not Gladiator does not get the rewards.
Base Resilience is set to 62% Damage Reduction from players for the duration of Arena Season 12.
Base Resilience is set to 40% for characters below level 90.
Battle Fatigue is set to -30% Healing and Shielding for the duration of Arena Season 12.
Note: We are aware that PvP Power has not been contributing towards Healing on the Beta, and that has been accounted for with the Battle Fatigue and Base Resilience numbers we have arrived at.
There is now a maximum PvE-Item Level of 473 while inside of Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Rated Battlegrounds.
If you are wearing a non-PvP item in an Arena, BG, or RBG that exceeds the 473 item level maximum, it will be set to item level 473 for that match.
For clarity, PvP items like Conquest Weapons at item level 490 are NOT affected by this cap and retain their item level.
Some good changes imo. 2v2 is the most played bracket in cata and it’s a shame that it didn’t offer titles there. The alt spots change is also good.
Not sure about the flat cutoff though, does that mean it’ll be a set rating or a set amount of spots? With a set rating I could imagine it being problematic. I’d just keep it at a percentage as a fair trade off since it’s becoming available in 2v2 (and 5v5).
With a set amount of spots you’ll risk giving out too little or too many titles, and with a set rating there will be even more issues. I think MoP will (atleast at the start) be active enough for a percentage based cutoff to work.
Some of the worst changes I could’ve possibly imagined.
Making 2v2 a title bracket will kill 3v3, and 2v2 is a completely unbalanced mess with zero possibility to overcome balance with skill at any kind of serious rating (because of the low skill cap of the bracket).
Have fun facing RDruid / Mage 99% of matchups at higher rating.
Sitting this one out.
But if you are having flat cutoff instead of a % based cutoff then why the hell is “calculating the cutoff” still a thing?
By the way: Flat cutoffs suck. Always have and always did. They are always made irrelevant by MMR inflation. Either stupidly impossible to reach (more than R1 for less inflated regions - yes, this has been a thing since it was introduced in Legion) or so easy to reach that anyone can get it (equivalent to old Duelist or even less, sometimes near Rival).
Well I mean, if people seemingly prefer 2v2 over 3v3 I don’t see why they should be forced into 3v3 for the cool rewards.
I’m not sure how MoP 2v2 will turn out but back in the day it was decently fun and cata pvp seems like a complete sh*tfest to me in general after playing it a bit to prepare for MoP
Do they prefer 2v2 over 3v3, or is it just more convenient?
Also, because this is MoP Classic. Not “Some random merge of random stuff from random expansions” Classic.
MoP was all about 3s. People have been theorizing about whether L/S/D, Godcomp etc will be the best this time around since 2019 when Classic was announced. Now what’s going to happen is 3s is going to be dead on arrival and we’ll never get to revisit it again.
Instead we’ll get some completely uninteresting, skill-less and boring 2s meta.
You think Cata 2s is worse than MoP. Oh boy, you’re in for a treat.
Again - Blizzard did not design PvP around 2s in Cata nor MoP nor WoD. That’s why 2s is a complete joke in all of them, but especially in MoP and WoD (because the class design had changed so much since WotLK when they actually did design around 2s).
It 1 billion percent is. The pve gear fiesta itself and rogue mage being this obnoxious completely ruins cata 2s. Also the lack of dampening. Being at a massive disadvantage because you didn’t buy hc pve gear is annoying as hell. That’s why I only went for the elite sets and didn’t push further cause it’s just unfair and unplayable.
But thats exactly the point, you dont make 3v3 more convenient if you remove titles from other brackets, 99% of the arena playerbase doesnt care about glad / rank1 anyway.
If blizzard wants to encourage us to play 3s, why not add a decent crossrealm lfg tool and more cosmetic rewards (exclusively for 3v3)?
As suggested by others already, I wanted to add my support for the idea of enabling Cross-Faction arenas in Mists of Pandaria Classic.
At higher ratings, there’s a clear imbalance — over 95% of players are Alliance, making it extremely difficult for Horde players to find partners and stay competitive. From my own experience, I raid and PvP on a Horde character, but I had to level an Alliance alt just to find more people to queue with.
If it’s not too complicated to implement, Cross-Faction arenas would be a huge improvement. It would allow more people to participate, make team-building easier, and create a healthier PvP environment overall — without forcing players to abandon their main characters or communities.
Just wanted to echo the idea and show that there’s strong interest in making this happen.
The time you have in a 2s game right now is simply not enough to go through peoples cds. People end up having most of their cds ready in deep dampening, games go to 80% dampening easily and running away until that will be the meta.
Please reconsider the whole idea, 2s never needed a dampening change to begin with or at the very most just a tiny bit earlier.
first we wanna bring instant dampening to 2s and then bring soloque for mop.
#nochanges was stupid since it denied a lot of QoL changes but asking for changes that affect the general gameplay or/and experience from an expansion is too much. Hope the blizzard devs don’t change too much about an expansion that is already really well designed in terms of mop.
This expansion needs to be touched THE LEAST in terms of pvp out of … literally any expansion that comes before or after. Just stop cooking please, we don’t need it at all. (tho some changes have been good like the titles and whatnot but i’d rather keep it the way it was if it means we can offset the bad ones)
Who’s we? You and your lice? Look at the US forums equivalent, there’s plenty of players asking for it.
There are many reasons for why people are asking for it, you might not agree with them but that doesn’t mean they’re not valid for some players.
I don’t want to go through the hassle of using the non-existant Group finder for PvP, to queue up with someone requesting 9k+ CR and is a multi rank1 chad (can’t prove any of it of course).
I want to be able to hop on to WoW, queue for some arenas at a time when I can play and solo queues would be good for that. Additionally, solo queue would allow people that like PvP, but doesn’t play a “meta” spec to play arenas.
Nochanges was for the classic andy’s who kept telling everyone that things were so good and difficult back then. They are mostly gone now. The QoL changes are great and faster games is one of them. Today’s players want an enjoyable game, not something that was considered fun in 2012 but would inevitably be miserable to play now.
Imagine if we had to play an authentic Season 12, it’d be miserable.