Is Season 4 Fair? - Part 2 of "Welfare Epics"

Yeaaaah, this is late. I'm just not going to make an excuse and jump right into things. XD
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Admittedly, my article on welfare epics was outdated long before I posted it. So think of this as a bit of a continuation of that article so I can update the argument to include the newest content.

Last time, my argument was that there was some relative truth to the "welfare epics" theory. Generally speaking, the PvP gear is interchangeable with PvE gear despite stressing different functions (longevity versus instantaneous results) and the same is not true vice versa due to the resilience stat. So the new question is, if Seasons one through three were comparable to Tier four through six, what does that make Season 4? Is it unfair that there's a Season 4 available and not a Tier 7?

Now, my first instinct is to say the PvEr's got first advantage with the release of Sunwell in patch 2.4. However, before I form a real opinion, I need to compare the available gear to one another to see which, if either, is superior. I will once again compare Paladin Holy gear for simplicity's sake.

Sunwell |||| Season 4
------- |||| -----------
Armor..............8104 |||| Armor..............8055
Stamina...........207 |||| Stamina...........313
Intelligence.....194 |||| Intelligence.....192
Spell Crit.........93 (100) |||| Spell Crit.........185 (189)
+ Healing........550 |||| + Healing........397
+ Mp5.............65 (70) |||| + Mp5.............0
Resilience.......0 |||| Resilience.......136 (143)
Spell Haste.....64 |||| Spell Haste.....0
5x Red Socket |||| 4x Red Socket
3x Yellow Socket |||| 2x Yellow Socket
3x Blue socket |||| 0x Blue Socket
1x Meta Socket |||| 1x Meta Socket

It is also worth noting that there is no set bonus for having the Sunwell pieces - they aren't part of a set, I'm just comparing the two sets. The lack of slots in comparison on the S4 gear is made up by the two miscellaneous bonuses: The Glove equip which gives a +2% crit chance to Flash of Light spells, and the 4 pc bonus which gives +30% healing to Holy Shock spells.

What we see here is a relative change, but not because of the direct scale in between the gear. Only because we have, at this point, reached the highest tiers and it's gear expectation that scales terribly, not the gear itself. While you could gem for a decent amount of Mp5 to make up for the deficiency, it wouldn't be *enough* for Sunwell standards. To be honest, that could also be true for the S3 to T6 comparison. However, wearing S4 would make you pretty much set on T5 content and under - and it's arguably quite easy to get at least a couple pieces of S4.

The problem of welfare epics, therefore, is not that they're interchangeable at the same level, but that they are easier to obtain to blast through lower level content. Basically, you can skip T4 content, jump straight into T5 and early T6, and get to late T6 to Sunwell content without half the effort other players put into the work. That is the ethical issue that I, and many others, have the problem with.

Even badge gear can't be considered "welfare" as you really do have to work to get the amount of badges it takes to get similar gear. Heroics aren't easy unless you have people way outgearing it, and it's simply a lot easier to grind honor or arena points than it is to farm badges. Perhaps that's a personal opinion, but anyone can jump into a BG or make a 2's team for points - gathering a tank, a healer, and two others to do a Heroic (or gathering a 10-man raid for Kara) is a little more difficult.

What I think I'm most annoyed with is that Blizzard keeps saying they try to make PvP and PvE interchangeable, yet they failed miserably at it by introducing the Resilience stat. There really wasn't a reason to introduce it in the first place - all it really accomplished is screwing over all crit-based damage classes, such as Rogues, Mages, Retribution Paladins, and Boomkins. They all *rely* on their ability to do burst damage, especially when fighting healers. All Resilience did was tip the scales in the healer's favor for survivability - it doesn't really help any of the other classes or specs.

To answer my self-imposed question, Season 4 is not fair - at the very least, it provides near-equivalent T6 (or superior in some cases) Gloves to every class except Tanks for practically no effort. As to the answer for Welfare Epics, while I don't like the concept, I can't say I don't use them. Granted, Blizzard didn't provide me in particular much of a choice - let me know when you see some actual Retribution Paladin gear drop in PvE content. I'll start looking for the flying pigs. =P

Tomorrow, I'll start the delve into the new Paladin talents. That will be the next three posts - distinct analysis on each of the trees for paladins. Unfortunately, I won't be doing this for other classes, since I simply don't possess the knowledge for high-end talents for any other class. Though I may be persuaded to do some rough one-day analysis of particular classes and my thoughts if people really have a demand for it. Simply comment in the next few days and I'll be happy to comply!

90% of All Statistics are Made Up - "Welfare Epics"

Sorry for the tardiness on this one - this week's been rough. Rest assured there will still be another post tomorrow. Expect a continuation; this article is a bit old and written before Patch 2.4, so I don't take into account Sunwell or S4 gear. I will focus on that in particular tomorrow. Think of this as a primer. =)

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Every time I find myself browsing the WoW forums, the biggest "problem" I see peoiple complaining about is the amount of people who never get to see end game content. It's a different percentage every time I see a new thread (though the average seems to be about 6% actually seeing end-game). I can sympathize to an extent. After all, I want to see end game as much as anyone else does. But I feel there's a point that most people are overlooking.

I feel because of the ease of obtaining PvP gear, everyone seems to feel that the game is obligated to hand everything to them. The only class functions who do not benefit from this "welfare epics" system are the tanks - after all, PvP gear has no useful PvE stats for defense and avoidance. Back to my point, people don't have to progress entirely through early PvE content to see later PvE content anymore. This is only true because of the removal of all attunement requirements, from SSC/TK to Hyjal and Black Temple.

What happened when the Hyjal attunement requirement got removed? We saw an influx of PvPers wasting their way through Archimonde after having spent months at the top of Arenas. We saw all the BG farmers use their easily gained PvP items to plow through PvE content.

Allow me to take a step back again. Neither PvE or PvP is easy. At least, not at the furthest tiers. Black Temple isn't a cake walk, and neither is 2k rated Arena. At the very least, Blizzard did a good job of scaling gear requirements for both sides of the game. Running battlegrounds over and over again is much akin to running 5-mans or Heroics repeatedly. Low rated Arenas are kind of like T4 content, mid rated is like T5, and high ratings are like T6. The gear represents these comparisons.

What I have an issue with is the effectiveness of low season PvP in PvE content when the low tier gear for PvE content is practically useless in PvP. Yes, resilience doesn't matter in PvE. But often times, the other stats more than compensate for these wasted points.

Let's make a direct comparison, from the T4 gear to the Season 1. I'm going to use the Paladin Holy gear as it's the easiest to compare between and the best for my own personal knowledge to make educated statements about.

Tier 4 |||| Season 1
------- |||| -----------
Armor..............6136 |||| Armor..............6284
Stamina...........163 (169) |||| Stamina...........209
Intelligence.....164 (167) |||| Intelligence.....141
Spell Crit.........67 |||| Spell Crit.........130 (134)
+ Healing........396 |||| + Healing........257
+ Mp5.............22 (24) |||| + Mp5.............0
Resilience.......0 |||| Resilience.......124 (131)
1x Red Socket |||| 4x Red Socket
2x Yellow Socket |||| 2x Yellow Socket
3x Blue socket |||| 0x Yellow Socket
1x Meta Socket |||| 1x Meta Socket

So, basically, as expected, the S1 gear is made for survivability while the T4 gear supports longevity. While you could easily socket for MP5 and get only slightly lower amount in the S1 than the T4, the same cannot be said for the lack of resilience on the T4 (not that anyone really sockets for resilience as it is). While Blizzard has supposedly supported the interchangeability between PvP and PvE, it seems the PvP items are generally itemized better for this swap than the PvE gear is. This only becomes slightly less true at higher tiers.

Tier 6 |||| Season 2
------- |||| -----------
Armor..............7415 |||| Armor..............7415
Stamina...........193 |||| Stamina...........268
Intelligence.....173 |||| Intelligence.....166
Spell Crit.........116 (118) |||| Spell Crit.........158 (162)
+ Healing........522 (542) |||| + Healing........341
+ Mp5.............42 (44) |||| + Mp5.............0
Resilience.......0 |||| Resilience.......136 (143)
0x Red Socket |||| 4x Red Socket
4x Yellow Socket |||| 2x Yellow Socket
4x Blue socket |||| 0x Yellow Socket
1x Meta Socket |||| 1x Meta Socket

While you have more gem slots in the T6 gear, you still can't make up the deficiency in resilience. And though meeting Mp5 standards in S3 is difficult and won't be on the same par, it's still do-able. On top of this, there is much more availability in other slots (trinkets, rings, misc armor) for Mp5 than there is for resilience.

I do not claim this is an absolute truth for all specs and class combinations, but I do believe I'm onto something. Perhaps there is a truth in the Welfare Epics theory after all.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about Season 4 and the fairness of giving PvPer's the option to higher end gear than is available to PvE'ers - or whether that theory is debunkable.