Grizzly, let me give you a little bit of an update and perhaps some encouragement...
My gear-up path was to run 10 games/week for a guaranteed 344 points per week and buy all the available ArenaPt+Honor gear that was possible without a rating. Additionally, I farmed honor to get the non-set pieces. Again, bought the best non-rating-required gear that was possible.
As I geared up, I began to see more and more success in the battlegrounds, but continued to have 95% loss in the arena during this phase (other than the /afk and "let's lose 5" teams). If you read this thread, you'll see my worries that weapons were holding me back in arena.
After getting to about 850-900 resilience by getting all the available arena/honor gear that was possible without a rating, I switched gears and began working on acquiring better weapons and getting Engineering to 400 on all characters.
Engineering was "easy", it's just a cash sink. Weapons were a little harder. At a bare minimum, you should have iLvl 219s from Pit of Saron Normal (Garfrost Hammers). These can be farmed relatively quickly. Here are a few things to think about for weapon upgrades beyond 219:
* I'd skip iLvl 232 weapons as an upgrade path. Not worth the time and effort for an upgrade that is not that great.
* iLvl 245 upgrade options are available via Trial of Crusader-25 man. On my server, these are PUGged as well as run by GDKP groups. Personally, I tried to get into GDKP runs as much as possible to have a shot at the Faction Champions STR based weapon as well as the Anub'Arak AGI polearm. The polearm isn't the best 245 ret weapon, but it certainly beats the 219s.
* Battered Hilts for the 251 weapon *may* be a viable option for you, depending on your server economy and your individual cash situation. I farmed Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron for about 25-30 hours, resetting them before I killed a boss and got saved. No luck on a drop, but while you're farming you're also looting everything and making some cash. Hilt prices on my server hit a low of about 5500g/hilt which I did NOT get a chance to utilize. I bought one at 7500 last week, and suspect that my server's current higher price reflects that fewer people are running these heroics now for gear upgrades and there are simply fewer to sell, driving the price up. I would not recommend farming them and hoping you'll get multiples, it's possible but I think there's better use of your time. I would recommend buying them if you can get a good deal or the financial outlay isn't too bad.
* Note: The financial outlay for running a GDKP ToC25 and spending 500-2000g on a 245 weapon is much less than a hilt. Not a huge difference between 245/251. I tried to run as many GDKPs as I could, and even bought a polearm for 400g... Stellar value, in my opinion.
* Other 251 options are found in ICC-10. There are THREE good 251 weapon drops in there, including one sword right off the first boss. If you are in a guild, you might be able to convince them to let you take a pally through the first boss for a shot at the weapon. Even if you can't swing this with a guild, ICC-10 is PUGged routinely and you should try to get all of your guys through there each week for a shot. If you have a lot of the 245/251/264 PvP gear, your "Gearscore" will be pretty high and you might find that you can get into ICC PUG groups fairly easily. People may harass you about the PvP gear, but you can minimize this if you're smart.
* A fantastic 264 weapon option is available on the first boss of ICC-25. Again, it's possible to PUG this instance. The great news is that you can join a PUG for ICC25, and if they can't down the boss, you don't get saved. If they kill the first boss but struggle to progress, it's not the end of the world for you. Two of my team have this weapon from PUG events. It's also possible on my server to find an odd GDKP 25 man run, jump on this if you have the cash, but expect a higher price than TOC25.
* You might also try contacting some of the better guilds on your server and offering them a guild bank donation for a 245-264 drop. I know a guild that has no more need for the drop and is DEing the awesome 264 weapon-- they've told me they're happy to have a pally come through and pay 4-5,000g for the thing if it drops. I'd be honest with people, tell them your team situation and try to reach a mutual beneficial arrangement. You'll appear less like a mooch or loser if you just lay out your situation.
*whew* Still with me?
Back to me and my arena progress. After a couple of weeks of concerted effort to improve my weapons, I was able to get a couple 245s on pallies and 232s on my DK and another pally. With a weapon loadout of 232-245-245-219-232, I was able to start winning matches and my win ratio climbed up to about 50%.
Keep in mind that your matchmaking rating is going to probably be in the 1300-1450 range because of the PvP gear you're sporting, so you will be matched against "better" teams or at least teams that will be harder to kill because they're also in your MMR neighborhood due to their gear. Just plan on most folks you meet having 750-850 resilience, even early in your arena progression.
If you have enough weaponry to be able to kill these 750-850 people, you'll start to win 20-50% of your matches and accumulate good points for the wins and lose very few points for your losses. With my above weapon loadout, I quickly climbed from 400 rating up to 1000 rating in one week.
Another week went by, and I picked up 2 weapons from ICC25 PUGs. New team loadout looks like:
232(DK) - 264 - 264 - 245 (polearm) - 251 (hilt). With this setup, I was able to very quickly shoot up to 1300ish rating, where I promptly stopped to farm honor and buy the belt upgrade, which requires rating. I'm still winning 70% of the matches against teams with MMR ratings near me. Only brutal losses I've had in the last week have been against 3 teams that had MMRs of 1950-2010. (Gotta love being paired against these guys... you don't actually lose any rating for these losses!)
I'm going to keep working on adding 251-264 weapons to my team, but I'm at the point now where I no longer feel that weapons are holding me back from hitting the 1500-1600 rating range. But there have really been 2-3 thresholds I've had to cross where my performance changed dramatically. First was getting everyone into the best armor that is available without a rating, the second was getting people into 232-245 gear, and the last big bump up in power was shifting more of the weapon gear to 251-261 range and finishing engineering (for rockets) on all characters.
It gets better. Hang in there!
