Quote Originally Posted by daviddoran View Post
It's annoying, and it sucks, but it's not THAT big of a deal. The difference in the new gear is negligible.
I think that this is true. One person was complaining that it was a 6% difference, and that it was huge. Another person crunched the actual numbers for 12 pieces for (I think) a DPS warrior, and the difference was about the equivalent of... a bracer. An ilevel 316 bracer, to be precise. It was kind of underwhelming, to be honest.

There are a few other things to consider:

1- This last couple of weeks were handled in an awfully sloppy manner by Blizzard. First, they do the conquest/honor conversion a week before they had planned, and lots of players got left hanging. Then they make this recent switch without warning, leaving players feeling as if they wasted their time. It's just a terrible way to manage your game. I don't think that I had ever felt that Blizzard took its players for granted until this past two weeks.

2- I'm not much of a grinder, in that I have my limits and I respect them. I earned enough honor over the weekend to upgrade around eight items, and could have gotten the rest. But there is only so much grinding I can handle, so I stopped. Since it was AV weekend, I was able to get more upgrades for the time spent. But I'm not feeling as bad as others are because I didn't force myself to play past the point where it was no longer fun.

3- Which points to (yet another) problem with how Blizzard handles PVP. In spite of any methods they use to try and slow the progression of gear in PVP, players know that they can grind out full sets in a short time and thus they do so. So when a screw up like this happens, a lot of players feel it. Telling them that it's their own fault doesn't make matters any better. Still...

4- This points to a problem with players, as well. Many players are angry because they insist that their full set of i365 gear is "OBSOLETE." That's because they feel that now, other players will grind out 371 gear and they'll be behind the curve. Well now, two things: one, the difference in gear is small, you're not losing arena games because the other guy had an extra bracer's worth of stats. Two, if Blizzard hadn't done this, you'd have had an edge because you decided to grind out a full set before the other guy did, at which point you'd be telling him to "suck it up."

5- And finally, another reason I'm not too upset with this for my own sake: I don't run arenas, and I have not run RBGs yet (though a guildie is looking to start a group for that this week). So this change doesn't hurt me much. And frankly, I would guess that more than 75% of the people crying on the WOW forums aren't doing arenas or RBGs either. I checked the profiles of some of the people complaining, and they had zero RBG rating and no arena teams. So they're pissed that their vanity gear says "365" instead of "371." Because it's not going to make a difference when you run normal BGs and daily quests, which is what they'll be doing with their epic PVP set.

So to summarize: Blizzard royally fucked players over the past two weeks. Lots of players have a legit beef over this. Lots of other players are complaining because that's what they always do, but this change won't make any difference to them.