So I've been really excited about the coming of Arena season four. Unfortunately I'm not particularly thrilled about the gear models, and I am not alone. Perhaps the developers say reusing the tier 6.5 models from the Sunwell (Tier 6.5) as a good way to cut corners, but it just doesn't look like PvP gear. It seems to be the way the Arena gear is designed.

I'm pretty sure whoever recolored these skins probably has an issue with their visual perception. The Hunter gear looks like an armored clown suit and the Shaman set is reminiscent of a test for colorblindness. I'm not usually one to rant, but these sets are a visual disappointment. I'm not asking for pink and black (although that appeals to my inner girly girl), but for the love of Christopher Walken, at least make the set match itself.

To date my favorite set to look at is the Season Two gear, especially the Warrior set. I feel that they the designers really captured the uniqueness of the classes best with those sets.

What do you think of Season Four gear so far?

Drysc has posted on the forums to clear up any questions about what's happening with PvP gear in Season 4. And while the rumors that Naxx gear was leaving the game marked the first instance of Blizzard removing content, here's the second: season one gear will no longer be available during Season 4. Not a big loss, since there is now other good PvP gear floating around, but a loss nonetheless.

Season 2 gear, as expected, will move to honor, with no ratings requirements. And Season 3 gear will be released according to the ratings requirements and rules set out the other day.

Got all that? So start saving that honor and/or practicing for the good ratings now. You have to think that, with all of this news solidified from Blizzard about Season 4, the start must surely be right around the corner. But of course this is Blizzard we're dealing with -- we won't know when it's coming until it's actually here.

Drysc has just posted what may soon be known as the death knell of "welfare epics," announcing new arena season 4 rating requirements for the brutal gladiator gear that extend not only to the shoulders and weapon, but to many other pieces of gear as well, even to honor-purchased gear. We've seen some of the gear leaked recently, and some of the ratings requirements leaked a bit earlier than that, but now we have the official whole picture.

Check out the word of Drysc after the jump.

Drysc posted yesterday to tell us a bit about what will be forthcoming when Season 4 hits the servers. It's honestly mostly stuff we knew already. Season 4 will not begin immediately upon the release of 2.4. Season 1 will go the way of the old level 70 honor gear and disappear from vendors, Season 2 will be gained via honor, and season 3 will go down in price, while still keeping the personal rating requirement to purchase the shoulders and weapon. However, the surprising little tidbit is how little they currently plan to change the requirement. Drysc quoted a requirement of 1950 for the shoulders and 1800 for the weapon. That's a total drop of only 50 points for each item. Of course, he also stressed that this information was not final, and neither the final requirement drop on season 3 nor the start date of Season 4 had been announced yet.

There is some concern from some comers that that drop is possibly a bit too low. Drysc responded to one player's voicing of those concerns with a somewhat cryptic reply that he thought they were making a few too many assumptions. I'm not quite sure what he could mean by this. I myself can't imagine a team that would climb to 1800 rating and simply satisfy themselves with season 3 weapons when they could make one last push to season 4 rating, so to me, the confusion is justified. Perhaps Drysc is hinting at a mechanics change in the way arena rating is calculated, or the fact that his numbers could easily change themselves? Perhaps he simply means that Blizzard is actively trying to shake the "welfare epics" stigma, and that people shouldn't assume they're entitled to low requirement ratings on the season 3 gear. I'd tend to lean towards that last one myself.

What do you think? Are these numbers too high? Are you expecting Blizzard to change them? Or do you applaud this as a step away from making Arena gear a welfare system for those who can't or won't raid or save badges?

It is not unusual for younger or less experienced players to approach me with questions on my PvP experience.

"Allie," they ask. "How can we avoid sucking like you?"

"Well, first it helps to have a functional mouse," I always say, favoring them with a benevolent smile whilst swirling a fine glass of port. "Click-to-move is usually impossible when neither your right mouse button nor scroll wheel actually work. You'd be amazed at the number of problems you can pin on your refusal to replace a relatively cheap piece of equipment. Never, ever, get rid of Mr. Gimpy if you want a ready excuse for being a keyboard turner."

They scribble this and then look at me reverently, hopeful for any additional pearls of wisdom I might drop. However, after receiving so many queries and accidentally mistelling most of them with, "I can tank, but gimme a sec to get rid of this punk who's bugging me," I have decided, in the spirit of all gifted Machiavellians, to preserve my bad advice in a medium more lasting than /w.

For beyond faulty mice, children, we get into more advanced and underhanded PvP tactics...

At first glance, I didn't really think there was much out of the ordinary about a post made by one of Nihilum's resto Shaman, Neg. A number of raiding guilds have complained strenuously about the presence of easy-to-obtain epics in the game, but any post entitled, "Does Blizzard Hate Raiders?" is typically going to get a scoff and little else.

I had read the article shortly before zoning into Black Temple for the third time ever, and for the first time with the ingame sound on. My guild had recently killed both High Warlord Naj'entus and Supremus, and while the Karabor Sewers portion of the instance is interesting to look at, it pales in comparison to what you'll see once you're offered a teleport to a different floor by a member of the Ashtongue Deathsworn. My guildies and I were really just there to farm Hearts of Darkness for resist gear and to explore a little bit, with nothing really important on our minds. Nevertheless, what we saw that night was beautiful. The floor you're ported to has a tiny, friendly area with the Ashtongue Quartermaster, but beyond that lie a number of sinister things. The ceiling is pillared by giant statues much like those that guard the portal into Outland, and rogues lurk in pairs seemingly all around you. Not infrequently you find yourself turning around to shouts on vent to see them rapidly killing off members of the raid; we finally hit upon the strategy of sending our own rogues off to sniff out the presence of danger while the raid itself was ringed and guarded on all sides by the tanks. Once another set of rogues was found, our hunters set up Flares to flush them out of hiding, marked them, and pulled carefully. You were only really safe if you were in the middle portion of the raid; wandering off to go explore on your own was unthinkable.

The music is lovely, the atmosphere is stellar, and for the first time ever in a raid I felt the real sense of a dangerous place with violent, unpredictable creatures that didn't want us there. It was one of the few times that we've actually had to use real strategy as a raid outside of a boss fight. Black Temple makes it abundantly obvious that you are a small, embattled group struggling to survive against overwhelming odds. Most raids are pretty straightforward - learn the tricks to the trash, pull the trash, clear the trash, ask "What's the respawn timer?", and then kill the boss. Tempest Keep is a pretty cold and sterile environment; Serpentshrine Cavern is more interesting visually but the trash is, in many cases, just pull after pull after pull of the exact same stuff (weirdly enough, Karazhan and Zul'Aman seem to come a little closer to the Black Temple raid mentality than their Tier 5 brothers). But there is so much obvious care and attention lavished on the endgame raids, I said to myself (while taking tons of screenshots and turning the sound up), that I just don't buy the argument that Blizzard doesn't give a hoot about raiders.

But Neg isn't really writing about the conflict between raiders and the rest of us, which has been a pretty thoroughly discussed in one form or another. It's his contention that the raiding world - what I saw on Thursday and what Nihilum practically does professionally - is becoming obsolete in this, the Age of Purple.

What does it take to get epic gear? Well you can do arenas or battlegrounds and save up points for gear. It takes a few weeks of arenas to get a piece of the most recent releases. A good weekend of battlegrounds might net you a piece or two. You can do raids for epic drops. It can take weeks to learn fights and clear raids. A hard night of raiding could earn you nothing but a repair bill.

Among raiding and PvP, which shows more dedication and skill? The term "welfare epic" has popped up to describe gear that some believe is given to a player without the appropriate level of effort. In his official forum post, Kaizersosay of Spirestone asserted that there are no welfare epics- that every piece of purple loot takes effort. He said that the phrase welfare epic is elitist. The thread sparked a lively discussion of welfare epics for both PvE and PvP players.

Since the inception of the arena system in WoW, players have been very creative in finding ways to boost their ratings. First it was a matter of highly-ranked teams selling slots to less skilled players. Lately the subject of trading wins and losses has been the buzz. Blizzard has taken the steps that they feel necessary, such as instituting the personal rating system, to combat the issue.

In a thread entitled "Selling arena teams ok/not ok?" Legolawls reiterated the subject of team leaders selling off points, and blue posts condoned the behavior. That player feels that selling violates the spirit of the game. This elicited a responses from both Crepe and Turtle (via Auryk) saying that there are currently no rules preventing the sale of an Arena team. Interestingly they even hinted that entire team sales are acceptable. As long as the transaction occurs only in-game it is considered to be a legitimate service. Team captains are free to sell slots or even their entire teams as they see fit. If the team were being sold outside of game, for a real cash sum, the matter would be different.

Tomorrow morning Arena Season 3 is scheduled to start up and, among other things, this will bring a lot of new loot into the game. I'm sure many of you are like myself and have been hoarding up honor and arena points in order to buy the new gear as soon as it appears on the vendors. This season, due largely to the new rating requirements placed on some of the new items, I've decided to actually put forth effort to be competitive in the arena.

With that in mind, picking up the new PvP gear becomes a priority, and I imagine other people are going to be in a similar position. Gone are the days of dying in the arena week after week in order to finally pick up that amazing weapon. Of course, for many players, there's a much more important aspect to preparing for Season 3: making money on the auction house.

Wreck from Addicted to WoW sent us his interesting opinion on the Season 3 gear required ratings. Why, he asks, didn't Blizzard put rating requirements on all the gear? When season 3 starts, the season 3 shoulders and weapons will require a high Arena rating to own (2000 and 1850), and Wreck wants to know why only the shoulders and weapons got put behind a rating wall. Why not make all the gear that much harder to get?

As far as I know, the cited reason behind the ratings was to keep raiders from losing in the Arenas and still getting gear. The weapons in season 3 are terrific, even compared to the mid-endgame raiding gear, and so raiders were playing just their 10 games every week, saving up Arena points, and grabbing the hot weapons. Blizzard didn't want that happening, so they put the requirement on the weapons-- you have to be good to wield those now.

But the shoulders I don't quite understand. I've been told that the shoulders are the most obvious piece of "leet" armor, and that Blizzard, as Wreck says, really wants seeing those shoulders on someone to be a sign that they're really good in the Arenas. But shoulders? As a few players have said, give them a title or something if you want them to be recognized. There's good reason for putting the weapons behind a rating, but if you're going to put shoulders back there too, you might as well require the rating for all the pieces, or leave the armor out of it completely.