Quote:
Quote:
10 games = Maximum 2 hours
Farming Kara for 1-2 piece of gear = Max 20 hours
PVP > PVE
Well... thats 10 games a week at 2 hours a week, to get... one piece of gear at a time. How many weeks at 1850+ rating do you need to do 10 games a week at for your whole set? And how about the vindicators set, how much PVP time do you need to spend doing BG's?
It is, from my experience, MORE time consuming to PVP for gear. And it's not even TOP gear, it's good gear, but it's focus is primarily towards PvP ... NOT PvE.
First of all, your experience isn't gospel. And really I only say this because of the way you use caps and the overall tone your caps seems to imply.
Second, and maybe even partially misunderstood, you don't need any specific rating to get any S3 except the weapon and shoulders.
Third, you can get any single vindicator piece of gear in no more than one BG weekend (even more realistically in 2 days of the 4 day BG weekend) if you do a small bit of research to figure out which BG weekend it is, and whether or not you feel comfortable spamming that particular BG back to back (looking at your honor per hour)... It's not impossible to make 10k honor in a single day... though that's a very long day not to mention a more favorable BG weekend.
Continuing further from that... You
know you will get the Vindicator item and even
aproximately how long it will take you to get it after you get your hands dirty in starting up the BGs. It's almost like there's an imaginary experience bar filling up to full as you progress. With random drops you don't get that, and for some folks the piece of gear you were wanting might decide to drop the one night you decide to hit the movie theater instead of raiding (obviously, in more intense guilds, going to the theater on a raid night might be a serious offense)
The thing in Kara is that the loot
is random drop... then
if the gear you want did drop you're potentially competing for it against someone else, then there's the idea that you might not be able to make a run one week or you have the worst of luck and you won't get anything of real use for another 2+ runs... and then even if you did get the gear over someone else
it then becomes a matter of where does your guild stand in progression? A) Your guild is doing T5/T6 content and their only reason to do kara is to help alts, or farm badges, etc. In this position, you can probably pick up a few key pieces from Kara before you're carried through Gruul's lair once or twice, then pick up a key piece while there before you're doing T5 content etc... If this is how things are for an individual I can definitely see why they think the way they do about PVP gear being a waste of time for PVE content. Not everyone is on this boat, however. Not everyone can have their hand held through a raid like this. If anyone finds this wording offensive, it's not my intention.
B) Your guild is just getting into kara and everyone and their mom is looking at those loots for upgrades. In this position, even if you get a few lucky pieces of gear for upgrades on your first run, you still have to spam the place and hope everyone else can get themselves geared up enough such that your guild as a whole can progress to the next best thing. That... or you can guild hop once you've gotten what you wanted/needed to move on... which the only thing for me to say about that is f' that. Then, once your guild as a whole is capable of progressing to something a bit harder (you know, after all the guild hoppers have weeded themselves out, picked up a few more new interested folks, lost one more to guild hopping, having to rerun and regear a few folks, etc), it's kind of the same thing all over again... everyone now wants stuff from gruul's lair... and you have to spam stuff until the guild as a whole can move to harder stuff
In "B" this gets to a point where you can't even label a piece of gear for the time it took to earn/obtain. You can clear kara in 6 hours this week, clear it again the next week, and a 3rd time after that... but this time spent ultimately now has to be tacked onto the additional time you will spend in Gruul's Lair or SSC... and then that gets tacked on to the time spent in BT... all just to get to a point that you have the best option available to you. Really... how many hours do you think it will realistically add up for the average person to get to a point that they can have the 1st or 2nd best option in the entire game available to them through means of PVE content? This includes the time spent to buff gear (gems, enchants, leather working patches) all on gear that will probably eventually be replaced on the quest toward getting the #1 gear.
There are a number of S3 options where they rank the #2/3 spot for a purpose in PVE play out of all the gear in the entire game and some of them aren't even that far behind that gear slot's #1 spots. And if that purpose of a particular piece is DPS... it also comes with the added bonus of hightened HP, and better overall survivability. It also happens to come with the advantage that it's something you can do/obtain on your own time or on a more casual schedule.
In close, stop with all this "PVPing for gear is a bigger waste of time" VS "PVEing for gear is the bigger waste of time", because realistically it will vary person to person. And when I say it will vary, I don't even mean within the constraints of the "A" and "B" scenarios I gave above. There's far more to an individual's life and their expectations of it for this to be so easy to break down. Different people will vary in the way they value their time spent on a game. Some folks will have more time to dedicate to the game than others. And Arena is something that is open to even the most casual gamer all while offering some of the best gear options in the game even when placed on a PVE scale.
Edited, Mar 5th 2008 3:32pm by Torzak