We’re currently planning to end the third Arena season and begin Arena Season 4 on June 24, 2008. This exciting Arena season will introduce the Brutal Gladiator set, and will also allow players to purchase Arena Season 2 items using the honor system. Please note that we will be resetting all Arena team and personal ratings. Players will still retain their Arena points and teams with this reset. The team and personal rating will simply be reset to the default 1500, allowing all teams to once again compete for top honors with a fresh start.

Eyonix (Source)

Personally, I thought season four would begin later than this. Afterall, it was stated by Blizzard that they wanted season four to begin after a “reasonable” amount of loot from Sunwell had started circulating. Also, season three started well after Illidan had been killed. Over five months after the first Illidan kill, to be exact. That was perhaps too long, in retrospect, but it seems much better than starting season four a mere month after Kil’Jaeden has been killed.

The final door in Sunwell Plateau just opened up on May 20th. We want that gear to begin circulating a bit before the next season starts. That’s how every season works, we wait until a reasonable number of people are able to grab gear from the highest raid before kicking off a season.

Drysc (Source)

Personally, I think it would do the playerbase a service for Blizzard to dicuss its arguments regarding why they’ve chosen to open season four this early with more detailed reasoning. I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Blizzard to argue they don’t want too many hunters with Thori’dal to have an extreme advantage for the end of season three. But, as part of a raiding guild that is currently working on M’uru, I’m rather concerned the season four weapons will have an extreme effect on guilds still competing for M’uru and Kil’Jaeden. Certainly, the top-end competition is now irrelevant and has played its course, but the competition for guilds that are still working on M’uru is very much alive. And currently you can put these guilds into two different categories: guilds that have the DPS budget necessary to kill M’uru, and guilds that don’t.

It’s probably arrogant for me to say this, but I’m pretty sure one of the two guilds behind us in progression on our server doesn’t have the DPS budget necessary to defeat M’uru, yet. I’ve been looking at their parses, lately, and their DPS is much weaker than ours and we are just making the budget ourselves. But the fact remains that we’ve shown we have the DPS necessary. So, in this regard, the encounter has given guilds like mine the opportunity for us to distinguish ourselves on a level of skill, rather than time commitment.

Now, my concern is that the opening of season four will remove this distinction between skill and time commitment for M’uru too early. Season four weapons are a big deal in terms of boosting a raid’s overall DPS when several members start picking them up. Muramasa, a sword that drops off M’uru, is only slightly better than Brutal Gladiator’s Slicer, and to me that’s rather disconcerting this early in progress. So you can bet guilds with members picking up the season four weapons may potentially cross over the threshhold of having too little DPS for a kill and having just enough. And, once your guild reaches that point, the kill then becomes more about time commitment and execution beyond optimizing DPS.

Personally, knowing the difference between my raid’s DPS and others on my server, I would be disappointed to see us leapfrogged by another guild that simply increases their DPS artificially in this manner while increasing their raid time from twenty hours a week to twenty-six. Because BT doesn’t exactly require top DPS on every encounter, it became more about time commitment. And, in this sense, the other guild certainly deserved to beat us, because they were willing to put in the extra time necessary to do so. But I think it’s very important and in Blizzard’s best interest to put Sunwell on a different pedestal in terms of DPS. Simply put, you should be required to either farm Sunwell heavily, or you should be required to find ways in terms of theorycraft to meet the DPS budget on the last two encounters of all of TBC. I don’t think guilds should have an opportunity to farm arena weapons this early in progress to do so. Selfish of me? You bet!

And on the point of selfishness, maybe Blizzard thought it was simply time to start season four in the context of arena progress itself. Season three has lasted longer than both seasons one and two, afterall. And the finals for the 3v3 arena tournament are coming up. But if there’s anything I have to argue, it’s that crossover of PvP and PvE gear can both be beneficial and a detriment. It can be beneficial in terms of allowing people the opportunity to augment their gear when loot drops have not gone their way or when they’ve taken too long on an encounter they simply can’t defeat. But it can be a detriment to things like guild competition in the first few months after the last boss’s first death worldwide.

This is really something Blizzard needs to look into. I think Blizzard needs to potentially consider banning the use of weapons like Warglaives in arena, and maybe temporarily banning the use of certain arena weapons in PvE until progress beyond merely the most hardcore level has played its course. Give it at least a couple of months and then throw the guilds that are stuck a bone. I think it’s too early to artificially boost guild’s DPS with new arena weapons right now. But it would also be a disservice to the PvP crowd to allow Thori’dal to have a major effect on the results of season three, as well as it would be a disservice to hold back this new season and drag out season three to eight whole months. So a compromise needs to be made somewhere.

Anyway, for those of you that are interested:When Season 4 begins, Season 3 items will be reduced in personal and team arena rating requirement to:

Shoulders: 1950
Weapon: 1800

The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:

Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none

In addition, some of the Season 4 quality items that will be purchasable with honor will also carry a personal and team arena rating requirement:

Boots: 1700
Ring: 1650
Bracers: 1575
Belt: none
Necklace: none
Trinket: none

The Season 2 items, which will move to the honor system when Season 4 begins, will continue to have no rating requirement.

Slorkuz (Source)