L70 S2 PVP Sets – Finally Some PVE Love

Having finally gotten my shaman to 70 as a mostly solo/PVE player, I noticed a recent addition that apparently arrived in patch 2.4 along with the other goodies – blue PVP armor sets being sold for cheap by Outland quartermasters.

“Cheap” as in, not much gold and none of those everpresent PVP tokens/marks/goobers/wingdings required. What’s the catch? The pieces are spread across the basic faction quartermasters (Thrallmar/Honor Hold, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, The Sha’tar and Keepers of Time), and you need honored standing to purchase them.

This isn’t a big deal, for the most part – you can make that rep with Thrallmar/HH just by doing the quests in Hellfire Peninsula, and Cenarion Expedition, The Sha’tar and Lower City should all be well into friendly by now if you've quested in Zangarmarsh, Terrokar Forest and Nagrand - and can be raised the rest of the way with repeatables or the few odds and ends you may have overlooked on your way through while grinding to 70 (also note: you can get about 1.7k rep with Lower City from the Children's Week event, if it happens to be around that time of year). This means that for the average solo player, Keepers of Time is really the only one you will have to spend any length of time grinding for (maybe 10-15 runs on normal mode based on a quick read of wowwiki).

Shaman are lucky, being one of the classes that get multiple sets to choose from, so I’ll be going with 4 pieces of seer’s mail for my elemental shaman, with shoulders of seer’s ringmail; having 4 of a kind gets me the highest set bonus for seer’s mail, meaning I can leave shoulders to be the "odd man out" without really losing anything (ringmail and seer’s mail are fairly close in stats), and it best of all it saves me having to worry about KoT rep (not so lucky with my hunters though, who have only one set and therefore have to deal with the KoT rep if they want the chest piece) .

While these pieces are PVP gear, they are still better for PVE than anything available from the basic (non-instance/raid) quests (once you load them up with gems, armor kits and enchantments) - including nearly all of the stuff at the Shattered Sun Offensive quartermaster if you happen to be an elemental spec shaman, so it’s a nice tip of the hat to those of us who prefer solo grinding, even though the obvious intention here is to give non-PVP’ers an incentive to try PVP.

I think Blizzard finally realized that for a lot of gamers, PVP just seems like more trouble than it’s worth – formerly with PVP there really was no “dipping your toe in the water”, “messing around”, or “trying it out”; in the immortal words of Yoda, “There is no try, only do”. Pretty much the instant you enter an arena, agree to a duel, or turn on your /pvp flag, things get ugly fast, as you try to flail your way through a fight in PVE gear.

Prior to patch 2.4, end game PVP seemed like kind of a catch 22 to “outsiders” like myself; you couldn’t really succeed at PVP until you had at least decent PVP gear, but you couldn’t get decent PVP gear until you succeeded at PVP. Or so it seemed anyway, and so I was content to stick with solo/PVE content.

I recently finished grinding LC rep on my elemental shammy and one of my hunters, so for now I'll be working on gems and armor kits - once that's all set though, who knows. I might just have a go at a battleground.

Good job, Blizzard.