The Arenas of World of Warcraft give the most battle-hardened and cold-blooded fighters a place to compete against each other in gladiatorial battles for honor, glory, and power. Gather your allies, build your teams, and prepare to face off against merciless foes and formidable enemies in a race to claim the honor of being the highest ranked Arena Team on your realm.

The main goal of the Arena PvP System is to offer players a highly competitive environment that does not rely so much on a huge investment of time but rather on a team's playing skills. Because the Arena System is meant to be the ultimate PvP challenge, the level requirement to join an Arena Team is level 70. You have the option of engaging other players in practice matches even if you are not level 70 yet, but these skirmishes do not gain you a Team Rating or Arena Points (more on those later).

The fundamental design issue with regards to soloable instances is that you have to tune them to be soloable. In this game, that basically means providing a challenge that would not favor or hinder any one class. With the nature of class diversity being what it is in this game, this severely limits the difficulty level of a soloable dungeon.

If it requires too much healing to complete, pure melee or casters are impeded.

If it requires significant amounts of dps, you either have to spec and gear properly for one, single dungeon or pure dps classes simply have a leg up.

If you can't tank or mitigate damage effectively...well, you're dead at the first pull.

Therefore, if you reduce group size and composition to a single participant, the more generic and easy you have to make the dungeon. If the dungeon then drops any significant loot, you end up with folks farming the thing at all hours and creating thousands upon thousands of instances until the hardware wets itself, then short-circuits due to increased moisture.

While the shift to the new Honor system will 'lock' a certain number of titles, it will not remove them completely. In fact, we are already adding titles for specific events and have room to develop methods to gain other titles in the future. Granted, most of the titles available currently are directly related to PvP and the Arena ranking system particularly, but there are other examples:

* Achieving Exalted reputation in all Battlegrounds will confer a title.
* The first gong ringer of the Ahn'Qiraj event will be conferred a title

For future development, we plan to develop other methods by which titles can be gained, but we also wish to keep them rare, as providing a clear path to title gain dilutes the value of the title.

Artwork

Reclamation by Manboy (Artwork) --

Community News

Warcraft Weekly - 12/01/06 by Blizzard (Community News) -- We invite everyone to take a moment and relax by reading th...

Since our previous Battle Plan, World of Warcraft has gained a considerable amount of new in-game content, as well as improved and expanded service features -- all of which have been focused on enhancing the game experience for our passionate, ever-growing community.

One example of the new content we’ve added is Naxxramas, a multi-winged 40-player raid dungeon that pits players against the forces of the lich Kel’Thuzad. We’ve also revamped Light’s Hope Chapel to make it a fully functional and exciting quest hub. In addition, many new items have been implemented, including new PvE and PvP armor sets, along with a powerful new Legendary caster item.

In terms of service enhancements, many players have taken advantage of the Paid Character Transfer service, which enables players to move characters between realms. Also, we’ve decreased battleground queue times by implementing the new cross-realm battleground feature. By allowing players across several realms to play in the same battleground, wait times have significantly improved for most battleground matches.

The normally scheduled weekly maintenance on Tuesday, December 5 is being extended to apply a content patch. All realms will be down for extended realm maintenance from 1:00 AM PST until approximately 1:00 PM PST that day.

The Looking for Group Tool is a new feature to World of Warcraft that we'd like to heavily stress test today. We would appreciate your assistance in a server wide test for this new tool. It should not affect your other play testing. Test setup:

1. TURN OFF Auto Join & Auto Add Members. This will keep you in the system and will not adjust your regular group/solo play.
2. RAIDING PLAYERS - Join the LFM and LFG queue for any dungeon.
3. GROUPED PLAYERS - Join LFM for any dungeon.
4. SOLO PLAYERS - Join the LFG for any dungeon.
5. Try to break the tool and report any anomalies in this thread. In particular, we're currently tracking down a bug where when Looking For More, the players for that particular dungeon does not update. For example I'm looking for more for scholomance and then switch to looking for more for stratholme... I would see the dungeon players from scholomance still.

Hi there, this notification is meant to inform you of some significant changes regarding the way we're handling UI addons. Over the last few years, we've seen a number of awesome, gameplay-enhancing UI mods along with a fair number of UI mods that run counter to our philosophies regarding what addons should and shouldn't be able to do.

Essentially, we don't want UI mods to make combat-sensitive decisions for players and as such, we've made some changes that block functionality that we feel is counter to the spirit of these philosophies. As such, addons and macros can't make decisions on who to target or what spells to cast.

That being said, our programmers have implemented a host of new functionality in order to allow many popular and benign UI mods to continue to function (once those mods are updated to take advantage of the new functionality), and will be providing some follow-up information on these forums as to how to take advantage of the new functionality.

Just to clarify, addons and macros will still be able to cast spells (with user interaction of course), they just won't be able to use logic to intelligently pick spells or targets.

We are now offering free character transfers for the below realms. You can take advantage of these transfers by accessing the character move page here.

We will be offering these transfers until December 7, however please keep in mind that transfers for any of these realms may be closed before that date if we see an adequate number of players moving between realms. We highly recommend that if you choose to move that you do so as soon as you are able. If any of the below transfers are stopped before December 7 we will update this thread.

Source --> Destination
Bronzebeard --> Hyjal
Aggramar --> Kael'thas
Alexstrasza --> Muradin
Thrall --> Norgannon
Gnomeregan --> Kilrogg

There will also be the introduction of Arena based combat, where teams of players (2v2, 3v3 and 5v5) can enter a Gladiator style death-match from the numerous Battle masters posted around the world. It's not until players reach level 70 that this offers rewards for winning - apart from the satisfaction of ripping your opponents to shreds obviously. In order to obtain anything from your victories you have to participate in Rated Matches, which require a Team Charter and some friends to sign up with. The Team Charter works in the same principal as the guild system to register. The points and rewards earned from these battles are separate from the normal honour related rewards.

As well as the new PVP system and Arena battles, a new Battleground will be included in the expansion called 'Eye of the Storm'. This can be entered by alliance and horde, from level 61 upwards, and is for teams of 15v15. The map is set in the Outworld and consists of two giant floating islands and a smaller island in the middle connected by three bridges. There are four towers located around the map which can be controlled by either team. When a tower is captured it contributes a small amount of points. The game is won by the first team to reach 2000 points. As well as controlling the towers, points can be earned by returning a flag which spawns on the smaller central island to one of the captured bases.

Just like all mounts, it will be required that you have the appropriate riding skill for flying mounts. Just like the paladin and warlock mounts, the Druid will receive the necessary riding skill when getting the flight form ability when it is trained. However, it will be necessary to train in the epic ground mount riding skill before you are able to use/obtain flight form or flying mounts. In actuality Druids will be receiving their flight ability for almost no cost.

It's the same as training in new levels for a profession, you can't go straight to master or artisan, you have to go through each skill level prior. If you currently don't have an epic mount and don't plan to have one throughout your time to level 68, then there will be a cost associated with Druids needing to buy previous riding skills aside from the flight form training itself.