Good morning my happy little magelings (and non-magelings for that matter) and what an interesting morning it is.  "Why?" I hear you ask; well because Blizzard has announced its upcoming changes to Valour Points and Conquest Points in Patch 4.3.

(And yes Valour has a U in it, I know I'm fighting an uphill battle to preserve the British spelling of things here but by God I'm British and I'll resist any corruption of my language to my dying day; we already lost the empire, please let us keep the U in words at least!)

Valour Point Changes

We’re in the process of making slight adjustments to the Valor Point (VP) drops on the 4.3 PTR which testers will soon see. In both 10- and 25-player raids, bosses will now drop 100 VP each (down from 115 and 135 respectively). We’ll also be changing Firelands raid bosses to drop 50 VP per kill upon release of the patch.

This change is being made to further emphasize the desire to kill bosses for the items they drop. In the 4.3 raid, tier sets can only be earned from boss drops, and as Raid Finder will allow for just about anyone to get a chance to kill bosses, we think there will be less need for Valor overall. We want to try to match the lower desire for VP with a slightly slower acquisition rate.

We appreciate your thoughts and constructive discussion on how these changes may affect you and your guild once 4.3 is released.

Now to me this seems like a pretty nasty kick to the crotch for 25 man raiding guilds yet again.  I appreciate that 25 man raids do get more drops per boss to compensate for the increased number of people in the raid but honestly I don't see the point of stressing out a raid leader with trying to herd the clusterfuck that is 25 raiders (btw that's my new term for a group of raiders because it is nearly always a clusterfuck) when you can earn the same number of VPs for a 10 man raid.  Sure you get slightly less drops per boss but the overall ease and efficiency of organising 10 people to have them all online at the same time, all buffed with the right food, potions, flasks and all feeling happy and content with no teddies being thrown in the corner far outweighs the (very limited) pros of 25 man raiding.  I'll not be so bias as to say 25 man raiding is dead, I honestly haven't done the research to back that statement up, but certainly anecdotal evidence and the experience of my own guild and many other guilds on my admittedly low population server is that 25 man raiding has largely fallen by the wayside.  These changes are certainly not going to do anything to help that. (Read More after the break)

Probably need to start adding a new category such as news for posts like this (Patch notes, Dev Q&As etc etc) and maybe get a shiney news scroller or something.  Not sure yet, but def thhinking the site could do with a little bit of a revamp.  Let me know what you guys think, anyhoo on with the post.

So what with the recent Developer's Q&A and the news that Arena Season 10 could be ending as early as next week, I thought a timely Mage News post was in order.  Well as timely as I get anyway XD

End Of PvP Season

Blizzard recently announced that Season 10 of Arena (and Rated BGs) could be ending as early as Tuesday 15 November (UPDATE: Blizzard have confirmed that Arena Season 10 will end on 29 November).  I emphasised the could because it is not yet set in stone; there is still testing on Dragon Soul ongoing on the PTR and I imagine the date for 4.3 will largely be dependent on quite how much tweaking Blizzard needs to do to get it right but either way the season will be ending soon and 4.3 is likely to drop either in late November or early December (SPECULATION: The patch usually drops about a week after the end of the Arena season, so we can reasonably expect Patch 4.3 on or about the 06 December).  Personally I'm going with MMO Melting Pot's prediction of early December as a tactical decision to gazump the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Anyway, I digress and the point is that it's time to start bringing your PvP gear purchases and Arena matches to a close and getting prepared to stockpile your honour points for the next set of honour gear.

If you aren't familiar with the way the new PvP season gear works and you want to give Rated Battlegrounds and Arena a try next season it's important to remember the following; next season's Honour Gear will be of a higher item level than this season's Conquest Gear.  Sure it will still be called Ruthless Gear, but it'll be Ruthless Gear Season 11 and you will find that even the best geared PvP'ers of this season will be grinding out honour to afford the lowest gear (outside of crafted) of next season.  Those few extra stat points can mean the difference between victory and death within the dreaded Arena.

So how do we prepare? Join me after the break to find out and also have a look at the Dev's Q&A about Mages.