One of the more controversial parts of the Patch 3.2 PTR was the decision to remove the 2v2 bracket from serious arena play. In the 3.2 patch notes thus far it was said that "The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5-player team rating. Rating requirements from 2-player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear."

That effectively killed off the 2v2 bracket.

However today, Blizzard has done an about face on the issue. Sort of. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. They're listening to feedback and this patch is in testing. The fact that they're willing to make such a major change based on feedback they've received is a great thing.

So as of today, your 2v2 rating will count towards your ability to purchase gear, etc... It will mean something. However the following exceptions apply:

• The current season's weapons will not be available for purchase with your 2v2 rating
• The current season's shoulders will not be available for purchase with your 2v2 rating
• Your 2v2 rating will not count towards the Gladiator title/rewards

The full announcement after the break.

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we talk about how to play a Rogue in 3v3.

As part of the new design for the upcoming Arena Season 7, Blizzard is planning to remove the ability for a player's 2v2 rating to count towards their eligibility for the current season's rewards. This means that unless you're playing in the 3v3 or 5v5 arena brackets, you won't qualify for any of the newest gear. As a class who's dominance has always been most prominent in the 2's bracket, I believe this change hurts the Rogue the most.

We're one of the worst classes in 5v5, and that's a trend that has continued since Season 1. Luckily, we do have viability in 3v3. When combined with a caster and a healer, Rogues provide the leverage it takes to give their teammates an opening to unload powerful spells into the target while stunned and their healer is Blinded. While our problems with low survivability are more evident when there are 2-3 DPS pounding on us, with intelligent cooldown usage and an aggressive playstyle, Rogues can conquer the 3's bracket.

Hell yeah! MMO Champion has done its usual data-mining magic and managed to unearth most of the latest Arena gear and whoa, does it look amazing. Boubouille notes that many of the sets are incomplete and that some Photoshop work was done for display purposes, but I think we get the general idea. Season 7 items are the latest iteration of evolutionary design, which builds visually upon older sets. This design evolution was hinted at in vanilla World of Warcraft, where the old Warlord / Field Marshal PvP sets were minor visual upgrades from the Champion / Lieutenant Commander sets. The Season 7 item sets should probably called Badass Gladiator because, well, personally I think they're just... badass.

While Blizzard promised the return of faction-specific sets in Patch 3.2, these will apply to PvE Tier 9, and from the looks of it won't be as phenomenal as it sounds considering classes sharing the same armor type will look nearly identical to one another. On the other hand, Season 7 gear, which also seems to introduce new weapon models, keep on improving without having to resort to dragon nipples or orbiting Thralls. It seems that Zarhym's promise of the Arena sets improving as the seasons continue is a solid one.

Despite his sometimes-crass way of getting his point across, Ming is one of the best PvP bloggers around these days. When the Patch 3.2 patch notes revealed the upcoming change to resilience, I was hoping to hear his take on it. He delivered! If you haven't seen the patch notes, Resilience in Patch 3.2 will lower incoming damage across the board in addition to its protection against critical strikes. By Ming's estimates, after all other factors have been taken into consideration, the change will bring a net difference of an added 10% damage reduction in the upcoming Season 7.

That number probably doesn't seem like a lot to people who don't set foot into the arena at all, but for people who arena seriously and competitively, it will be a game changer. The developers' stated goal is to slow down the pace of the arena, and this change will do exactly that. An extra 10% buffer on survivability has the potential to absolutely be the difference between a one minute game and a five minute game. It has the potential to be the difference between a gib and a last second defensive save. As has been stated, it's possible to die in the span of one GCD, and that's not fun. If this change can extend one GCD to two or three GCDs to allow for reaction time, the arena just might end up more balanced than it has ever previously been, unless you pretend Mace Stun didn't exist in the middle seasons of The Burning Crusade.

You really shouldn't take my word for it, though. I PvP, but I'd never claim to be a highly rated anything. There's a reason I was waiting for Ming's take on it. Go read what he has to say, and be bolstered by it. The arena might actually be truly fun again.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. If you've been keeping up with the many changes in Patch 3.2, you might get an inkling that PvP is going to change drastically and for the better. Adam has already gone through the whopper announcement that Blizzard hinted at some time back: players can now gain experience from the Battlegrounds. It's something I'd wished for since the days of vanilla WoW and the developers have finally gotten around to implementing it in the next major patch.

Does this mean the death of twinks? Not necessarily. Players can opt to toggle experience gains on and off by going to Behsten in Orgrimmar or Slahtz in Stormwind (best-in-slot, get it?) and ponying up 10 Gold. But wait, there's more! Players who turn off experience gains will only be placed in the same Battleground queues as other players who opt not to gain experience. That's right -- twinks will be facing off against twinks. Twinks who have always contended that it wasn't about the unfair gear advantage will finally get the opportunity to test their mettle against equally geared opponents. Enjoy.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. After the jump, we'll take a look at a whole bunch of changes that will impact World of Warcraft PvP from the obvious (Arena and Battleground changes) to the not-so-obvious (item and ability changes). Let's hit it.

One thread over at the forums sparked quite a discussion when it asked what the problem was with World of Warcraft PvP. It's a pretty good question and definitely not something with a simple answer, but Ghostcrawler took up the task and addressed several issues in his usual forthcoming fashion. In a nutshell, Blizzard views the following issues as the primary problems of PvP:

• Too much emphasis on Arenas and not enough on Battlegrounds.
• Too much emphasis on 2s and not enough on 3s and 5s.
• Not enough class / spec representation in Arena. Warlock, hunter and shaman numbers in particular are too low, but they're not the only ones.
• Too fast-paced.
  

Ghostcrawler proceeded to explain the last point in detail, talking once again about burst damage and reiterating their intent that PvP should be a balance between damage, healing, and crowd control. He says that Blizzard plans to "add an extra GCD or two" in the small window where a player can either be healed to full or fall to enemy fire, allowing players to better use their full toolbox. Anyone who has ever played Arenas should know that that's a pretty tall order.

Arena Junkies has an appropriately-themed contest going on over at their site where they asked their community of high-rated Arena players to design their own Arena. The community was quick to whip out everything from pencils to 3D programs and came up with a pretty good selection of possible Arena maps. How good were the maps? Well, let's just say I'd take any of the submissions over the awful Ring of Valor Arena. Alright, so maybe that's not a good gauge... but it's worth going over the entries to see what creative ideas the Arena-enthusiastic community have come up with.

The top three winners will receive tickets to BlizzCon while registered Arena Junkies users who vote for the winning maps have a chance to win a Blizzard Authenticator. Pretty cool prizes for a pretty cool contest, so head over to their site and register if you haven't already. New Arena maps would be a welcome addition to the game and conceivably not too much work considering no new mechanics need to be in place unlike the Battlegrounds, which have different objectives. In fact, new Battlegrounds maps using the same mechanics would be an interesting addition to break the tedium.

The dominance of Rogue/Mage/Priest continues as SK Gaming defeated eMazing Gaming's faceroll Unholy/BM/Holy comp in the Major League Gaming Columbus Grand Finals 6-3 (best of 11 counting previous matchups). SK Gaming took home the $9,000 Grand Prize in the first leg of the MLG 2009 pro circuit, proving that the US still has a competitive RMP team. Europe's RMP contingent, Ensidia, barely missed the Finals after dropping to eMG in the prior round.

Some of the teams didn't do so well despite expectations, such as two-time MLG winners Fnatic, who were playing without their Warrior, Rhaegyn. Fnatic did rather poorly, playing a Rogue/Warlock/Shaman comp that simply couldn't match up against the dominant RMPs or even eMG's Death Knight/Hunter/Paladin. Evil Geniuses also played below par, but there really have to be teams that occupy the bottom of the standings. The good news is that teams collect points through all MLG legs to tally at the end of the season, so we might see some changes in the next MLG stops.

All the matches were streamed through three different sites via Octoshape, but the streams were choppy and often stalled more than it did in the first two days of the tournament. It came to the point where the matches were simply unwatchable, which is a shame because there were some pretty good games on the last day. The shoutcasters did an excellent job commentating on the matches but camerawork and the pace of the games were just too fast at times to appreciate. Arena Tournaments could benefit greatly from instant replays, slow motion, and camera angles beyond the third person view. Replays should be available on GotFrag soon.

The second day of competition at the Major League Gaming 2009 Pro Circuit has just wrapped up, with SK Gaming leading all teams with a 5-1 record followed closely by eMazing Gaming and Europe's Ensidia with identical 4-1 slates. The entire event was streamed live through MLG's site, as well as GotFrag and MMO Champion, and if you missed them there are short recaps of the matches over at GotFrag, as well as a brief match overview. The Arena Tournament uses a best-of-five format where no maps are played twice, which is a great concession to the fact that some team comps play better in particular maps.

Over $15,000 are at stake in the tournament, with the first place winner taking home $9,000. It's been an exciting two days so far, and even though the Rogue/Mage/Priest comp continues to exert its dominance in the format, the current environment has also opened up to relatively newer comps such as Rogue/Warlock/Shaman and Death Knight/Hunter/Paladin. Day three will see which team comes out on top and takes home the prize, with the rest of the matches in this roundrobin tournament streamed live tomorrow at 9am EST.

I don't PvP, so I'm going off the reports of others here, but apparently Warlock and Hunter pets are often proving ineffective and short-lived in PvP. Until recently, this was often the case in PvE as well, but pets have much more avoidance now in a PvE environment.

It looks like an improvement will be coming in PvP as well: Ghostcrawler said last night that they "think it's probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell pen." In fact, he says they have a new pet scaling system, and "assuming it works" (which seems like something they ought to be able to make work), they should be able to make the pet scale off of "all relevant stats" of the master.

Players have been asking for more pet scaling for a long time, especially resilience. Obviously how big of a change it will be depends on what "to some extent" ends up meaning, but it can only help pet classes.

An interesting thread popped up on the forums regarding Arena representation, noting class disparity and how it might be possible to rate performance based on a player's class. Balancing all the classes is an ongoing struggle and has been one of Blizzard's greatest headaches in PvP design. In Season 5, Holy Paladins and Death Knights dominated the Arenas, with Warriors getting the very short end of the stick and having the lowest number of Season 5 Gladiators. The original poster points out Blizzard's continual, active revision of the Arena ratings system and suggests that the system itself might be flawed. Because the rating system is "blind" to class or even classes in team compositions, for that matter, players using an "OP" class have an advantage.

The poster goes on to suggest that rankings be based on the class, rather than overall Arena population. This means that the percentile used to determine end-of-season rewards will be applied on a per class basis, thereby granting all classes conceptually equal representation. Ghostcrawler gives the suggestion some merit, even going so far as to say Blizzard isn't "above iteration on the design" of the Arena system as evidenced by their proactive adjustments to it.

Now you can yell at people for not fighting at the flag in all kinds of different languages: Blizzard's EU staff have announced that they're breaking out the first cross-language battlegroups. Actually, that's not quite true -- players who speak different languages will only be playing as opponents (so the Horde you're fighting may speak a different language, but your allies will still understand you). But it is good news for some EU players who've been suffering long queue times. The English language battlegroup Nightfall will be combining with the Spanish language Crueldad (to form Cruelty/Crueldad), and the French battlegroup Némésis will be battling Germans in Hinterhalt to make up Embuscade/Hinterhalt.

Arena ladders on all of the realms will be combining as well (but of course even there, opponents will still be from different languages, so you'll never have to worry about crossing translation lines). The change is in effect right now -- have any of you been playing on Cruelty or Embuscade and seen faster queues yet?

The gates are about to open and mayhem is about to ensue as the second week of the ESL TV Invitational Arena Tournament kicks off today. This special invitational event will feature four top teams from all over Europe -- x6tence from Spain, Rest in Many Pieces from Germany, aAa Nawak from France, and newcomers Sickology from... some mysterious place in Europe, probably. The whole event will be streamed live on the Blizzard eSports channel at 22:00 CEST (4pm EST).

The Spanish team x6tence won the Intel Extreme Master Global Challenge, while aAa Nawak is one of Europe's top RMP teams, placing 3rd at the IEM Global Finals. Also playing RMP is Rest in many Pieces (formerly known as mousesports), and completing the line-up is Sickology, composed of relative newcomers running a WLD (Warrior, Warlock, Druid) comp. The show is estimated to run for two hours, and should be a real treat for Arena enthusiasts. Active World of Warcraft subscribers can find the Blizzard eSports Channel through Account Management or simply head over to the ESL's Blizzard TV channel.

It seems like a good day for sports fans, too, with this show squeezed between the Champion's League Finals match between Barcelona and Manchester United and Game 5 of the NBA Western Conference Finals between the LA Lakers and the Denver Nuggets. For World of Warcraft PvP afficionados who also happen to love football and basketball (could be just me, I dunno), it looks like we'll have to look for a very comfortable chair.

Still, it's not just being a Death Knight alone that gets you PvP fame and godhood. It does help to have the right talents, gear, and strategy. So we're going to talk about that a bit, focusing mostly on the talents. Here's two popular PvP Talent builds.

Each week Arcane Brilliance brings you a column about Mages. This column used to be housed on Wowinsider, but now it's featured on some newfangled site called WoW.com. The url is a full seven letters shorter. It's crazy. where did those seven letters go? I don't know, but I blame Warlocks.

There's an old saying: you can please some Mages some of the time, but you can't please all Mages all of the time. Or something like that. Last week, several of you complained that I was spending too much time writing about PvP, while ignoring PvE completely. This will be the fifth PvP-related Arcane Brilliance in a row. Previous to that, you have to go back to October 25th of last year to find our last PvP-centric column. A short list of things that have happened since then:

• Wrath of the Lich King was released.
• Barack Obama became the president of these United States.
• 5 dollar foot-longs.
• Arcane Brilliance brought you 24 PvE columns in a row.

Seriously, guys. Make up your minds. I don't know what you want from me anymore. Anyway, on to Frost Mage PvP.