You can still get about 5 epic items and the rest blue from honor and craftables without stepping into the arena. Similar to where you can gear with dungeons, heroics, and craftables before entering raids.
They are basically treating Arena like end game PvP, like they do raids end game PvE. I'm not a huge fan of Arena, but not having everyone running around in full epics from honor sounds good to me. Although, after a season or two in the expansion, the first Arena set will likely once again be purchasable with honor.
Plus, with more people in Arena (and a few tweaks they are doing to the matching system to make sure matches are as even as possible), I think doing decent will be a lot easier.
Blizz also said they were going to expand on BGs more and (as I predicted) look at letting you queue anywhere AND gain exp (thank you WAR).
Edit: Link where Blizz talks about PvP changes they are considering:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...=1&pageNo=2#22
Edit2: All that said, my account is still set to expire - I'm just flat out bored atm, even with the expansion beta, everyone I knew playing has quit. Also, Blizz still can't seem to get class balance anywhere near where it should be. Shaman have been a joke throughout BC, and are shaping up to be even worse in the expansion. Within the last couple weeks, they took out both the enhancement and resto 51 pt talents (which would have helped both specs a lot) and replaced them with crap (resto's on par with a paladin's 21 pt talent, enhance's a very crappy snare..not even root...remover totem). The totem system is very crappy. I could go on and on....shaman is the most fun class IMO, but as much as I like being the underdog, I like to at least a chance in PvP.
I tend to get bored with WoW (or maybe just MMOs in general) and come back a few months later, so we'll see. I'll be on my 360 for a while, once I get back in the mood, will likely pick-up WoW expansion OR WAR...if people are still playing.
You're gonna arena, and you're gonna like it
Linear Mode
