114 is the new black in resil

Thanks to the plunking down of the Blue quality PvP sets at quartermasters around outland, PvErs now have the ability to enter the BGs with a baseline of resilience. If you add the resilience, without even socketing the set, all five pieces of, say for instance, the Dreadweave Battlegear will give you 114 total resil. Add more if you get the socketed bonuses or throw in some Mystic Dawnstones as well. Has this set a new baseline for where the least geared PvPer will be? There's really no excuse now to walk into a BG without the 114 resil.

Why the change? Many of us have experienced, since the addition of resilience, what it's like to go into a PvP setting for the first time with a newly minted 70 without a bit of Resil gear to our name and to get completely hosed by the other players. But, with these items now available to people who have NEVER set foot in a PvP experience, is the door wide open to experience PvP without the barrier of the great gear gap standing in the way?

I don't think so. The great gear gap still exists due to the proliferation and decent availability of epic gear for the casual player. If you are committed to either dying 10 times a week in an arena setting, or putting in your time with the BGs, you can pretty quickly garner yourself some epic PvP gear, that can really send your stats soaring.

For instance, the Gladiator's Dreadweave Battlegear, which is now available for purchase for honor, but was formerly the s1 arena reward gear, would give you as a complete set, 161 resilience, without any gems, 185 with Mystic Dawnstones in only the yellows and no socket bonuses, and 209 resil if you use every slot as a Mystic, stacking nothing but resil. Considering a majority of PvP players have a full compliment of epics in their arsenal, their resil is starting up near the 200 point mark and climbing well into the 400s, especially if they've continued to do Arena, or are serious about PvP.

With that kind of resistance to crit, and the amount of health that the majority of these players are packing, due to the stacked stamina on most of this kind of gear, it'd be pretty hard to be competitive or contributory in some ways with PvE quest blues. The proliferation of epic PvP gear in the battlegrounds and arenas, and serious overload of stats that these gear sets provide is making it necessary to equip prior to stepping into the BGs so that you can progress without feeling as frustrated.

It's a great move, and if Bliz continues to push PvP as heavily as it has in recent history, I can see this as a helpful tool to allow casual and hardcore PvErs alike to come into the realm of PvP with a little more confidence and a little less death. And that might be crutial to the continued direction of the game. With the addition of the much talked about Lake Wintersgank, they'll be the theoretical endless swirl of PvP, destructible things, (besides your armor), and hopefully some decent rewards for participating. So many of the epic arena gear provides some of the most easily accessible options of gear, even for hardcore raiders. So, it only makes sense that blizz would want to make it easier to get into PvP.

It'll be interesting to see where all this gear ends up after WLK comes out though. Are we going to be seeing S4 gear available at old faction vendors? I'm guessing it'd be left to exalted, but then that'd probably be harder to get than it was originally. Either way, it should be an interesting future for all our hard(ly) earned gear.