TBC Anniversary PvP Guide

TBC Anniversary PvP Guide Quick Summary:

• Anniversary Edition of TBC makes it so that the PvP gear is more accessible in Season 1.
• Check out what BiS or pre-BiS gear you can get for your class when you’ve earned the required rank.
• See the current list of available arenas and battlegrounds.
• Forgot how honor and arena points work? See the difference and how they’re calculated.
• Resilience stat is back. Learn what it means for your class.

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The Burning Crusade Anniversary PvP Changes

In case you skipped TBC Classic and are now looking into getting TBC Anniversary as a PvP fan, you’re going to be super happy. If you’ve never played these older versions of WoW before, you have to know that TBC is where PvP has become something more than just uncontrolled open-world skirmishes and semi-structured battlegrounds from the original.

Arenas got added in the original TBC, making PvP more about skill than objective. The separate systems and ranks let you choose your preferred way of sticking it to the opponents. The tournament-like rules made it even more exciting. Now, this time around, the Anniversary edition has also changed a few things, specifically - how you get your rewards. So, check out all of these changes:

Individual Arena Rating

Previously, you had to have a team to be able to compete in ranked arenas, but in Anniversary, the teams are gone. Now, everyone has an individual rating for all 3 arena types: 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5. You start at the base rating of 1500 instead of 0 like last time. And you start to climb the ranks from this point. If you lose too many times and drop 1500, you’re going to have to pay up in gold to reset your rating back to 1500.

Minimal Rating Requirements

This is probably the coolest change - most of the gear used to be locked behind a rating bracket, so you couldn’t get good stuff unless you’d won enough arena matches. Now, that’s gone. The only two slots that still require a specific rating are shoulders and weapon slots.

This means you can basically get the best gear for your class just by enjoying arenas, and it wouldn’t matter how much you win or lose.

Lower Arena Gear Costs

Not only don’t you need to have a specific rating to get PvP gear, but their costs have also been reduced by a lot compared to TBC Classic.

Early Access to Reputation PvP Gear

PvP gear from reputation vendors is also available from Season 1, instead of being delayed until later like last time. Plus, their set bonuses work with set bonuses from honor-bought gear, so you can mix and match them and still get those full set bonuses.

No Point Decay and Predictable Progression

While this isn’t exactly the new thing for Anniversary edition, none of honor or arena points decay with time, unlike in the original TBC. It’s good to know, in case you were wondering, if the game will make you play PvP if you don’t want to lose your currencies.

In terms of open-world PvP, that thing is still there and mostly the same. The only thing worth mentioning is that on PvP realms, there will be a balancing thing where if one faction has the numbers, you won’t be able to create a new character on their side. So, both sides should have more or less the same forces.

Last but not least, in case this wasn’t clear, battlegrounds and their own honor system do not have ranks. If you want to rank up, you gotta do it in the arenas.

TBC Anniversary PvP Arenas

Arenas used to be the cool new feature of that expansion. So, here’s a quick rundown of how they work, in case you’re new.

You start at a 1500 rating, as we’ve said before, and when you match up with your teammates, each with their own rating, the game then finds you a matching team of opponents within the same bracket as your combined rating. This is so that the fights feel fair. If you win, your rating will increase based on the difference between the rating of your team and the rating of the opponents. In other words, winning against more skilled teams with a higher rating will give you a higher personal rating as a reward compared to winning against a team with a rating lower than your team’s.

Now, here’s the kicker - at the end of the week, you get Arena Points based on your final rating by the end of the week. If you have played at least 10 matches in those 7 days, you’ll get your points.

There are 3 types of WoW arena TBC Anniversary based on the number of players in the team: 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5. You get more ratings from winning 5v5 compared to arenas with smaller teams. That is also fair, because winning against bigger teams is harder. As for the maps, unfortunately, you only get to choose among 3 TBC Anniversary arena zones:

1. Ring of Trials, aka Nagrand Arena
2. Circle of Blood in Blade’s Edge Mountains
3. Ruins of Lordaeron located above the Undercity

Later expansions added more arenas, but these 3 are what you have to work with in this game. Keeping things exciting, you have seasons on top of ratings. Seasons last a couple of months, and at the end of each one, players are rewarded with special titles and even mounts based on how they ended up performing. PvP Season 1 in TBC Classic Anniversary starts on February 17, almost two weeks after the launch of the game. This gives you time to level up your character before accessing PvP. BLOG20

TBC Anniversary PvP Battlegrounds

There ain’t much new about Battlegrounds in TBC Anniversary except maybe for the fact that you don’t have any rating requirements for buying honor gear. Once again, addressing new players, honor points are like Arena Points but for participating in battlegrounds and open-world PvP.

You spend these on buying PvP gear, which actually matches with gear from PvP reputation vendors, so you don’t actually need to play arenas specifically to be able to get PvP gear.

To make the distinction very clear, you have:

• Honor Points Vendors in Stormwind and Orgrimmar
• PvP Reputation factions and their vendors like Thrallmar, Honor Hold, Cenarion Expedition, and others
• Arena Points Vendors like Grikkin Copperspring in Ring of Trials and others.

Anyway, the main point is that you get honor from both bgs and open-world pvp. While the game has a bunch of locations where faction pvp is allowed, across Azeroth and Outlands, you get a number of iconic battlegrounds:

As you can see, battlegrounds are mass-pvp, objective-based maps. The TBC Anniversary new battleground in this list is the Eye of the Storm. In this one, you need to capture a tower and then bring the flag to it to gain points. You’ll get honor whether you win or lose; it's just that you’ll get bonus honor for winning.

TBC Anniversary PvP Rewards

There’s a bunch of stuff that you can get from PvP besides the bragging rights. There are mounts, titles, and most importantly, gear. PvP gear in TBC Anniversary (and TBC in general) is unique in the way that it has a brand-new stat called Resilience that reduces critical strike chance and damage against you, plus the DoT and mana-drain effect against you. This is kind of huge because it gives some classes (hello, Priests) a fighting chance in PvP. Now, let’s list some of those TBC Anniversary PvP rewards.

TBC Anniversary PvP Gear

Every class has at least one Season 1 set. Hybrid classes have multiple versions that share the same visuals but use different stats and bonuses. The consistent thread across almost every set is the same 2-piece bonus, while the 4-piece and glove effects are where playstyle starts to change.

Season 1 PvP gear is purchased through Arena vendors across Outland and a few key hubs. You will typically use whichever one is closest to your current route, since they serve the same purpose.

Prices vary by item slot. You can see the table below for reference, but be warned that these prices could be outdated. If you want advice, go for weapons first, then get anything that gives you a 2-piece bonus, then go for a 4-piece bonus.

TBC Anniversary prices for PvP gear should be considerably lower, so you should be able to get your set fairly quickly.

TBC Anniversary PvP Titles & Mounts

Seasons exist so that the highest-ranked arena players can get unique titles. The most skilled players who make 0.5% of arena teams will get:

• Swift Nether Drake - a flying mount with the highest 310% movement speed bonus.

That is an incredibly rare mount, and getting it for the first time ever is something any WoW player remembers fondly. 

Besides the mount, the highest-ranked players will receive unique TBC Anniversary PvP titles:

In later expansions, they added rated battlegrounds and titles for them, but not in this one.

Read our other TBC Classic Anniversary guides:

• Best Addons
• DPS Tier List
• Gold Farming Guide

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