DiminishingReturns
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We meet again, Alterac
As I've mentioned in a recent warrior column, I'm running the new Alterac Valley on my prot warrior. Mostly it's not intended to accomplish anything, it's just to see how I'll do. I average about four games before I get bored and go do something else. However, in the days leading up to patch 2.3, these four games would probably have been miserable timesinks with no honor gain to show for it and a lot of complaining in /bg.Nowadays, as you can see to the right, four games is about 1500 honor.I've found, at least on my Stormstrike BG toons, that the games go a lot faster now. Towers are still being capped, and the Horde still wins more than we do, but it's not so much the intolerable blowouts I'd become accustomed to where they crush us and we can't even take Iceblood GY. In the past two days I've won three and lost five, and almost all of the matches were pretty close. (We tend to do better when the Horde defends, I'm noticing, although I don't know why.) So from my perspective as an Alliance player (look, pro-Alliance bias in a WoW Insider post! Get those flames ready, kids!) and a very casual PvP'er who probably won't bother to run arenas, the changes have been for the good.How about you all? Thumbs up or thumbs down for the new AV and the immediate honor updating? (I think immediate honor is my favorite thing.)
2.4 lifts diminishing returns on honor
var digg_url ='http://digg.com/pc_games/WoW_Patch_2_4_removes_diminishing_returns_on_PvP_Honor_gains'; According to Drysc, 2.4 will fix one of the biggest issues causing minimal honor gain for losing teams in Battlegrounds, namely Diminishing Returns. As things stand currently, according to Drysc, "What diminishing returns mean for honor is that each subsequent kill of the same target will reward you with less and less honor; 10% less per kill to be exact. One of the major downsides to diminishing returns is that the calculations, for potentially hundreds of thousands of players, is too intense to do real time, so they are calculated during off-peak hours. This in turn requires that the honor you gain be temporarily displayed as "estimated" until the calculations are run. It's a system that we've certainly improved (moving the calculation from weekly to daily) but still always disliked. It creates a very uninteresting and sometimes aggravating or confusing detachment from your achievements and the actual reward." I can't say I disagree with him on that score, I hate waiting till the next day rolls around. It's interesting to me to see that Blizzard always disliked it, too, as I would not have guessed that to be the case.Drysc goes on to further point out that the original reason for DR on honor was to prevent exploitation of the system that is no longer a real problem, what with battlegrounds providing a more reasonable reward for effort as far as honor is concerned compared to trying to exploit by corpse camping or otherwise killing the same mob over and over. The new system still only allows you to kill a single target so often, though: after 50 deaths, a player in a BG is worth no more honor until that BG is over. Better still, with the new system, honor gain will be instant. No more waiting for tomorrow, you get your honor as soon as you make a kill and can spend it as soon as you're done.Thanks to World of Raids and our tipsters for the heads up.
Blood Pact: Fear kiting 101
Everyone talks about fear being overpowered in PvP, but that's not a discussion we're going to have today No, here we're going to talk about using Fear in PvE situations, where it can easily be just as useful. The main reason for this is that Fear in PvE isn't on diminishing returns. You can cast it until you run out of mana (though it costs 12% of your base mana per cast), and your target will never become immune. Compare this to Fear in PvP, where your target will become immune on your forth attempt to fear it. And while it has a chance of breaking on damage in both PvE and PvP, its maximum duration in PvE is twice as long as its PvP duration (at least it will be as of patch 2.2).With a 20-second duration and no diminishing returns, you can kill nearly anything that you can Fear, and if you want to know how, just keep reading!
