Honor
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Honor points aren't decaying, but they are estimating
Lots of players have been having issues with the honor numbers after the last patch (and the recent decrease in honor gain), and the CMs are scrambling to get everyone OK and updated with the new honor points.For the record, there is only one known bug: When your estimated honor hits 6554, the display (not the actual honor earned) will reset to zero. That means if you earn 10,000 honor in a day, your display will say 3,446 on estimated honor. It's a known bug, a fix is coming, and Drysc reminds players that the display has no effect on what's earned.In that same thread, a few players question why estimated honor is shown at all-- if HKs can be calculated, why not show totals in real time? The reason is for diminishing returns: the server can calculate how many times you killed someone, but not who and when, so diminishing returns aren't showing up in estimated honor.Finally, Neth says there are no current plans to reset honor for the Burning Crusade, so if you want to start stockpiling honor for the new coming items, feel free-- just remember that there is a max limit on honor earned, currently two times higher than the most expensive item. A few players are still worried that the CMs claiming there won't be a reset just proves that there will be one, but I'm siding with Neth this time: she says what she knows. Like the wind in the trees, who knows what tomorrow's Azeroth will bring?
PvP'ing for epics -- is it worth it?
Okay, so here we are in "Before the Storm", and one of the biggest changes to the game has got to be the PvP setup. Let me state here that even though I leveled my first 60 on a PvP server, I've always been more about the PvE game. You can count my total total hours of battleground PvP on all of your fingers, and maybe a toe or two.To be honest, the old PvP grind didn't do it for me. It was a time sink, much like endgame raiding, and I only had room in my heart and life for BWL. To put in 80+ hours a week to hit Grand Marshall wasn't something I was prepared or able to do. And so PvP became a slight social distraction for me when my guild asked me to fill out an Arathi Basin group, or I had a long time to wait for a lasagna to defrost.
Lots of Arena PVP info from Drysc
Drysc has practically written a novel today on the upcoming rewards for Arena PVP. When a player asks how the rewards will be distributed, Drysc opens up and answers a lot of questions we had about how the Arena system would work. Arena honor points will be given based on ranking every week during maintenance-- if you have a high ranking, you get more points than if you have a low ranking. This means that everyone will eventually have access to all of the Arena PVP awards. If your team is terrific, you'll get access to them much faster than a team that flouders in the rankings, but no matter how you play, as long as you have a ranking, you'll earn points every week. Arena seasons will last three months, and and the end of a season, the teams with the top rankings for that period will get "cool prizes." Drysc says that, unlike the normal Arena PVP awards, these rewards will be "purely status or cosmetic in nature," but what that means we're not sure-- special mounts? Special tabards? Cooler looking versions of Arena weapons? One of the rewards will be titles for the top teams at the end of the season. The other big news: rankings won't go into effect until you're level 70. You'll still be able to play Arena "skirmishes" that don't count towards the ranking (they'll still give honor points, however), but not until you ding 70 will you be able to enter the tournament system. In addition, the skirmishes will be seperated by every 5 levels-- 60-64, 65-69, and 70 for the ranking system. And once you do start ranking, you need 10 matches minimum to enter the system. So Drysc says most players will probably play their ten, and then decide whether it's something they want to stick with or not. In addition, he predicts matches will run "5 minutes or less"-- in sharp contrast to the BGs currently in the game. Finally, Drysc says players will be able to be on one team of each size-- 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5. Sounds awesome-- can't wait to see what kind of rewards come out of the system, and the prospect of "5 min or less" matches sounds a lot more enticing than the looooong WSG and AV matches I've been stuck in lately. While we're at it, here's a little Arena video as well. In just the Arena system alone, PVPers will have plenty to play with come the Burning Crusade.
DKs disappear in December patch
As you may or may not know by now, we've been told that DKs will be removed in the Burning Crusade. In fact, since that's as core a change as they come, Neth has revealed that DKs will most likely be bye-bye by December, when the next patch hits. "Most likely," she says, because it's not completely guaranteed that what's on the beta servers will make it to the live ones, but based on Neth's repeated comments, things look pretty good for this one.And for at least one player, that means it's time to go crazy. Peegee on Arthas has promised to make Mulgore his personal ganking ground. Most players agree that DKs make any sort of World PVP all but impossible, but you have to remember why they were implemented in the first place: to keep PVPers away from quest and trainer NPCs that lowbies need around to level. Sure, you may think that implementing DKs wasn't the best way to solve that problem (I sure do), but you have to admit that since DKs were brought into the game, lowbies have always had their quest and trainers NPCs around to talk to.In the first thread, Neth says that the devs do realize that, at first, a lot of players will be making up for lost time when DKs disappear again. For at least those first few days, I would imagine that the Crossroads might be a little overrun with overzealous Alliance. But then again, Neth says adjustments will be made "when necessary," so maybe the devs have something else up their sleeve-- maybe some NPCs will be invulnerable or, as a few players suggest, have "spirit stand-ins" to return quests even while dead. At any rate, start sharpening those swords-- as of the next patch, here's hoping it's open season on NPCs again.
To /afk or not to /afk...
Right now, at least, I'd recommend not. It's hard to walk into a battleground these days without noticing at least one player who's not doing anything but sitting quietly near the battleground entrance gaining honor and reputation. Perhaps they're using a bot or perhaps they're watching a movie and occasionally pressing the space bar -- either way, they're a nuisance at best. And when this post showed up on the customer service forums, I couldn't help but be surprised. Because while Blizzard would previously take action against players using bots or hacks to prevent them from going AFK during a battleground, now they seem to be prepared to act against any players "who are not actively participating" in a battleground. The wording is still very vague, but this could mean a crackdown on AFK players -- regardless of method.
Is There Too Much Honor in Crossrealm BGs?
Since my Shaman hit the big six-oh, I've found myself checking more and more into the BGs, especially Alterac Valley (where we picked up a hardwon victory late last night, with the help of a gigantic Ice Lord). And from everything I've seen, they're as much of a hit as everyone first said they were-- queues are almost nonexistent, there's always lots of people around to play, and quality of play in there is-- well, it's not entirely terrible. Sometimes. But at least the honor and rep flows quickly.In fact, that's exactly the problem Luriah has over on Detheroc. He hates the new cross realm battlegrounds, not because he isn't getting more honor-- he is-- but because he isn't getting better ranks for it. This past week, he reports, he picked up three times the honor he had the previous week, but his rank rose by barely half of one. Because of that, he says the honor system is actually worse.Now, technically the point is moot because the expansion will bring a complete revamp of the honor system, and ranks as we know them are going bye-bye. And I'm not one to stand up and defend the honor system as it is now-- any way you look at it, it's a grind. Players who spend way too much time in the battlegrounds will get the highest ranks, period, and I think Blizzard should be rewarding skill in battle, not necessarily the time investment.But I don't think Luriah's argument holds much water. The new honor system isn't worse-- it's the same, with more players (namely me-- this last week, I played more than I ever have). More time in the BGs means everyone has more honor. Blizzard didn't ruin anything if you can't get ranks-- they just made the gameplay better, so competition is more fierce. Is that good news if you're trying to reach HWL or GM before the expansion hits? Nope. But it is good news for those of us who were tired of spending more time in the queue than the BG itself.
The Puzzle of Battlegrounds Reputation
Since my current character-of-choice isn't running in a raiding guild, I've recently turned to PvP as a possible alternative way to acquire new and interesting gear for myself. In my travels through Azeroth's battlegrounds, I've noticed something puzzling about reputation gain in each - some are easier to get than others. Specifically Aterac Valley reputation - which has some simply incredible weapon rewards - seems to come a lot easier than Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin reputation. So I sat down and decided to do the math and see how it really works out - is AV reputation given out like candy, or am I just imagining things? Read on to find out.
To Turtle or Not to Turtle...?
We're 45 minutes into an Alterac Valley run and 30 players are sitting in our base playing defense, fighting a pitched battle that doesn't help us win, but slows down the rate at which we're going to loose. We haven't managed to hold a single graveyard throughout the fight, and the Alliance has a line of defense that quickly picks off most players attempting to move north from the Horde spawn point. I manage to sneak up to the next graveyard with a hunter friend while everyone else is busy fighting back in Frostwolf hold - and we manage to tap the flag there. However, before we manage to make the capture, a group of five Alliance comes down hard, and we're sent back to where we started.My friend whispers to me, "They have no idea what causes people to turtle, do they?" And, while I hadn't thought of it in this way before, I'm forced to agree - this sort of fight is probably no fun for either side. By playing such heavy defense, and not allowing a single capture, they push us back towards Frostwolf hold again and again - and when there's nothing else for players to do, many of them regroup back at one of the worst bottleneck points in the game, and the match ended up lasting an nearly an hour and a half. So what's your experience with turtling? And is there, perhaps, something to be said for letting the opposing side take a little, just to prevent them from fighting with their backs against the wall? Or is there some better strategy to avoid or break the opposing team's turtling efforts?
Doing the Math on the New Honor Kill Decay Rate
There's lots of questions going around on the changes in the Honor system coming up in patch 1.12, but not a lot of clear answers, so let's pull out the old nerdulator and crunch some numbers.First, if you're just wondering what the story is and don't care much about the numbers, the news is good for most of you. Basically, you'll be able to get more kills on the same person before they're worth no honor at all. Additionally, Blizz is changing the honor curve a bit-- even though there's no numbers on that yet, they say it's "to allow more people into the ranks." So we assume that's good news for most of us-- if you're one of those players who farms honor in the battleground for forty hours a week, you're probably not real happy about that, because there will be more higher ranks walking around. But then again, you were probably one of the kids who messed up the grading curve for the rest of us in math class.But speaking of math class, let's see what they're actually doing with the "diminishing returns" on honor kills. Currently (before 1.12), there is a diminishing return of 25% every time a PVP player gets killed. That is, the first time they're killed, 100% honor is given (the actual number of honor is based on all kinds of other factors-- the ranks and levels of the players involved, whether you're in a group or raid, and a few other things). Then, the second time they're killed, 75% honor is given, then 50%, 25%, and on the fifth time they're killed, no honor is given. But in 1.12, we're told that the diminishing return will fall back to 10% per kill. The first kill, then, will grant 100%, but the second will grant 90%, then 80%, and so on and so forth. Which means you'll be able to kill the same player more times, while still gaining honor.So the big question is, how much more honor will we get? (We told you we were pulling out the nerdulator for a reason.) Just for calculation, let's use an honor score of 100. Under the system before 1.12 (the formula is 2.5x, if you want to get really nerdy about it), you'll get 100 + 75 + 50 + 25 + 0 = 250 honor before your target is honorless. Under 1.12 (formula: 5.5x), you'll get 100 + 90 + 80 + 70 + 60 + 50 + 40 + 30 + 20 + 10 + 0 = 550. That's a whopping 220% more honor before every kill goes honorless. Sounds nice! Except that everybody else is getting honor at the same accelerated rate, too. So not so fast on shopping for that new High Warlord gear. Blizzard's updating of the ranks curve will help get you the rank you want, but the new honor kill decay rate just means there's lots more points for everybody to fight over.
Breakfast Topic: Favorite Battleground
With all the recent news and speculation about coming PvP changes - both in patch 1.12 and the expansion - it seems only fitting to have a breakfast topic discussing everyone's favorite source of honor - battlegrounds! So which of the available battlegrounds is your favorite place to slaughter the opposing faction? Of late, I rarely venture outside of Alterac Valley - which, with the rate at which AB and WSG groups loose on my realm, seems to be the best source of honor. I remember, vaguely, a time in which I used to enjoy Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin matches, but this must have been long ago - all of my recent experience with them have been nothing but quick and harsh losses - with the players of my own faction spending the entire match yelling back and forth and disagreeing about what best to do. (Trust me, such battleground runs are not entertaining.)
Additional Honor System Modifications Coming
We already know that the honor system's curve is getting adjusted in patch 1.12, but apparently that's not the only change planned. On Friday, CM Nethaera let us know that there will also be some reduction in honor decay. The exact patch note reads: Honorable Kills now diminish at a rate 10% per kill rather than 25% per kill. The phrasing of the post lead to some confusion, so she later clarified - in patch 1.12 you're going to be able to kill the same player more before you stop receiving honor. If it seems like a minor tweak, well, Nethaera admits that it's only a temporary measure, and that there are bigger changes coming.
Gear-brackets in Battlegrounds?
Battlegrounds are already divided up by level - but even with equal levels, gear can dominate, especially at level 60, where you get a mix of players who have just started traversing 5-man dungeons and players in guilds who are farming Naxxramas. This post in the general forums proposes a radical solution to this problem - give everyone a standardized set of gear when they enter a battleground, and leave the rest to player ability. However, far more interesting than the original idea is the fact that it received a CM response, with Drysc chiming in that they wouldn't want to eliminate the hard work players put into acquire the best gear, but were working on a "player matching system" which might help nudge players into appropriate battlegrounds. No further details on how such a system might work, though Drysc does let us know that it won't be coming before the expansion.
MMOs and the Secondary Market
The Escapist has a good article discussing the secondary market of various MMOs. It doesn't focus on World of Warcraft, but gives an interesting broader picture on the practice of buying and selling currency in virtual worlds. The question of whether players can remain competitive at this point without the aid of additional financial is a curious one. In Azeroth, additional gold, BOE items, or power-leveling can certainly be of help, but are they necessary to keep up with the rest of the players? For PvP, I'm tempted to answer "yes" - as the bar to reach the upper ranks of the honor system is so high as to make it neigh impossible for many players to reach - unless they do nothing but take short breaks for sleeping and eating between play sessions for weeks on end.
More on PvP in Patch 1.12
We've gone over some of the PvP changes that will show up in patch 1.12 - both cross-realm battlegrounds and the new world PvP objectives. However, this is not the only change coming. When patch 1.12 goes live, the honor curve will be softened, somewhat, allowing a larger number of players into the upper ranks. There are no specific details on the numbers here, of course, and it's unlikely we'll understand the full impact of such a change until after it's been up and running on the live realms for a while. [Fan art by Guillaume Bonnet]
Today's Maintenance Extended
An error in the automatic honor calculation process during this week's maintenance has required the honor calculation to be re-done for many realms - leading to an extended maintenance period for many of us. Realms in the following list may be offline as late as 1:00 PM PDT: Aegwyn, Aerie Peak, Agamaggan, Akama, Altar of Storms, Andorhal, Anetheron, Archimonde, Azshara, Black Dragonflight, Cenarion Circle, Cenarius, Chromaggus, Dalaran, Daivengyr, Dark Iron, Deathwing, Demon Soul, Dentarg, Detheroc, Doomhammer, Draka, Drak'thul, Duskwood, Eitrigg, Emerald Dream, Executus, Garithos, Greymane, Hakkar, Haomarush, Hyjal, Icecrown, Jaedenar, Jubei'Thos, Kalecgos, Khadgar, Khaz Modan, Korgath, Kul Tiras, Lethon, Lightbringer, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Mal'Ganis, Malorne, Moonrunner, Mug'thol, Norgannon, Rexxar, Runetotem, Sargeras, Scilla, Staghelm, Steamwheedle Cartel, Thrall, Turalyon, Twisting Nether, Uldaman, Ursin, Uther, Wildhammer, Ysera, Ysondre, and Zuluhed.Update: Maintenance for some of these realms may slip to 2:00 PM PDT.
Healing in PvP
The priest I'm currently playing is the first character I've made any serious attempts to PvP with. And, no, I'm not blazing through Alterac Valley in shadowform - I heal, much to the amazement of people I end up grouped with. At first I was surprised by the shock of other players when I healed them, but after spending some time in all of the battlegrounds, I've come to realize that healing in PvP is quite a headache.In PvE groups and instance runs, players are arranged into parties. In a raid group, where there are multiple parties, there's usually a healer in each and we stick to healing our own parties. We move forward as a group by necessity - because a single player would be highly unlikely to stand on their own against the monsters we're fighting. I watch my party's health bars, and I heal them when they get low. Easy enough, right? But in a PvP situation...
The PvP Grind
I've been playing World of Warcraft for over a year now, and have only recently attempted PvP. I've had a lot of fun with it, but certainly haven't spent enough time grinding for honor to burn out on the experience. This article from Not Addicted looks at what it takes to make rank 14 in the PvP grind and is a clear explanation of why I don't intend to try going that far. Anyone out there with personal different experiences on the grind to rank 14?
Cross-realm battlegrounds on the way
Gaming Steve brings us the long-awaited information that cross-realm battlegrounds, of a form, will be coming to Azeroth. By patch 1.12 or 1.13 "at the latest", battlegrounds will span sixteen realms, allowing for shorter queues and new opponents.There are also some more exciting BG changes planned for the future, turning WoW PvP into a truly competitive sport with tournaments, ladders and worldwide rankings to take part in. It looks like we'll have to wait for the Burning Crusade to see most of the changes, but bringing cross-realm combat in sooner rather than later is something I'm definitely looking forward to.[Via Joystiq]
