Are waitings times killing bg's?

[Aedh]

I'm wondering if Blizz nerfed the gear available from honor points (so called welfare epics) to the point where there is little incentive to pvp in bg's anymore. Maybe that is why so many fewer people are queing up. Too busy grinding emblems for decent gear or playing areana.

Make the honor gear worthwhile (not top of the line but a bit more than ilvl 213/226 plus add some weapons/off hands back into the mix) and you'd see alot more people grinding for it.

I didn't start doing BGs again until I had 2/5 furious which I had gotten by farming heroics. I had 2/5 deadly, but stopped because it just didn't seem worthwhile to farm honor when i could farm emblems, and I now have 5/5 furious.

I highly doubt they would make weapons/off hands available for honor for the same reason they don't make weapons available from emblems. They want the players to play the game for the weapons they want, ie raid for pve weapons and (currently) arena for pvp weapons.
I would like to have a set of relentless weapons (one for my threat set and one for pvp) and a shield, but since Blizz feels that arena is the pvp endgame it's not gonna happen until rated BGs.


But yes WTB faster queues for BGs. They should shorten once furious stops requiring a rating to purchase with honor. I hope.

[Haruk]

I didn't start doing BGs again until I had 2/5 furious which I had gotten by farming heroics. I had 2/5 deadly, but stopped because it just didn't seem worthwhile to farm honor when i could farm emblems, and I now have 5/5 furious.

I highly doubt they would make weapons/off hands available for honor for the same reason they don't make weapons available from emblems. They want the players to play the game for the weapons they want, ie raid for pve weapons and (currently) arena for pvp weapons.
I would like to have a set of relentless weapons (one for my threat set and one for pvp) and a shield, but since Blizz feels that arena is the pvp endgame it's not gonna happen until rated BGs.


But yes WTB faster queues for BGs. They should shorten once furious stops requiring a rating to purchase with honor. I hope.

It's not that I disagree with you about the weapons/off-hands, but what you are saying is Blizz wants players doing PVE and Arena (since that is only where better gear comes from) and they don't care if players bg or not. Well, they are getting what they want in that case, which is my point. Less players queued for bg's cuz they are raiding/running heroics (the arena crowd is a differenet animal, they play because they enjoy it). It seems especially odd you can only get (currently) deadly from bg's (a pvp activity) but you can get furious from emblem farming. Obviously this will lead to more emblem farming and less pvp activity.

Some of the other points above are also relevant (larger number of bg's, fewer queue options, etc.)

But I'm sticking to my theory - make bg rewards equivalent to emblem rewards (but pvp spec'd not pve spec'd) and I think you would see a lot more people in the queues. Especially now that it is a self compounding problem - i.e. wait for an hour one bg (and get a couple thousand honor at best - say ~10%, if even, of what's needed for an item) or run 5 heroics ( get 25 emblems, ~50% of what is needed for a (better) item in the same time) - it's obvious how people are gonna farm their gear.

Myself, I will queue for the daily bg and WG these days, that's about it. And I'm not even in a bad battlegroup for waits. Maybe 10-20 mins is the average. It's just the honor doesn't get me anything worthwhile any more so why bother except for the odd change of pace. I've got to believe players on these EU servers with super long waits think the same way.

[v-ice]

Lets view our choices here:

Farm Honor for full Deadly
Farm Heroics for full Furious


Heroics give better pvp gear right now.

it should even out with the start of S8 when furious is buyable with honor.

Okay, you get full Furious set from heroics...then what??? You will equip it and sit in a random city/sanctuary and still wait for ~1 hour to get into some pvp battleground where you can actually see the benefit of it.