What will it take to get High Warlord / Grand Marshal?

[garicasha]

Basics of the Ranking System
(This is heavily edited, the OP is at the bottom.)

Update Dec 1 2018: If you didn't play classic, this is the short version:
Hitting the top levels of the honor system frequently required 8-12 weeks of playing 14 hours/day for months at a time without missing a day. This is for a few reasons:
--Each week all players lost 20% of their accumulated progress.
--On an average server, only the top five players for a week would make more progress than they lost.
--Going from Rank 12 to Rank 14 took about six weeks of being one of those top five players.
--Skill barely mattered, it was mostly hours logged.
--Because of the absurd time investment required, people used multiple ways to make it more manageable, such as forming premades, forming cartels that limited play, and sharing their account.



More thorough explanation:

The math behind the system was punishing because at the top levels only the top .2% of players in a week could make significant progress on a process on which the final step took a minimum of 3 weeks. The minimum possible amount of time to go from character creation to High Warlord / Grand Marshal was 3 months.

Thanks to Ettan in post 37 for a good explanation, and http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Honor_...-2.0_formulas) for a very detailed explanation. (On that page, though, most the links are broken.) This is my explanation, which is more intended for players that did not play vanilla:

There were two sub-systems, that were very similar, used for determining ranking.
--One was "Ranking Points", which determined a character's title from 1 (Private or Scout) to 14 (Grand Marshal / High Warlord). It was basically reputation except it could go down. It took 60,000 Ranking Points to achieve title 14. A player could see their own Ranking Points by running a short macro.

--The other was a ranking system that also divided players in to 14 groups, but it was based on a player's contribution points for that week only. During server maintenance, a list of every player that had gotten 15* honorable kills that week was generated. Then it was sorted by contribution points earned that week. The players at the top .2%* of that weekly list earned 13,000 Ranking Points. Players in the next .5% got 12,000. Players in the third bracket got 11,000, and so on. The size of the brackets was very bottom-heavy: the five top ranks comprised only 7.7% of players, but the bottom five had 51% of players. This is the part of the system that pitted players against each other. *(the exact number was different in different patches)

Larger servers could have 4-6 people in this top bracket. Servers with few players could have zero players in this bracket. The breakpoints on a graph looked like this: http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Honor_...vsWS-examp.png

This weekly list is also why what it took for an individual to rank up could vary immensely from week to week and server to server. If a half-dozen people decided to get 1.5 million contribution points that week, a player would need to get 1.6 million points to beat them. If the players were organized and limited their play, it could be possible to top that list with far less.

--Ranking Points decayed 20% each week. This meant that a player 1,000 points away from title 14 (59,000 RP) would lose 20% of that, or 11,800 points.

Because the amount of weekly decay (~11,800/week) was so close to the maximum weekly earnings (13,000), it meant that the mathematical lower limit it took to get the 5,000 Ranking Points to go from title 13 to title 14 was four weeks of being in the top weekly bracket. As a result of this, players who were hoping to get High Warlord / Grand Marshal a month in the future could interfere with players trying to finish it the current week, so competition could be fierce.

Being on low population servers was even worse, because if the number of players on a server was below a certain threshold, zero people would be in the weekly bracket that earned 13,000, which meant that the decay of ~11,800 a week was almost exactly the same amount awarded to the top players (12,000).

So in summary the combination of three things is what made the process so difficult:
--The max progress per week was capped
--That amount was very close to the amount of decay
--Only a tiny fraction of players could got the max progress per week

Edit 4-22-17: If the math is kept the same, it actually might be more difficult to get HW/GM than it was in vanilla. The unsung hero behind the rank 14 math is large numbers of casual players getting 15 honorable kills/week. Depending on patch, every ~333 or 500 players that get 15 HK/week open up one spot in the top bracket. My logic is this:
--The servers will initially be very popular
--People that play the game excessively will make competition for the top brackets fierce.
--In 2004-2007, vanilla Warcraft was one of the best games available.
--In 2019, vanilla Warcraft will have much more competition.
--After a brief surge, there will be far fewer casual players getting 15 HK/week than there were in 2004-2007.
--Which will leave the system with a disproportionate number of extremely hardcore players but far fewer casuals, basically the worst-case scenario

However, I guess the previous scenario isn't what has happened...in similar situations...so perhaps more casuals will stick around than I thought.

Other notes:
The amount of contribution points earned from killing a player per day had diminishing returns, so killing a player more than 10 times in one day gave no additional honor. When battlegrounds went cross-realm in patch 1.12 it significantly affected how players would farm for the top ranks.

There were dishonorable kills and the way they were calculated in was brutal IIRC so players would not do anything that would risk getting DKs.

One other thing is that most game systems displayed a player's highest rank ever achieved, so if a player got Grand Marshal / High Warlord they got to display it forever.

In 1.12 the number of players at the top bracket was increased from 0.2% to 0.3%.

The rewards for getting rank were gear purchased from a PvP vendor for gold. The armor acquired at rank 13 was very good for most classes (I guess a little less so for casters), and rank 14 only additionally unlocked the PvP weapons. Apparently the weapons were cheat codes for fury warriors and rogues but much less impressive for other classes.

Post #69 from Katsu2881 also touches on some of the psychological aspects of getting so close to the reward, which caused people to pursue higher ranks via unhealthy play.

Random factoid: If I did the math right, the soonest possible week a HW / GM could appear on a new server would be after the reset of week 12 (i.e. week 13) if a person got 13,000 RP from the top bracket every single ******** week.


If week after week a player got more Contribution Points than 25% of players they would earn 1,000 Ranking Points a week. Their decay would equal their progress at 5,000 RP, which means they'd top out at the rather underwhelming rank 3. The player would also need to play in the next highest bracket for the very last "push" week or they would wind up with something like 4900 RP. This is generally not a big deal except for 13-14 where it's more serious.
...50% of players, 3k RP/week, 15k max RP = rank 5
...75% of players, 6k RP/week, 30k max RP = rank 8
...90% of players, 8k RP/week, 40k max RP = rank 9
...99% of players, 11k RP/week, 55k max RP = rank 13
...99.5% of players, 12k RP/week, 60k max RP = rank 13 but really close to 14
...99.8% of players, 13k RP/week, 65k max RP = rank 14

Again anyone that got 15 kills in a week was on the list, so it wasn’t super hard to play more than 50% of players. But when you start talking about consistently getting in the top 10% it was a pretty serious time commitment.

And to answer the title question, the answer in terms of hours played varies enormously. But it's worth noting that many people have replied it took 16/hour days for weeks.

Post #88 is very eloquently written and definitely worth a read. (page 5)

Also, if anyone wants to fill out / fix this template I'd be interested:
Honor Per Week / Rough Estimate of What It Took To get:
15 Honorable Kills: under 30 minutes
10k honor/week: A handful of battlegrounds each week.
100k honor/week: ~10 hours in a week casually
500k honor/week: ~8 hours/day day without a group or ~6 hours/day in solid pre-mades
1000k honor/week: ~16 hours/day 7 days a week in very good pre-mades
1500k honor/week: ~20 hours/day immediately winning battlegrounds
2000k+ honor/week: Continuously playing

Also, various posters have said that acquiring the top weekly reward was in the best case scenario 500k honor / week (with everyone at the top levels cooperating) and the worst case scenarios were in the 2,000,000 - 2,500,000 honor a week scenario (intensely competitive PvP servers with multiple farming groups competing instead of coordinating.)

Edit April 27:
One of the things I realized after writing this was that people that acquired Rank 14 didn't necessarily have to be good at PvP. I find this pretty ironic, as it was so difficult to get and required so much dedication, but it was really more about time commitment and farming more than being better than anyone else.

Obviously with the kind of time commitment that was required, R14s played far, far more than the average player and presumably got at least proficient. And if the player was really bad they'd have had a hard time getting in to a premade that could consistently win.

But again it's kind of amusing to think that even someone that was extremely skilled at PvP that "only" played 30 hours / week would probably top out around Rank 11 or 12.

OP:
Getting those titles was arguably the most difficult thing to do in Warcraft. The only things that come to mind are world-first kills (particularly things like pre-nerf M'uru) and some solo kills (Yogg) but...it's just kind of apples to oranges, as the PvP titles were the only thing that ever pitted people with crazy amounts of time to spend on the game against each other.

Which patch the game launches on will have a big impact on this, as http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Honor_system_(pre-2.0) lists that there was a change in Patch 1.8.

I was not a big PvPer myself but did read a post in vanilla that suggested that you needed to make a social network of all the people pushing for it. Then for the three weeks before the push come home from work and play until bedtime every day and pretty much continuously on weekends. Then the week of the push the person needed to take vacation and just play the entire week. All of this preferably being done in groups that were capable of winning battlegrounds, as it was much easier to rack up kills in good groups.

However, getting these titles is arguably the one thing that will be harder now than it was at launch, as players have optimized every aspect of the game to the smallest details over the last fifteen years...but that will be all put to the test as extremely experienced players square off against each other.

Also, if people want to post what they think it will take to get other ranks, especially the ranks that give gear for PvE progression, feel free to post that as well!

[Ettan]

Alot of time and effort, but keep in mind you are also gated. There is a max ranking point gained per week for each rank. So you cannot simply go from private to rank 14 in a week. Here is an example of aproximatly what will be needed (source is well.. lets just say its appliable to the situation described ).

Rank 5 to rank 6: ~7k honor/week
Rank 6 to rank 7: ~10k honor/week
Rank 7 to rank 8: ~25k honor/week
Rank 8 to rank 9: ~50k honor/week
Rank 9 to rank 10: ~120k honor/week
Rank 10 to rank 11: ~210k honor/week
Rank 11 to rank 12: ~340k honor/week
Rank 12 to rank 13: ~400k honor/week
Rank 13 to rank 14: 500k-1M honor/week

You can absolutely get it without grouped premades or a pvp guild. But it will require you to play much much more than them, steadily over a long period of time.
As their farming will be quite alot more efficient than yours (wsg/ab spam all day every day, and kill everything that moves while you wait).

I fixed the issue by account sharing back in the day (first mine then his). Didnt have a pvp guild, but I did play with premades/semi premades most of the time.
People give up when faced with a premade, as being oneshoot all the time is not very fun.
The results are quick 5 base ab or 3 flag wsgs meaning the bg is over in a handful of minutes tops. Most of your the time will then actually be spent farming world pvp while waiting in que.

[Chaelexi]

Alot of time and effort, but keep in mind you are also gated. There is a max ranking point gained per week for each rank. So you cannot simply go from private to rank 14 in a week. Here is an example of aproximatly what will be needed (source is well.. lets just say its appliable to the situation described ).

Rank 5 to rank 6: ~7k honor/week
Rank 6 to rank 7: ~10k honor/week
Rank 7 to rank 8: ~25k honor/week
Rank 8 to rank 9: ~50k honor/week
Rank 9 to rank 10: ~120k honor/week
Rank 10 to rank 11: ~210k honor/week
Rank 11 to rank 12: ~340k honor/week
Rank 12 to rank 13: ~400k honor/week
Rank 13 to rank 14: 500k-1M honor/week

You can absolutely get it without grouped premades or a pvp guild. But it will require you to play much much more than them, steadily over a long period of time.
As their farming will be quite alot more efficient than yours (wsg/ab spam all day every day, and kill everything that moves while you wait).

I fixed the issue by account sharing back in the day (first mine then his). Didnt have a pvp guild, but I did play with premades/semi premades most of the time.
People give up when faced with a premade, as being oneshoot all the time is not very fun.
The results are quick 5 base ab or 3 flag wsgs meaning the bg is over in a handful of minutes tops. Most of your the time will then actually be spent farming world pvp while waiting in que.

Sounds right, after the AV patch you could do it easily in AV as alliance as well. I know on Laughing Skull ALliance it was organized to where each player would hit a certain honor level in that week and then stop to ensure people would get the GM in a certain order. It was managed fairly and if you got out of order with pushing too hard they would work to ensure you did not get GM for the next month.

[AeneasBK]

Depends what other people on your server are doing if the system remains the same.

"Be unemployed" is probably a good start

[RickJamesLich]

Most people that did the grind that I know of stopped at rank 13, mainly because the weapon just isn't as strong as the stuff you can get from raiding. Still it's a very long and brutal grind but for many classes the set items can last you well into naxx, so I can understand why it would take so long to get as if it was easier, a lot of content could've been potentially trivialized.

[Echocho]

You need a few weeks where you and a friend or two can play 24 hours per day sharing your account, it may cost you a ban if Blizzard find out that you're account sharing but it's really the only way.

[Drusin]

I'd be more interested in if the sellers figure out a system for a carry lol

[schwarzkopf]

"Be unemployed" is probably a good start

That was a prerequisite for just getting into AV when I first started trying BGs. Queue length was > 24 hours many times.

[Gavll]

I used to PvP a couple of hours every day and that'll get you to Knight Captain eventually. Worked out about the same on PServers too. I think you're looking at at least 6 hours a day to get anywhere near the top ranks.

[Loxotron]

Alot of time and effort, but keep in mind you are also gated. There is a max ranking point gained per week for each rank. So you cannot simply go from private to rank 14 in a week. Here is an example of aproximatly what will be needed (source is well.. lets just say its appliable to the situation described ).

Rank 5 to rank 6: ~7k honor/week
Rank 6 to rank 7: ~10k honor/week
Rank 7 to rank 8: ~25k honor/week
Rank 8 to rank 9: ~50k honor/week
Rank 9 to rank 10: ~120k honor/week
Rank 10 to rank 11: ~210k honor/week
Rank 11 to rank 12: ~340k honor/week
Rank 12 to rank 13: ~400k honor/week
Rank 13 to rank 14: 500k-1M honor/week

You can absolutely get it without grouped premades or a pvp guild. But it will require you to play much much more than them, steadily over a long period of time.
As their farming will be quite alot more efficient than yours (wsg/ab spam all day every day, and kill everything that moves while you wait).

I fixed the issue by account sharing back in the day (first mine then his). Didnt have a pvp guild, but I did play with premades/semi premades most of the time.
People give up when faced with a premade, as being oneshoot all the time is not very fun.
The results are quick 5 base ab or 3 flag wsgs meaning the bg is over in a handful of minutes tops. Most of your the time will then actually be spent farming world pvp while waiting in que.

Heavily depends of the players on the server on your side, for example me and my brother had to farm over 1million (around 1.3-1.4) per week at the latest stage just because we had people who were pushing over 1 million as well, and you need to compete with them. On some servers it was way less of competition and you could make it without account sharing, but i doubt on the classic servers if the population will be higher then it was in vanilla, it would be possible.
Our daily record was 330k so i assume it is possible to make closer to 2 million or even over 2 million of honor per week.

- - - Updated - - -

If it's unchanged then most GM and HWL players will just be account sharers. I don't think there's any prestige to the title when most of the people that have it had to cheat to get it.

I imagine it'll mostly be warriors and rogues that have the title. They get stupidly strong weapons early on from it while caster weapons are actually kinda bad. If nothing is changed then you're going to see certain guilds have a bunch of warriors and rogues that are GM/HWL for the weapons and not a single one of them will be legit. They just account share so their melee dps gets the weapons.

They should either change it or take a very careful look at accounts aiming for rank 14 and flat out permaban anyone account sharing.

Nah it was presigious anyway, not a cheat to get a friend or family member on board to this goal, still takes a lot of effort to get there for both.
Had a guy who was farming in several players 24/7 non stop but without premade, he has stoped at 13th rank since it was pretty impossible to go beyond without premade on a competitive server. They have added a bit later really good caster items as well but some caster stoped at 13th rank and went to pve for the weapon, was a bit easier choice than to farm 14th. On my server it were warriors and hunters mostly, we were exception as a shaman.

[xcitng]

Getting those titles was arguably the most difficult thing to do in Warcraft. The only things that come to mind are world-first kills (particularly things like pre-nerf M'uru) and some solo kills (Yogg) but...it's just kind of apples to oranges, as the PvP titles were the only thing that ever pitted people with crazy amounts of time to spend on the game against each other.

Which patch the game launches on will have a big impact on this, as http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Honor_system_(pre-2.0) lists that there was a change in Patch 1.8.

I was not a big PvPer myself but did read a post in vanilla that suggested that you needed to make a social network of all the people pushing for it. Then for the three weeks before the push come home from work and play until bedtime every day and pretty much continuously on weekends. Then the week of the push the person needed to take vacation and just play the entire week. All of this preferably being done in groups that were capable of winning battlegrounds, as it was much easier to rack up kills in good groups.

However, getting these titles is arguably the one thing that will be harder now than it was at launch, as players have optimized every aspect of the game to the smallest details over the last fifteen years...but that will be all put to the test as extremely experienced players square off against each other.

Also, if people want to post what they think it will take to get other ranks, especially the ranks that give gear for PvE progression, feel free to post that as well!

Most of the time it was account sharing, so thats probably a good start

[Storfan]

I used to PvP a couple of hours every day and that'll get you to Knight Captain eventually. Worked out about the same on PServers too. I think you're looking at at least 6 hours a day to get anywhere the top ranks.

Lol no. 6 h/day is not even close if you wish to reach R13 or R14.

A friend of mine had to play 16-18h/day for about 3 months if I recall correctly in order to reach R14.

[Hottage]

When I got Grand Marshal I was at over 1 million for 2 weeks and 1.2 million for my last week.

To go from Command to Grand Marshal was 6 weeks of 16 hours a day nothing but Warsong Gulch with a win rate well in excess of 90%.

- - - Updated - - -

I used to PvP a couple of hours every day and that'll get you to Knight Captain eventually. Worked out about the same on PServers too. I think you're looking at at least 6 hours a day to get anywhere near the top ranks.

Good luck with that. The curve above rank 10 is so exponential it's almost vertical.

- - - Updated - - -

Most of the time it was account sharing, so thats probably a good start

Was a lot of account sharing, unfortunately. I know of one warrior on my realm who had three people playing his account 24/7.

Thankfully even then his team was trash and he only made it to Warlord.

[babyback]

Lol no. 6 h/day is not even close if you wish to reach R13 or R14.

A friend of mine had to play 16-18h/day for about 3 months if I recall correctly in order to reach R14.

It was really server dependent. Six hours a day sounds way too low but a few of my old guild pals got to rank 14 and they played less than 16-18 hours a day. But I know they ranked down a few times too. So if you didn’t want to rank down you migh’ve needed that many hours a day.

[Hottage]

Nah it was presigious anyway, not a cheat to get a friend or family member on board to this goal, still takes a lot of effort to get there for both.
Had a guy who was farming in several players 24/7 non stop but without premade, he has stoped at 13th rank since it was pretty impossible to go beyond without premade on a competitive server. They have added a bit later really good caster items as well but some caster stoped at 13th rank and went to pve for the weapon, was a bit easier choice than to farm 14th. On my server it were warriors and hunters mostly, we were exception as a shaman.

Having farmed Grand Marshal without account sharing (managing my own premade group of course), I can quite confidently say the account sharers did take a lot of the prestige away.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Alot of time and effort, but keep in mind you are also gated. There is a max ranking point gained per week for each rank. So you cannot simply go from private to rank 14 in a week. Here is an example of aproximatly what will be needed (source is well.. lets just say its appliable to the situation described ).

Rank 5 to rank 6: ~7k honor/week
Rank 6 to rank 7: ~10k honor/week
Rank 7 to rank 8: ~25k honor/week
Rank 8 to rank 9: ~50k honor/week
Rank 9 to rank 10: ~120k honor/week
Rank 10 to rank 11: ~210k honor/week
Rank 11 to rank 12: ~340k honor/week
Rank 12 to rank 13: ~400k honor/week
Rank 13 to rank 14: 500k-1M honor/week

You can absolutely get it without grouped premades or a pvp guild. But it will require you to play much much more than them, steadily over a long period of time.
As their farming will be quite alot more efficient than yours (wsg/ab spam all day every day, and kill everything that moves while you wait).

I fixed the issue by account sharing back in the day (first mine then his). Didnt have a pvp guild, but I did play with premades/semi premades most of the time.
People give up when faced with a premade, as being oneshoot all the time is not very fun.
The results are quick 5 base ab or 3 flag wsgs meaning the bg is over in a handful of minutes tops. Most of your the time will then actually be spent farming world pvp while waiting in que.

This is pretty spot on. It can be jangled with a little if people work out a rotation and are corporative. You will always have people that won't be though. But I was invovled in a lot of 13-14 rank PVP grinding back in vannila. Never got it myself but was always happy to jump in and heal them for a couple hours on the paladin a day when I wasn't raiding. Not sure how some of them did it. We are talking 12-18 hours of grinding hardcore BGs for some of them for weeks on end.

[Storfan]

It was really server dependent. Six hours a day sounds way too low but a few of my old guild pals got to rank 14 and they played less than 16-18 hours a day. But I know they ranked down a few times too. So if you didn’t want to rank down you migh’ve needed that many hours a day.

That is indeed true to some degree, although R14 was reserved for the top 0.1% of the PvP-week meaning a low-pop server would only allow for 1-2 HWLs/GMs per week while a big pop server can allow for several.

EDIT: Myself I only got to about R10 by playing 3-5h/day.

[towelliee]

This all depended on your server really. Some servers had premade groups who coordinated on who got their rank and it made it easy to get people their rank on that given week. I was on same server as Nightmares Asylum and our premade "social" group on Alliance would always have to coordinate with them on vent about who will get what following week. Lots of win trading also happened between us to make sure our honor was fast.

Then you have people on bad servers who had rogue players who gave no shits about whose "turn" it was.

[Chaelexi]

I'd be more interested in if the sellers figure out a system for a carry lol

There is not a reliable way to carry it since someone could always beat you out on honor and if it is found out that you are being carried it is likely that someone will try to stop it from happening.

- - - Updated - - -

I used to PvP a couple of hours every day and that'll get you to Knight Captain eventually. Worked out about the same on PServers too. I think you're looking at at least 6 hours a day to get anywhere near the top ranks.

Try anywhere from 18-24 hours a day. I know I made Field Marshal and was playing close to 15 hours a day and only made that since Laughing Skull's community was good for setting limits on everyone and for the most part people cooperated.

[Thatfire]

Its takes way too much and your better off raiding. You know. I'm cool with keeping classic classic and all but, you know, Id be ok with changing this 1 thing. Just so you don't have to no life it. And maybe a little bit of class tweeking to make more specs viable.