Battleground and Honor Changes on the Horizon

[Nomenclature]

The wording of the post mentions 'battleground marks' will be removed. What does this mean for marks for places such as Wintergrasp or Halaa?

I will soon be attempting to save enough Halaa marks to get the War Talbuks, which will be no small feat, since large scale pvp in Halaa is almost non-existent. I don't want to start the long grind of gaining that many Halaa marks if they're going to remove them from the game.

But still, the confusion remains. The post mentions 'battleground marks,' so I'd assume this excludes Wintergrasp and Halaa, but is there any chance those will be included as well?

[Shelke]

So far it sounds nice but, random battleground? I dunno, i'm already imagining half the team leaving because they got thrown into Strand of the Ancients or something.

Easy fix to that, and it's along the same lines as the Deserter debuff.

"If you leave a random battleground, you will be unable to queue for random battlegrounds for the remainder of the day."

Problem solved.

[lilbandit]

I read up to about page 7, then it all became the same so skipped it.

Here's my 2cents on it:

Random BG just will not work as Blizzard intend. The reason? Most people dislike any battlegrounds except for Alterac Valley. They purposely do not queue up for anything except for AV, unless they need the marks. If they don't need the marks, they don't queue.

Based on my PUG experience :
best honor per hour = AV
best honor per effort = AV
best honor per gear = AV
best honor per AFK = AV
best battleground for playing the way you want to = AV

That's why Blizzard are putting this in, but...at the moment, you still get virtually the same, if not more honor by just spamming AV all day long, than by doing the other BGs and doing turnins.

This will not make people want to stay in terrible EoTS games for example, or fail Arathi Basin that takes 30 minutes for ~300 honor (if you are lucky).

If you are in premade, it's different, but then you don't really care about doing the other BGs if you are in a premade. I simply cannot see people staying in fail battlegrounds (which 90% are) for a few honor, when they can just continue spamming AV blitz for more honor.

[Nomenclature]

Based on my PUG experience :
best honor per hour = AV
best honor per effort = AV
best honor per gear = AV
best honor per AFK = AV
best battleground for playing the way you want to = AV

I like the idea of a random battleground scenario. I'm not sure which battlegroup you're on, but I'm a casual PvP'er (I avoid Arena like the plague) on the Ruin battlegroup. Oh, and I'm also horde. The horde SUCKS for PuGing PvP on Ruin. Alterac Valley is not good BG for Horde on Ruin, at least not until late at night when more people 'in the know' are running it. Before late a night, it's one AV loss after another. If an AV loss = more honor than X battleground win, I can see your point. Otherwise, at least on my battlegroup, spamming AV PuGs is NOT a very fun endeavor.

[tc3d]

Why won't there be an extra award for using random BG? You get 2 extra emblems from random HC. What the fuck is that about?
Why would I use the random BG queue then when I can just choose the one I Like to play.

My God. Stupid changes are stupid.

# Winning a Battleground using the Random Battleground option for the first time in a day will award players with 30 Honorable Kills worth of additional Honor currency.
# Winning additional Battlegrounds using the Random Battleground option after the first random win will award players with 15 Honorable Kills worth of additional Honor currency.

Reading is fun and when properly used it may answer questions...

[SoberLion]

I just can't understand why Blizz tryin to make every dungeon more and more tactic based , but allow zerg tactic on BG.
They doin everything to make easier honorfarm, but thus changes still didn't makin BGs interesting, most BGs now is simple pvp gearscore test.
Sad that BG is now playin for honor, not for Victories.

[Cyno]

I think that 30 honorable kills curency equiwalent is not even near the amount of badges you get from random hc.
For example the minimum badge amount you can get from random hc is 5 and average piece price is 50 badges so each run gives you 10% of badges needed to buy one piece. Now 30 honorable kills are equal to lets say 250 honor now so it will be 500 honor later on and pvp pieces wary betveen 40.000 - 60.000 honor so it will be 1% needed to buy one piece. Imo thats not really going to speed things up. The double honor from BGs will give you the same honor as it is now with marks of honor.

On the other hand some BGs will be reanimated through that system. Like IOC or SOTA (which arent that bad, problem was in my case that when i was full of all other marks i had to wait like 1 hour in queue just to join it and lose in 5 mins 20 vs 40 or so)

I think your a little off this change will bring hks up to something like 120-130 before they're broken down. This would mean you would be getting closer to 3600-3900 honor for 30 hks given by the Call to Arms or your first random then followed by 1800-1900 honor for the rest and 600-650 for losing.

[xenoie]

This won't change anything gameplay wise for PVPers. Those who choose to spend most of their time PVPing will still be competing against players who choose to spend hours raiding. The honor buff is nice, but it doesn't put PVPers on par with raiders in any way, which is what the are attempting to do here. Random bgs are already in effect. Who doesn't queue for two BGs and take the first pop?

This is why:

What if raiding was a ranked system, and if your rank wasn't high enough you couldn't obtain or use the gear that dropped?
What if every time you wiped on a boss or died to trash your rank went down and could only be raised by successfully killing a boss in the current end game dungeon?

It would suck, and 50% of raiders wouldn't get anything which is how arenas are currently. You don't even need to be good at PVE raiding anymore. Didn't one guild down the lich king the first day he was out?
The only thing challenging is hard modes and you are not required to do them in any way.

You can also currently obtain PVP gear sets by running heroics and raids by turning in badges of different levels. You can't obtain PVE gear sets from doing PVP. PVE gear packs way more dmg then PVP gear, that's a clear advantage.

Either take PVE gear out of the PVP areas (BG/ARENA) or allow players to obtain PVE gear from arena points.

Arena weapons are great, but how are you supposed to get them when you are forced to compete with players who have already obtained a weapon of that level by other means?

Rated BGs will be awesome when guilds who choose to focus on PVP are put up against players with access to high level pve weapons, trinkets, and gear sets to mix in with their resilience.

[Pat1234]

You guys do realize that they said objectives were based off HKs right? They specifically said that capturing objectives yields 100% more honor aswell... We are looking at a huge buff to honor grind - twice as much honor per BG + nearly an addition 4k honor for first win, 2k for the rest.

[HolyDKPriest]

Since the implementation of faction transfers and LFD-Xrealm Heroics, a lot of PVP focused Alliance faction changed to Horde (prior to the undead racial nerf), or started avoiding BGs entirely and now farm mainset badges/honor in heroics.

Whilst the overall population may be close to even, PVP participation is a lot more lopsided in favor of Horde on most battlegroups.A vast majority of battlegroups have Horde outnumbering Alliance considerably, hence why Horde queues are long and Alliance queues are instant (but Alliance usually starts outnumbered in off-peak matches).

While the BG changes may get some people back in and may improve queue times a little bit for Horde. It's going to be a hard sell to what is left of a now minority group of "dillusioned" Alliance players that are now avoiding BGs entirely.

Especially when its easier to move to a PVE server as Alliance and its "still" somewhat faster to farm honor in heroics than queueing up every BG only being outnumbered/facerolled by the overpopulated faction.

[Rolex Snob]

yet not T10.5/75 or this seasons Arena gear. This makes gearing an Alt up quite easy. You try getting a full run of naxx going that isn't for achievements going, and let me know how it goes. Hmm i wonder how long you would last in the crafted blue PvP gear, with a quest weapon? about 1 second instead of 6 in last seasons gear. So why don't you go complain about things that are actually an issue, like no Achievement for not dying in ToGC10, no mount in ICC10, rotface having the same slime spawn rate in 10 as 25, or the lack of melee daggers in the first wing of ICC10, but there are 2 in ICC25, and 7 caster weapons.

People having the 232 T9 gear isn't a problem, you can always get the T9.75 stuff to look "leet" all of that gear still doesn't get you out f the fire or help you max out your dps.

Great post. I agree

[Arthas]

so happy this is here. i always get at least 1 mark. cant never win at bg