The problem with this is that you end up with the current situation: DPS (and to a lesser extent healers) geared through pvp who outgear and thus want to skip past lower level content, but tanks for whom pvp gear is not viable (due to the lack of mitigation) who thus cannot find any dps to run normal instances, then cannot get into heroics because the pvp-geared dps want a tank geared enough to carry them. If you compare say, a prot warrior who hit 70 a week ago to a mage who hit 70 a week ago, the mage could be most of the way to enough gear to quite comfortably get through karazhan, while the prot warrior is still struggleing to fill a normal mech group to get replace his greens. This is the problem with raising the power of entry-level pvp gear at such a rate through time.

I don't really see any harm in allowing people to bank 75K honor and be able to pick up a few pvp pieces at 80. Frankly, this is a rather disappointing annoucement, it does feel like the equivalent of gold being wiped out. A wipe might be valid if pvp were changing drastically, but it isn't. We'll still have the same old battlegrounds, plus 1 new BG and 1 outside pvp zone. I bet we'll still have AV/Eye/WSG/AB weekends, etc. Blizz should really cut the players some slack here instead of having people refarm whatever honor they had going into WotLK.

Which method has the greater problem of players potentially having no way to get into a heroic, because nobody wants to go to the normal instance once they're attuned. When I wanted to get my Shaman attuned to H.MgT a few weeks ago it took me two full days to find a group for precisely this reason.

A possible compromise between the two existing systems of attunement would be to have keys linked to reputation as is currently the case, with daily quests for each keyholder faction to make sure the rep is freely available. However, the end boss of each normal instance would drop an item that starts a "report to base" quest (a la Nazan's letter). When that quest is turned in, an extra daily quest for the appropriate keyholder faction is unlocked. So a player who can't find a group for the normal runs can still get his heroic key, but players who complete all the instances on the hub in normal mode will be able to speed up the required rep grind enormously.

When you put it this way, a solution seems clear to me: give people some reason to do *normal* instances, in much the same way there are reasons to do heroics. Give the lvl-80 normals tokens for the account-bound scaling items that are available from nothing except these tokens, give normal bosses some vanity items (a special tabard, non-combat pets) which aren't available in the heroic version. Hell, even give them a wotlk "Mark of the Illidari" such that running a normal lvl-80 5-man means that you have all your nights consumables. You could also say, give them each a *very* lucrative daily quest that only opens up once you have reached a certain rep level or...who knows what else. But we need a reason for at least some people to be going to the normal instances so that new 80s (particularly tanks) will have a pve progression path without having to spend days in lfg for each group that manages to start. Of course, some people will still try and cheese things by demanding a tank in full epics, but many will be ok with one at the appropriate gear-level so at least it would be some improvement.

A tank in full Season 2 can easily tank a heroic. His parry and dodge will be low but he'll have the HP/armor for the job and be uncrittable from Resilience. It's not ideal, but it's a hell of a lot better than the patchwork blues/greens/crafted epics that people first did the Heroics with. I would often do Heroics with a Warrior friend tanking who was only interested in PvP, and it was trivial to heal him and keep him up even with an Arms spec (we quickly learned he had to spec Prot anyway if he was to hold aggro off of good DPS though).

This was actaully one of the arguments Blizzard made when they introduced the Badge PvP cloaks (Dory's Embrace, etc.). People complained that they'd have to go do Heroics and that they weren't geared for it, and blue posts responded saying that they certainly should be able to.

The decision makes sense considering the considerable changes to how Honor and arena points are earnt and spent in Wotlk. But resetting Honor each season would have been problematic for non 70 players who werent otherwise affected by seasonal changes at all.

Now my only problem is what to do with 74800 honor and 390 tokens when I allready have almost all the offset gear I could desire.

Re: The "Heroic Attunement" frustrations.
If every (Dungeon) faction had associated dailies, I think everyone would be pleased.

- Everyone can get themselves keyed independently.
- Provides an avenue to obtain your Helm Enchant, Faction Recipes and Exalted rewards/tabards without the stress of spamming "LFG H SP!" for 4 hours per day.
- Everyone enjoys doing dailies for cash. Moving from Sha'tari Skyguard, to Ogri'la, Netherwing and the SSO, allowed me to raise 4 factions and make a lot of money at the same time. It's a very accomplished feeling, as opposed to the days of grinding Twilight Texts to get my CC rep to Exalted... that was just painful.

You and I know this: it is how my 2v2 partner got his dory's, for one. But in most cases, people will not be willing to group with a tank in full pvp gear. We pugged 3 dps every day for a few weeks to do HBM, and almost every single day someone did the usual "...is that your tanking gear". The assurances of the pocket raid-geared healer were what kept them around, but even a well-geared pug healer will be hesitant to make assurances about healing someone in pvp-gear who they don't know. The would rather sit in shatt for an hour than consider the possibility of wiping.

It all comes down to attitude: people want what is easy. They don't want to be challenged. A heroic with a pvp-geared tank is very doable, but since it is harder than a pve geared tank, since they may just have to pay attention, they call such a tank "undergeared" and refuse them.

Anyway, this is a wotlk thread, and I am getting somewhat off-topic, so I will re-iterate the reason I am here: Wrath needs some way to encourage people to at least participate in early pve, such that in a few pvp seasons time there is still a progression choice between pvp and pve.

Also, again on the topic of Heroics; none of the Dungeons in Northrend have reputations attached to them at this point. Probably just NYI, but if not, it may be safe to assume that Heroics will either have no attunement; or follow the same structure as Magister's Terrace.

So then I suppose, at least how things stand now, that wearing the faction specific tabards is the only way to get rep while clearing a dungeon as well as the only way to get rep for those factions inside dungeons? Actually, assuming that the main way you gain rep with factions is to do dailies, this provides not only a way to gain rep without limit (run dungeons until you collapse) but also solves the problem in TBC of people who aren't interested in running dungeons trying to get the gear, recipes, etc, that come from getting to exalted with "dungeon" factions.

The daily dungeon quest (not heroic) also has as a reward +250 rep with the faction of your choice (Argent Crusade, Ebon Blade, Wyrmrest, Kirin Tor).

I think part of the reason behind the honor reset is the restructuring of PvP gear costs.

If you wanted kit your Arms Warrior out in the full level 80 Savage Gladiator gear (Chest, Hands, Head, Legs, Shoulders, Two-Handed Weapon, Throwing Weapon), it would take you 41,600 Honor to do so.

In comparison, a level 70 set of the equivalent Season 2 items would cost 100,250 honor.

Granted, the Savage set also requires 2,400 Arena points, but I feel that if it takes you 2 months to accrue those points anyway, then 41k honor from BG dailies and the occasional PvP binge is hardly asking for too much.

The main problem I how with the wipe is that it also penalizes lower level characters. I think it would work much better if they just wiped the Honor Points/Marks when you leveled above 70. Because I have a few friends who play very casually like doing Battlegrounds on there way to 60, and get a piece or two of gear with it. This would essentially reset there progress.

You bring up another point. Perhaps the reason for the reset is they intend to adjust honor distribution/award in battlegrounds. As in, slow down honor gains in a process to normalize it or some such.

Again, on the Heroic discussion. Just noticed this - Heroic Key to the Focusing Iris, which gives the a quest; rewarding you with Heroic Key to the Focusing Iris. The quest states that the item dropped from Sapphiron; which means that you can not access Malygos without having killed Sapphiron first?

Currently, you need the key on one member of the raid group to open the door, after which the whole raid can zone in.

At the moment, it looks like the normal key (from 10-Sapph, named just Key to the Focusing Iris) will open 10-Malygos, but the heroic key (Heroic Key to the Focusing Iris, from 25-Sapph) will open both 10- and 25-Malygos.

The honor reset isn't fun seriously.

Without the option to save Honor in advance whats going to happen is likely that lots of people just spend the first week playing so many Battle grounds that they are absolutely sick of them and never ever wants to see them again; and still have all the gear in no time at all but after that the game stops being fun entirely. Battle grounds are fun if playing a few hours/week but grinding them non-stop really isn't something anyone I know enjoys.

Dont take t6 tokens as an example but badge of justice then. Raiders gained many badges until now and will until release, but they are useless at 80. So should be honor/marks/arena points.

My gripe with the honor reset isn't the fact that honor is reset, although reseting anything in a game that is based on character development is a good hint on bad design.

The main problem is how they handled it. People have been talking about this for about a year and blizzard never gave a clear answer. Actually once they did and they said we'd keep the points:
WoW-Europe.com Forums -> GM Working Methods

I think this decision was too important from a players perspective to announce it 6 weeks pre expansion, where everyone already has their honor banked. That is just horrible for someone who isn't too much into BGs (and I know I'm not) and grinded it out (I was smart enough not to).

Now cleary their main goal isn't to piss their players off as that is against their interest of earning money, which is what companies are about.
I guess they just didn't plan well, which I consider quite unprofessional.
But if they did this to keep people playing pre 3.0, and they earned money by keeping us in the dark or even suggesting we'd get to keep it for wotlk (and even giving a false and uncorrected confirmation that honor would stay), this gets dangerously close to fraud.
I don't understand how anyone would *seriously* think they handled this situation well.

Edit: Hmm... I think I was misunderstood. I don't care about honor being reset, as I'm not affected by it, as I pointed out in this very post. So this wasn't intended as a whine. So maybe I'm not the one who is actually overreacting here.
And with the fraud thing I just wanted to point out that *if* they were planning to reset honor but didn't tell the players earlier or suggested otherwise on purpose, so the players would keep up their subscription until wotlk, then that would *probably* be fraud (in my country it actually is... feel free to check it out if you can speak german StGB - Einzelnorm). I'm aware of the fact that this will never go to court and nobody will be able to prove it, but I still have a valid point. I suggest you look it up in your local criminal code if you can't speak german, otherwise refer to my link.

Right, and if you look the costs, most pvp items currently costs both honor and arena points, at a ratio of about 15:1 for the introductory set, and 9:1 for the epic 1 set, and no honor at all for the epic 2 set. Assuming they keep this, nobody is going to have to farm more than about 10k honor per week at "worst", which is fairly manageable (we're talking a daily win plus one or two more BGs, and never mind Wintergrasp or weekends). It's a nice system really - the lower tiers cost less arena points and more honor, but you're limited in your point income by your rating; and as your rating goes up, you unlock the next tier of pvp gear, which has a higher arena point cost, but costs less honor, and at the highest ratings there's no honor cost to arena gear at all.

I thought they were going to do something like that really, but more akin to how they currently handle honour gains/costs accross level ranges. If I PvP for 40 hours at lvl 19, my honour gains will not match 40 hours of PvP at lvl 70. The price of items is adjusted accordingly. I thought the 70-->80 downgrade would be harsher than 60-->70, but a full reset?

I'm not seeing a sensible reason in which this won't be worse than any problem it's attempting to address for player morale. In fact, just about the only non-cynical reason I can see is a desire to keep the numbers low. They don't want an individual piece to cost 75K honour, even though those 75K honour at 80 wouldn't be any harder to attain than the 5K they're shooting for now.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what kind of rewards we're talking about from the content patch. "Special rewards" sounds like an euphemism for something very non-combat and decidedly not useful, but pretty to look at.


And there really is no problem with rep gains from WSG/AB that is not solved if people actually had a reason to play proper. 50 minute WSG games is not a sign of two evenly matched teams, it means you've got less than two people in each team actually trying to win, because unless these two people are horrendously undergeared or class mismatched (and I do mean both at once) two is all you need. Micro-managing honour rewards for playing proper in battlegrounds - staying near flags, being in the area of a recap of a flag, being near a cap and so on and so forth - are excellent ideas that actually can be implemented and would improve the quality of gameplay immensely. Like others in this thread, I'm completely baffled as to why they havn't already stepped in and remade the BG reward systems, and if this reset is indeed as someone suggested above a prelude to such a remake... "Awesome" is not a word strong enough to cover how cool that would be.