I don't know how you do it stateside but our av's last a average of 15 minutes as a horde pug, netting ~~300-350 honor per 15minute. If the fight takes any longer than that (Ie. mass defending on the horde part) it's better to leave.
If I'm in a premade we can wipe the floor with the Alliance and get 600 honor per 20minutes ("All Red").
At best you can get the full 75k in one weekend, worst it takes you two. Last I checked a season lasts longer than two months.

As a off-note: Spacebaring in the starting cavern gives 10-20k a day as well.


This is all during the AV weekend of course.

I think there is one essential problem with BG's which wasnt mentioned much before. Its the "zerg". Death means nothing. You die, you res, you run again. This approach totally drags the BG's down to the level of unbearable tedium.

I understand that it is not possible to remake current BG's to be played in Arena (or god forgive, counter strike way) way, but it would make the games way more interesting if you could just spectate when you die once or atleast wait quite long time to get resed again. Together with removing honor / marks from loosing or atleast reducing it, it would come a long way to improve the BG's in my opinion.

People would pay way more attention to keeping themselves alive and actually keep the bases and use atleast some sort of tactic if they'd knew that their death can actually ruin the victory for their team and send them home without honor / mark.

350 honor every fifteen minutes is over fifty hours of grinding. You're acting likes it's trivial putting 6-7 hours a day into AV for every single day of honor weekend two weekends in a row (8 days total). If you're seriously doing it in one weekend (13ish hours a day), you're either botting or crazy.

That does not really seem all that fun to me. First off, everybody will hesitate to actually PvP because death means you're out. The tactics which will form is actually not to PvP but to run from it to keep alive. Second if you do not give the losers some reward, they will not come back. Which means less people participating in BG's and more queue times and less fun overall. Remember in order to win, you also need losers. Don't punish the losers, reward winning more to entice people to actually win instead of losing. You don't kick a dog if he pisses on your floor, you reward him for pissing outside.

How bout a honor bonus for having a positive kill/death ratio? I think this would work better than just excluding you the first death you encounter in a BG. You cannot compare this game to CS, totally different monster.

Besides, we already have a death match system in the Arenas. Where the goal is to survive vs another team. BGs have totally different goals.

It is purely dependant on your server and battlegroup. In my battlegroup the queues for AV are 5-10minutes, on AV weekend 1-3minutes. Games last around 20minutes each, 300 honor per win, 550ish per AV weekend win. Please note on non AV weekends I have earned over 500 honor and on AV weekends over 700 for a single game. People in our BG always split off to kill elites, defend our towers and capture the enemy bunkers.

That means in 12 hours on an AV weekend, you will get just shy of around 20k honor. Now add in the fact that "grinding AV weekend" could mean for a hardcore player 16hours of AV. Also add in that some games may last longer, though I have had 15minute Av games too and it is possible to grind 25k honor a day. It would be very very draining but definately possible to get 75k honor total in 3days if you really pushed it and got lucky to avoid any "puush! Come on pusssh to SP!" type games.

The biggest problem with making losing hurt more is that it hurts everyone who is above average. You have to know that people aren't going to suddenly be good once something is on the line. They will keep playing. They will have fun killing people on the blacksmith bridge or in the middle of WSG while the flag is running past them. And everyone doing the "right" thing loses alongside them because of it. It's not fair to be penalised for losing when it's not within your power to force a win.

My final AV weekend I ground 60k honor over that weekend (not this one, not the last, but the one before). On one of those days I hit 22k honor. This was with 10-15 minute waits on games. I also ground my 60 warlock to cap within 2 weeks real time. These things are not healthy. They should not be described as "just" anything unless it's "just insane". Anyone who can grind like that is not normal and should not be held up as an example of how something is easy or insignificant. 75k honor is a massive number and well beyond reasonable, stop trying to pass it off as otherwise.

The amount of honor you can get also wildly depends on your battlegroup. I'd kill for 5 minute AV queues, and though it would be fairly mindless and uninteresting, at least it'd be pretty efficient. Instead, I have 35 minute queues during AV weekend and 1.5 hour queues last night now than AV weekend is over. That's a pretty substantial difference in play experience based on something as random as what battlegroup your server happens to be in.

The question if 75k honor is a lot all depends on the timespan you give yourself to reach it. Doing it in one weekend while actually playing is possible in a populated battlegroup, but after this you are completely brain dead for a week after.

Doing it over a timespan of a season isnt much of a hassle, it comes down to about 500-800 honor per day for the whole season. Keep in mind that with AV weekends you can grind a lot more which will result you to have the gear a lot faster.

At least with BG you have the option that if you really want the gear obtainable , eventhough its not healthy, you can grind it extremely fast, where as in pve raiding or arena, you can play literally play 24/7 , but still not get these upgrades so fast.

Melador, I think you should make a topic where you state your BG isnt the most healthy to say the least. To me it seems you dont have much trouble with doing the honor grind, but more the queue times and hence want alternatives for obtaining the BG gear.

Yeah, I think you're right, it's basically two things:

1. Long queue times that make an already dull grind almost unbearable.
2. How easy it is to get rolled in non-AV BGs for basically no honor.

I don't want gear faster or easier (purchasing with Arena points would be both slower and more difficult), but I would like for gear to be more pleasant to obtain.

Throughout WoW people have argued that they shouldn't be forced to play one part of the game that they don't enjoy to play another part of the game that they do enjoy. This is just another one of those cases, and the two options are 1) break the dependency, which they've largely done with PvP/PvE, or 2) make both parts of the game sufficiently enjoyable. I'd be happy with either solution here.

For me, it was just a matter of getting ahead of the curve. When the honor system changed pre-T BC, it effectively killed raiding for my guild (we were wiping on Nef at the time). We couldn't drag people in to BWL to waste gold on repairs and hope for a weapon drop when they could pvp and be guaranteed a drop. As a result, I did a lot of pvp and just saved the honor.

Right now, I have every piece of veteran's on my pally and my mage, and I am approaching the honor cap on my mage and at about 25k honor on my pally. I do a few BG's every night for fun after raiding to unwind, the honor piles up, and by the time season three rolls around I will be able to buy everything almost immediately and start banking honor again.

And I honestly do not understand why so many people hate EOTS. I love it. Granted, I am in a battlegroup where the alliance is perpetually stupid, and still can not figure out AB, but on the occasions you can get a group that understands towers >flag, it is a lot of fun. For me, the worst BG in the game is AB. The minute the gates open, you can watch on your battle map as 8 morons charge farm, a few charge BS and get wiped, you take Stables and stay to defend it, and get annhilated by the horde who went LM and GM. At that point, the horde camp you at Trollbane. OVER, and OVER, and OVER again. Or, alternately, you take three nodes, and watch as 13 people charge BS, at which point you sit and wait for the bitching to start because we lost the three nodes we had.

AB makes the baby jesus weep.

I believe R. Pardo stated at Blizzcon that they were comfortable with the best rewards being available to those who excel at multiple aspects of the game. Having said that, 'rewards' in that context were framed around gear; although rewards could be also entail basic enjoyability.

It certainly sounds as if Blizzard is ok with some degree of players being 'gently nudged' into an aspect of gameplay they may feel inclined to ignore.

Well I didn't get to High Warlord by botting... Mainly it was premades and that's the key.
As for trivial... You know the AV weekend is coming. Plan accordingly. A lot of people took vacations when TBC was released. You can plan one weekend a month for AV grind.
I guess it's how you define fun. I have fun beating the opposition with a premade or do "All-Red" where we hold all the points. 600 for 20 minutes gives a bit different numbers but even then you'd want to put in 15+ hours to get the maximum out of the premade/weekend.

So it's up to the person really. Hardcore for one weekend and relieve yourself from all the tedious "3k a day" worries.

Right now for high end arena PvP you need either
a) ultra high-end PvE epics or
b) the honor rewards

This is a problem when the following the two factors come together
a) it takes a really long time (I grind 750-1.5k honor per hour)
b) it is not fun (subjective; however this seems to be by a large margin the most common experience)

Additional problems

a) Some Alliance report long Q times (5-60 minutes?) I guess this could affect horde too, but I haven't heard of that happening.
b) High variability in time spent versus reward received beyond the control of your character.

Personal frustrations
a) As a healer, I am reliant on others to generate honor via HK's. How many healers here just follow the strongest warrior around when pugging? (I do)
b) Encountering teams while pugging is a common experience (and a frustrating one.)
c) I've been doing AV for 2 years, with no end in sight. I'd like new content.
d) Often the most strategic choice (i.e. guarding something) is the lowest honor producing choice. I do not think a smart choice, or a team player should be penalized if it can be helped.

Do you ever look at how many people are afk in the cave in AV? Analyzing who they are or rationalizing why they are there seems pointless to me. One thing is obvious, they do not want to be there and/or better things to do, but do want the rewards. The anti-afk measure blizzard is putting will hopefully work well, but I have serious doubts that it will actually improve my experience in AV. I kinda feel like blizzard has not put even a small amount of effort into the BG's in the last couple years and it shows. I understand why people afk (because they do not want to play in the BG, but can still profit by pressing one button every 5 minutes instead of devoting attention to it), eliminating the reward for doing so seems like the less important fix. The problem is that they do not really want to be there. I believe the large # (based on my observations it seems about 25%) is evidence of the poor quality (or age) of the content.

On a side note I would like to see an UT assault style BG w/ NPCs. Give each side a chance to assault an objective(s) with NPCs and award honor based on the difference in time taken. You could have it get increasingly more difficult for the defenders by having an increasingly larger NPC presence (ranging from none to a lot.) I think Blizzard usually does a great job on their content and so I'd just assume let them handle the details of something like that because they will probably make it fun. I really think they haven't given any effort to improving BG's in a long time.

I'd also like to see them remove the 3 marks for winning vs 1 mark for losing system. Is anybody here motivated to play or excited by the prospect of those marks? How many are frustrated by the amount required and the often small level of control you have over the outcome of the match?

To address the original question. While I can not say that blizzard won't add arena gear for all slots; I think most people here would be surprised (including myself) if they did.

Not mine, not lucky enough to be an alliance afker. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...VwkndTotal.jpg

There is no doubt that the planned "improvements" in AV if they go in as stated and no more is going to drastically reduce the gains from AV, and overall make it a lot more depressing. It will bring it back to the old school minimum 2 hour games, and if you doubt me on that just look at what happens when it is 20 horde vs 40 alliance after IB GY gets capped when horde got wiped at SH GY, and then consider how it would look like if it was 35v40 and horde were spawning at FW GY and could stop the ninja. Or check out Wipe You on Galv 2 PvP, 7v~30 is quite simple in most cases.

People say they will do what it takes to get the most honor possible even if it means backing down, but that's hardly true. 99% of players do simple math to decide if they want to fight - If amount of players next to me >= amount of players I am going to fight, go attack. If no, search the next/closest objective for such conditions.
That's basically exactly on. Imagine if with each new raid instance that came out, an entire new set of badge rewards came out that was required to fill out your sets, and the mobs in heroic instances gained 10% more 'power', from HP to damage.


Back on the main topic, I remember back from the first Blizzcon in the PvP talk they had stated that you shouldn't pick your BG by the amount of honor you get, but the one you enjoy the most. They need to get back to that and do just a flat honor/hour with a nice but not amazing win bonus that adds in queue time(but forces you to actually end the BG to get the queue bonus), while also picking up the amount of honor you get for kills. Especially group kills, which are essentially worthless. How does it make sense that a 20v20 victory is the same honor to a player as a 1v1?(As pointed out by Avair as well) A 20v20 should grant at least 10x more honor than a solo kill. This would also in part aid in premade vs premade battles, as they typically are more organized and put more people where it ends up mattering into huge epic battles.

Implementing an in-background honor tick which was independent of your current victory conditions in the battleground would be amazing. All the BGs would be normalized for proper/equal gain rates, people wouldn't *have* to do AFK Valley and could then participate in their favorite BG.

Sometimes I get the feeling that PvE players forget that this is a game, and it's supposed to be fun. Honor grinding on your first toon is unbearable enough, let alone if you want to try out a new class. The time it takes from starting a toon, levelling, gearing, faction grinding, etc, and grinding honor and arena points, it takes WAY too long to get to a point where you merely have the gear to be competitive in high end arena matches. It's pretty sad.

I think there would be much more strategy innovation if rerolling didn't take 3+ months.

AQ had basically the same problem as the honor grind -- you were forced to do something long, boring and tedious (the endless trash packs) and due to that, it's most commonly noted as the worst raid instance despite having some really fun bosses. One major difference is that you didn't have to keep going back to AQ once you were in Nax like you have to keep returning to AV. We ran MC long into BWL, and BWL long into AQ, but never touched AQ once we were in Nax. C'thun is one of the best designed bosses in the game but also one that we killed the fewest just because of the stupid trash.

So regardless of what aspect of the game you're playing, when it's not fun for long stretches at a time, it shouldn't be in the game.

Another example of braindead design decisions -- WSG matches aren't guaranteed to end. Ever. After 25 minutes with no captures I bailed out of one tonight and now I've got to wait 15 minutes until I get back in. 45 minutes burnt with about 80 honor gained.

Stuff like this is why we shouldn't be forced to do BGs to compete in Arenas. It's infuriating.

Edit: Later the same night -- held captive by a mostly organized group that refused to cap the final flag and preferred to just farm us for honor at our graveyard by mass-focus-firing us as we spawn. Did whoever designed WSG seriously not think of this?

Whats funny, is this has been going on forever, since the debut of WSG.

If something equally stupid happened in a PvE Encounter some big name raid leader would make a post on the R&D forums and cry and the servers would go down and stuff would get changed.

Wait, thats already happened. Here we are YEARS after WSG's introduction, and it's the same stupid crap it was before.

If people were forced to go into MC every week people would move onto a new game in a heartbeat.

I honestly think, if Blizzard does not do something about it, we are going to see a major exodus of the BG crowd, and possibly arena crowd once they get tired of farming AV every season(Warhammer possibly). Which I am pretty sure everyone is already tired of it, just arenas are worth it - for now.

Edit: Pretty whiny, but it's just not fun anymore. I feel like my brain is leaking out of my head trying to convince pugs that they should help rather than hinder. A few years of tedium sucks.

Edit2: Who actually likes BG's anymore at all? I mean seriously. The only time they are even close to fun is when its Premade vs Premade that are close in gear/skill(Have'nt seen this once since Naxx days). This is why arenas are a huge hit, they take what was fun about BGs and concentrate it into a small setting.

We need a QQ forum, obviously.

What if BG's had premade queue option where its all about winner? Winning team would grab all honor, based on the ladder system where your premade is based. Higher you go, better honor you get. If you loose, you get nothing but step down. Team ratings could be as simple as 1-10. Everyone starts from 5, if you loose games you drop by 1 slot and if you win you go up. Teams with ladder status of 10 would obviously gain best honor, but they would only face other 10 teams. Lets say teams with rating of 10 would gain triple honor from wins. And rating of 1 would gain equal to nonrated honor.

How would this kind of system work with battlegrounds? I dont mean exactly as I described, but something along those lines. Would it encourage players to play for their honor? Would it give better BG experience?

Edit: So the problem is that BGs arent fun. Fixing the reason for not doing BG pvp, instead of letting the problem remain and give alternative. And I really do agree that WSG needs some deadline. I absolutely LOVE wsg. But as mentioned, it can last forever in worst case scenario.

Isn't it nice how the worst BG to play is also the one that awards the least honour? WSG has to be far and away the worst... at least even if you are being totally rolled in AB/AV/EotS you know it will be over soon and you will probably have held some points long enough to get some honour.

AB is my BG of choice; but I also enjoy AV in theory, and at the moment it is intolerable.

Personally I think the AV change is a step in the right direction - it will still be a massive honour gain BG because of how many people there are to kill and how many times you can kill them before the game is over. Additionally you get points for objectives, of which people would complete more if games were longer. AV is also so big if you don't enjoy one aspect of the BG there are always others (the zerg, guarding points, base defense, quest objectives, stealth teams) It won't give as much honour as it currently does, but it would still be a lot and it would be more fun... I am horde and have never afked, but it really, really irritates me because I actually enjoy AV and I hate losing because only 10 people could be bothered to play.. and the alliance don't even have pity and let you kill Belinda unmolested - it really just makes you not want to go at all.

It's funny because i am the kind of player who is mostly PvE oriented and I CAN cope with going back and doing old content again and again... I am always the last one to leave old content behind and that has always been the case.. I ran MC and BWL runs for casuals and alts back when my guild was only doing AQ/Naxx, and I only recently stopped trying to run Kara and Gruuls for people. (We are in BT/Hyjal)

I don't agree with letting Arenas die because then every PvE or casual player who is not serious about Arenas would be pretty much cut off from PvP forever more. It was at least the case in the past that heavy-duty PvEers or PvPers could swap from one to the other with the gear they gained, not so much now, but to kill BGs would be to pretty much completely sever the two parts of the game. I still want to be able to PvP, but as an enhancement shaman in PvE gear, BGs is pretty much all I can do.

So personally I hope that Blizzard puts some time into making the old ones fun again, or makes sure the new ones are good fun and worth doing whether you win or lose.

(As a side note, I wish they would let you turn tokens in for rep again)