Icewing Bunker can potentially give you honor for HKs from people fighting around stonehearth, and if I do happen to tab back in when someone's assaulted it, I can defend the bunker and save my team some honor.

This is my favorite AFK spot. Even if horde see me they never bother to kill me, and it is always easy to take the tower back.

Your argument makes no sense at all. Who cares if you played 1 or 25 chars to rank 14. Fact is you have to farm honor now to get upgrades on your current gear. Your number of HK's does not give you the right to just afk because it bores you. I might aswell have 4 over geared friends run heroics for me while I just follow and shift loot once every 5 minutes.

...and if I could get 4 friends to do that in a Heroic, I would.

I spent 2.5 hrs wiping in Heroic Arcatraz last night for 3 badges (we couldn't kill that shadow dude), with people in T4 because our tank was undergeared and it's a crappy heroic (but someone wanted rep). Urgh!

I'm sorry you feel that way but I hope Blizzard puts a real end to this antisocial behaviour. If you cared to play 1 AV weekend you'd have enough honor for all the items. Just get 1-2 healers 1-2 DDs (even a rogue/mage/WL... can easily "tank" Balinda/Ltnts) and have some fun, but this antisocial AFKing that you seem to like just isn't right.

If you don't want to power through one weekend: fine! The season is long enough just play a few hours every AV weekend! But this is a serious board, please don't push your antisocial agenda.

On topic the thing that gets me the most is the fact that season 3 will live past the patch for atleast 1 week, while it might be understandable from a bug-fix point of view, it will most probably screw the current balance and as such change the "face" (aka the titles) of season 2.

I hate the afkers too, though I have done it occasionally myself. It's very frustrating when you do want to play.

If you think you can earn 75k honor in a single AV weekend though, you're crazy though. You never get the perfect run of games, or wins. If you do a full weekend - I mean give up a weekend of your life to bore yourself to death on a friday night, then 12hrs on a Sat and Sunday, maybe you could get over 30k, but not 75. And I don't know anyone (myself included) who could stand 2 x 12 hr days in AV.

Anyway, apologies for continuing the derail (!)

Where I come from, a 'weekend' is two days...

Taking Monday and Friday off work to do twice as much? *shudder*

I'm kinda impressed though. I managed about 25k on AV weekend two weeks ago and was pretty much ready to kill myself

Well, I've done 20-25k a day. Weekend has 3 days. I'd say it's possible.
As for 2 x 12 hr? It's more like 3 x 14-16 hours.

Trust me, if you have a job, weekends are 2 days!

AV 'weekend' is 4 days, but I can't realistically use that time.

16hrs a day is clearly not fun/acceptable. That's the problem. AVing a reasonable amount (say 7 AVs / week) will not get you the honor you need before the season is over, pretty much. That's why the system is broken. The idea of bonus honor dailies helps this. But as has been much discussed, the amount of bonus is insignificant and so nothing, actually, is changed.

I earned 50k and my brother earned 65k last AV weekend. We both gave up before the weekend was over. On one of those days I hit 27k honor. If I had kept it up for just 3 of those full days I'd easily have capped but there's only so much AV I can tolerate, even when AFKing.

Also, I don't think anybody is trying to justify AFKing. Reasons why you do something aren't the same as an excuse. I personally realise that AFKing hurts the other random people trying to play AV. I just don't care enough to either a) not get the honor items or b) participate.

Well, it is also heavily dependant on Battlegroup too. I haven't really played AV for 2-3 months, but back then Alliance queues on Ruin were 16-20+ minutes on weekends so queues take about as long as the actual game. 27k honor in one day just wouldn't be possible. My friend just got his shaman to 61 the day before the weekend and he had was in AV for 12+ hour days every day except Monday where he only played a few hours. He came out with about 37k honor for the entire weekend.

Regardless of whether people are trying to justify AFKing for honor or not, there are people in this thread saying they would rather have the Cloak cost 30k honor instead of 60 Badges of Justice because they can get 30,000 honor in 2 days (re: Downloading and activating Mouse Clicker, Macro Express or any other sort of program that does automation to perform an action every 4 minutes 59 seconds so they don't get booted out of AV). These people are the reason I hate the thought of even queuing up to a battleground (and horrible people that queue as well and actually play, which there are a lot of). They would rather exploit instead of spending a portion of the time actually playing the game to do heroics and get 60 badges, which I think is pathetic at best.

The whole retrofitting rewards forcing us to go to do extremely time consuming things we've already done, been done with, and never want to go do again to get competitive gear is becoming annoying though. That goes for both Battlegrounds and Heroic instances.

I'm really happy with it, while I'll still respec for arenas. It will make grinding honor (already been discused) as 10/48/3 in 2.3 alot less frustrating. And the obvious benefits for raiding.

I am completely for AFKing in battlegrounds. Sometimes I dual box or even tripple box my friend's characters and AFK on all three of them to get them honor. Everyone I arena with (last season Gladiators) agree with me 100% that it's perfectly fine for us to AFK in AV to get honor points. Sometimes we participate in AV out of sheer boredom. Every descent competetive PvPer I know of has no problem AFKing in battlegrounds. Because we did it so much before.

When I zone into AV, I see 30 incompetent players, 8 half competent players and possibly one other person I would enjoy PvPing with. The last time I zoned into a battleground to have fun was with a premade group.

The Battleground system does not yield fun. I do not know anyone who enjoys doing Battlegrounds. The Arena system on the other hand is incredibly fun and competetive in both gameplay and rewards.

We're beating a dead horse here. People do battlegrounds for one purpose only: To get gear for Arena and/or Dueling. There is no reward other then gear -- completely opposite of every other mechanic like arena and pve, similar to grinding heroics.

I hate you all and my opinion of several people has declined as a result of this thread.

AFKing in BGs gets you /gkick in EJ for what it's worth.

I'm not claiming I have a "right" to AFK because of my lifetime kills - I'm explaining *why* I AFK, and that's because grinding battlegrounds for honor is mind-numbingly boring. If I could get a reasonable amount of honor per hour playing team vs team WSG, I'd do that, because I love that battleground at the highly competitive levels, but I can't. If I could get the items currently relegated to honor with arena points and never step foot in a pug BG again, I'd do that. But because the only way to get the boots/belt/bracer/neck is via honor points, and the best way to get honor points is alterac valley, and alterac valley is agonizingly boring, I'm going to get my honor in the least painful way possible, which is shadowmelding in Icewing Bunker while doing something else and tabbing back in every so often to make sure I don't get deserter or occasionally take back the bunker if it's been assaulted.

As others have said, if the BG daily quests were actually for a substantial amount of honor (1000+), it would cut down on the need to grind out AV, while also giving people more incentive to play battlegrounds to WIN. If i could play a few pug BGs a day to guarantee myself 1500-2k honor or so, I'd actually PLAY those games, and it would be much more enjoyable. As it stands, AFKing in AV will likely remain the most efficient road to honor rewards.

On my (fire PvE spec also doing arena for points) mage, I will love it and use it and hotkey it and love it more.
On my resto druid, I shudder at the thought of fire/Cold Snap builds... while not that powerful DPS wise it seems to have loads of kiting and waiting-for-cooldown opportunities. Which seems pretty bad for melee.

We'll see what happens though, other classes should be getting balance changes as well as with every single other patch.

I think an equally valid suggestion would be to vastly inflate the amount of Honor you get for actually killing opposing players, reducing the 'need' to do Battlegrounds, and potentially stimulating outdoor (a.k.a. 'World') PvP. I realize it's not a big part of the game, and that the outdoor PvP objectives are largely worthless (Halaa, Zangarmarsh GY, etc.), but it could also give people cause to actually be competitive in Battlegrounds - killing your opponents should be worthwhile.

With that said, I'm not opposed to bonus Honor or daily Battleground quests - the bottom line is, there simply need to be more options.



As far as the actual Arena season, when was the decision to reset all ratings announced? I could have sworn I saw a Blizzard poster on the official forums specifically say they would not reset the ratings, just to avoid the inevitable clash of 2400 vs. 1200 teams.

There's still a need to do battlegrounds since you need tokens, but yes, actually making it worthwhile to kill players is a big part of it. The diminishing returns really hurt long games and AV is never short -- lifting the "4 kills" cap while in a battleground would probably go a long way.

See, while I understand and respect this position, I just think the current honor system is so massively flawed that I really don't have qualms about taking the easy way out. I used to play 100% of the BGs I joined, but after grinding out to the honor cap for the fifth time under the current model, I just don't have the stomach for it anymore. I have three characters I play in arena, and a fourth that I haven't leveled to 70 simply because the prospect of grinding honor to catch him up in gear is too miserable.

I am a highly competitive person and an obsessive min-maxer, so simply doing without the upgraded pieces each season is not an option, at least for my main. I'm not proud of AFK'ing, and I can completely understand those who are staunchly opposed to it. But grinding out honor isn't fun at all to me, and if there's a part of the game that isn't fun that's standing in the way of keeping me from doings something that is (competitive arena), I'm going to circumvent the suck if I can. Honor grinding is simply too big of a repetitive time sink.

As I mentioned before, I think higher value BG daily quests would go a long way toward remedying this problem, as would rated/team-vs-team WSG/AB games. The bonus weekends as they stand now just encourage players to honor grind binge, which makes the experience that much more unpleasant - on AV bonus weekends, I actually feel like I'm doing something *wrong* any time I'm not in an AV game on some character, and that's absurd. Something like the BG dailies to spread that grind out would go a long way toward improving the honor grind experience, as well as encouraging people to actively participate because winning really matters. Similarly, WSG/AB rated leagues with weekly bonus honor or something would revive those battlegrounds and put competition and fun back into BG PVP.

FYI: It's been 10 kills at 10% reduction each since 1.11 or so, didn't make the patchnotes though.

I think they should just get rid of the shared honor for kills and give everyone on the "tap" list 100% instead. This would go a long way towards solving the honor issues in 2.3 AV while also promoting grouping up instead of hoping for 1vs1's.

And, in fairness, I would hazard a guess that most players have their 30 "___ ___ Mark of Honor" before they get the ~12-19k Honor they need for the piece they intend to buy (irrespective of whether they're winning or losing all their games, or anything else in between).

Removing the 10-cap might encourage kill-farming in a goal-oriented BG like WSG, though, which we want to avoid. Tripling the Honor you get for each of those kills, however, would certainly go a little way towards encouraging participation.

Alternately, we could be mean, and argue that anyone in a 10-person BG contributing less than 5% total damage and/or healing should be auto-removed from the Battleground (in 5 minute intervals, or something). Scale the values appropriately for the larger BG sizes (3% in AB, 1% in AV?).

I think the current honor system is an abomination and I agree with most of your suggestions. I think 4000-honor dailies would've been the best thing Blizzard has done for PvP in a while.

That said, if the system as constructed is not tenable or something to which you're willing to subject yourself, the proper response is not to participate. Yours is the same logic that justifies powerleveling, buying gold rather than farming consumables ("I love raiding but I can't stand farming so this is my solution"), and everything right up to altering your textures to skip to C'Thun. Leeching your way through BGs is selfish and a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the rules.