Wanted to create this post in an effort to be as informative and productive as possible while also discussing the problems we are bound to see in the future as well, not just currently.
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I’ve been queueing on both factions for the past week and a half, but today queued AB during AB weekend for 7 hours earlier as Alliance after queueing for 8 hours yesterday as Horde just to get some numbers to post here.
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Avg. Ally queue time: 2 minutes
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Avg. Honor per BG: approx. 200 (50-200 for a loss, 275-350 for a win)
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Avg. Honor per hour: between 600-650 depending on winrate
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Total Honor gained after 7 hours: 4437
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Mind you, these rates are usually worse during the week as Alliance playing in other BGs as WSG, EotS, and AV losses (Alliance rarely have been winning AV) usually net me less than 200 honor with a longer time investment. Lets look at the Horde numbers:
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Avg. Horde queue time: 18-24 minutes
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Avg. Honor per BG: approx. 250 (same rates as Alliance, but I won more as Horde which raised the average)
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Avg. Honor per hour: approx. 375
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Total Honor gained after 8 hours: 3,166
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Now, here are the current gear costs of the Blue starter set Honor Gear obtained through Battlegrounds, with Epic offset pieces (I’m not even going to include the Marks required from each BG since they’re irrelevant due to how much worse the honor is):
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Blue Main Set Pieces:
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Helm: 20,081
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Shoulders: 12,622
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Chest: 20,655
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Gloves: 12,622
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Legs: 20,081
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TOTAL: 86,061
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Epic Off Set Pieces:
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Neck: 15,300
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Cape: 11,794
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Bracers: 11,794
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Belt: 17,850
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Boots: 17,850
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Ring (only 1 ring option in S1): 15,300
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TOTAL: 89,888
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TOTAL FOR ENTIRE SET: 175,949
I didn’t even include any of the Blue quality weapons which can be farmed with honor, with those 2h weapons costing 38,250 honor which would put you well over 200,000.
All you have to do is glance at the amount of honor being averaged per hour, and then look at the cost of gear currently to see there’s a serious problem.
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Approx. time required for an Alliance player to obtain the full set: 281 hours (over 300 if obtaining a weapon).
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Approx. time required for a Horde player to obtain the full set: 469 hours (pushing 500 if obtaining a weapon)
While Horde definitely have it worse, both factions are looking at a ridiculous grind to obtain this starter set. this is an ENTRY LEVEL set of gear, not actual BiS. This gear is intentionally designed to serve as a springboard to help people prepare for Arena, yet it is more time intensive to farm than actually obtaining the full Gladiator set will be for anyone who doesn’t have 8+ hours a day or more to play.
Addressing the main discussion points surrounding this topic:
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"Horde queue times are terrible." They are terrible because you have all these people queueing BGs to try to farm this set. If Classic is any indicator, if people were able to farm this set in a much more reasonable amount of time then queue times would normalize again. During the rank 14 grind in Classic, Horde AV queue times were well over an hour. However, once the first few generations of rankers obtained their gear and stopped queueing, queue times slowly returned to normal and were much more manageable. I would expect we’d see the same result if people were able to obtain their gear at a more manageable rate and could push through the current bottleneck that exists with the queues.
- A sub part of this discussion: “Please add mercenary mode to help” If you have played retail since they added mercenary mode, you would understand this caused serious damage to the faction balance in the game. It definitely isn’t the only culprit, but faction balance is at an all time worst in retail currently and mercenary mode was a large contributor to this problem. This short term solution would cause significant damage to many other aspects of the game and the game as a whole, and is not worth implementing as such. I sympathize with the struggle, but increased honor gains would help the queues return to normal solving the root of the problem without causing such damage to other parts of the game.
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"I farmed 75k honor in prepatch so why should I care?" This grind will exist throughout all of TBC when you have to farm a new set off epic off set pieces every new season so it will never go away. This includes the Battlemaster trinkets introduced in season 3 which cost 35,000 honor.
- MUCH worse than that however, is how horrible this is for Alts, Casuals, and New and Returning players. As the seasons progress, past seasons of Gladiator gear replace the blue set as the catch up/entry level set of gear. To keep the post shorter, in Season 4 a New or Returning player will have to farm approx. 280,000 honor for a full set of catch up gear, depending on what weapons they need for their class. It benefits everyone to have more people playing, but I wouldn’t blame a player coming back who saw this grind and decided not to play PvP due to how bad this grind is. It also remains essentially unobtainable for a casual player with less time to play, and anyone trying to get an alt geared for PvP as well.
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"You can just get a few pieces and then do PvE/Raiding for the rest of your gear." I think TBC had the opportunity to serve a huge portion of the playerbase who was unhappy/disenchanted with how PvP gearing worked in Classic. You either had to raid, or do the rank 14 grind. Now, ironically enough, the grind required to obtain just the starter set, not even the actual BiS Gladiator gear, is potentially longer than a lot of mid-late gen rankers Rank 14 grind was in Classic. PvP Players want to play PvP to obtain gear for PvP. Being forced into PvE to circumvent how terrible the grind is feels terrible. That’s not to mention that a lot of classes NEED the resilience from the PvP gear so PvE doesn’t even really work as an option for them.
Blizzard have already hotfixed honor-specific changes that were wrong with TBC Classic multiple times so far, including the fiasco that was the first few days of the prepatch, not inspiring much confidence. However, I’ve hit the point where I don’t even think it’s productive to look at that anymore. Blizzard just need to objectively look at how long the current honor grind is, realize how monumentally bad it is, and make some serious changes as it is pushing a lot of players away from the game.
At a time when they added a level 58 boost, increased the arena points obtained per week from lower rated teams, and just announced a TBC Classic Arena tournament to try to hype up the scene, we have the largest barrier to entry in PvP that has existed possibly in WoW’s history due to how bad this honor grind is. It’s just so backwards, and it’s sad to think about. They’re shooting themselves in the foot so bad with this, but it feels like that seems to be the norm recently with Blizzard.
I could go on but I’ll cut it here. Hopefully this post shed some light on the current situation for those who don’t really understand the situation or who haven’t been playing in battlegrounds in TBC at level 70 yet.
