I think this is the crux of the problem right here, you get two thumbs up 
I know exactly what you are arguing, if “a literal Blizzcon wiiner” gets one shot with PvP gear on then how is it any different having no PvP gear on? you still get one shot?
How does this provide any sort of feedback as to why honor gains need to be increased to make gear more accessible, your video shows the gear to be useless anyway.
I wish queue times were 20 minutes. My averages have always been 45-1 hour.
HES NOT WEARING THE PVP GEAR IN THE CLIP. Bro. It’s like you read 5 words and just assumed what I was trying to say.
He’s at 200 Resilience in the clip almost purely from gemming resilience with a few pieces of PvP gear, which is about half of the resilience you can attain in Season 1. If a player of this caliber stands no chance at surviving a simple opener in Arena, what possible chance does any lower caliber player stand? The farmable gear is the solution to help bridge that gap and allow you to actually play the game past the first 5 seconds of a match, but due to the massive time investment it’s essentially unobtainable, even over the course of an entire season, for anyone who doesn’t play 16+ hours a day.
If you think this is a healthy system and that this type of gameplay is good or fun, then you’re just beyond ignorant and not worth anyone’s time. The solution to create parity in the game and prevent this type of terrible gameplay is to increase honor gains to allow people to farm the honor gear in a manageable amount of time to be able to progress in PvP and enjoy the game. It’s not that complicated of a discussion, and my example was about as simple as I could have made it to try to shed some light on the current situation but it flew right over your head it seems like.
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Cry more instead of playing the game. This is classic not retail if u want insta gear go to retail and swipe ur card for wow token gold and buy boost
Is the player opening on him in PvP BiS? PvE BiS? What is the variable decided on here to make sure it’s not oddly favored one way or the other?
Why do people play a game like WoW to PvP then complain about balance issues in the first place? Don’t they realize all WoW PvP is is getting rolled by players that out gear you or rolling people you out gear and Rock Paper Scissors class balance?
Like these players realize this isn’t an arena pserver and they are a fraction of the player base, right?
Where did Blizzard ever promise you equal footing in arena? Where in the history of Blizzard supported Burning Crusade did players ever have equal footing?
Edit. Nevermind I just watched the clip. Color me surprised that priest warrior loses to rogue mage 3 weeks into Season 1 gearing. Truly shocked I am.
OMG maybe I should have used the term resilliance instead of PvP gear, lets get irate about terminology.
How many classes can rogues destroy in openers like that? seems like a class balance issue otherwise the forums would be flooded with people complaining about getting wrecked by rogues.
Again honor rates should be increased to make gear more available, but not because a priest got slammed by a rogue.
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pretty much anyone i know that was serious about pushing arena rating made sure to cap in prepatch to have gear as quickly as possible in tbc. mostly all of them have had full pvp gear for atleast a week or two now. the premade i ran with had full pvp gear before the season even started.
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You’re like getting it, but not at all at the same time. Saying honor should be increased to make gear more available is the purpose, and then saying that clip i used as an example shouldn’t be the reason…the clip is the purpose to show why the gear is needed. I don’t see how you’re missing this super obvious connection. If he could have survived that with lower levels of resilience then this whole discussion would be moot and the gear wouldn’t even matter. But the gear IS needed to survive in PvP, which is why this whole thing came about. Resilience was Blizzard’s balance solution to heavy burst in PvP back in the day, that’s why it exists.
I mean no ill will, but I recognize I’m engaging with someone who isn’t even playing in PvP himself so I just don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. I’d recommend you actually get to 70 and then spend a good chunk of time engaging with this honor grind and this PvP system/gameplay before trying to be this involved or outspoken about the issue.
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This has been my experience moreso since making this post. At the time I did the test for the post, those were my queue times so it is what it is. But since then, generally speaking im looking at anywhere between 20-50 minutes usually for AB, WSG, and EotS during the week and between 40-1hr+ for AV, so it is worse for sure.
Also my honor as Alliance is consistently worse than when I made this post as well. Ally just lose the majority of BGs, roughly around like 4 out of every 5 or sometimes worse, tanking the honor per hour to pretty terrible levels. I’ve had conversations with a lot of guildies on my Ally character in the past week and a half and they all share the same experience: they were excited to PvP, got into it and did a few BGs, realized the honor rates they were experiencing were trash and its not fun to grind that much when you have to play through that many losses, and just decided to straight up quit queueing. I’m guessing there is likely a large unspoken population going through this same experience, which I’d guess is a major contributing factor to why a lot fewer Alliance players are queueing up resulting in these terrible queue times for Horde.
It seems like the more I think about it and discuss with people, honor rates is always the common thread and root of the problem. My guess is much more Ally players would be more willing to queue up and deal with the losses if they knew there was still a light at the end of the tunnel that was achievable to obtain the gear in a reasonable amount of time, but as is its just way too much of a time commitment to slog through that many unfun games.
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You realize the OP was arguing AGAINST Merc Mode, not for it, right? You didn’t even read the post, otherwise you wouldn’t have made this comment. You should probably read the post before trying to get involved in the discussion.
I dont disagree with you, what I am saying is it is not 100% essential right now except for a few instances like your video shows. How many classes can a rogue burst down like that right now in arenas?
If people were getting burst down on a regular basis like the video shows these forums would be ablaze with people complaining, as it stands a handful of disc priests are complaining they are not viable.
Changing honor for the exception rather than the majority is not the right way to go, changing honor because it down right sucks to grind any sort of PvP gear right now is the reason to do it.
You do realize this is an old retail toon that I have been posting on forever, your assumptions are very inaccurate.
it seems to me you want to change classic bc into retail lite.
yep your right. I’m sorry OP my mistake. It’s just i have seen this line so many times from QQ horde i just automatically roll my eyes and stop reading when i see it now.
It was not just the rogue.
His team mate was CC’d and unable to peel for him while both a rogue and mage blasted on him.
Even SL/SL warlocks die to that, let alone a priest that cannot even shield himself because of the mage.
I say either take racial out of bg’s or implement the same mechanical racial too opposing faction to make it even. Then offer faction change’s too balance it out.
Isn’t WoW all about insane grinds ?
In what world are your average horde queues 18-24 mins? I’d say the average is more like 40-50 mins. The only time I’ve seen queues less than 40 mins was peak time AV weekend or peak time daily and that’s about a 4 hour window before they go back to normal. 95% of the time my queues say “average wait time last 10 players 1 hour”
If there’s ever a time I get a 15-20 min queue I can almost guarantee it’ll be a spot in an almost completed premade 4 cap that a bunch of people started leaving or the afks mass kicked.
The problem with queue times is not really an issue of faction balance, but one of PARTICIPATION. It has always been like that, and it will continue to be like that.
Just some food for thought here for the loads of ally with super petty/childish attitudes like “thats the consequence for bandwagoning horde” or “these are the consequences for picking better racials”(as if theyre even significant to begin with, or the insane idea that you deserve to be PUNISHED for making a choice) and blaming horde for the problem.
According to Ironforge pro, at the end of Classic in May the faction balance across all PvP servers(aka what matters for cross server BG queue times) was roughly around 53% Horde 47% Ally(for max level characters), which was quite good. Even with such close balance, horde queue times were still regularly in the area of 20 min or more, with Ally queue times being legitimately 5-10x quicker. Why such a huge difference in queue times despite relatively closely balanced populations? Well thats obvious, PARTICIPATION in PvP for each faction is drastically different. Horde has a large % of the population that queues, and ally has a very small % that queues.
Fast forward to today, and the faction balance is about 60% horde-40% ally now. So clearly, there was a sizable portion of the Ally player base who either 1. Quit with the launch of TBC 2. rerolled ally on a PvE server or 3. rerolled Horde. And id bet a majority of them chose option 3, and rerolled horde with TBC due to arena and perceived advantages from racials(which in all reality, Horde racials dont have anywhere near the level of advantage some people seem to think, and in some match ups its actually better to be Ally). Why am I confident a majority of those people chose to reroll horde? Well, due to the Horde queue times obviously. The issue is with a roughly 60-40 split in the population you wouldnt expect to see queue times to be anywhere near as long as they are, or see them jump to 2-4 times as long as they were at the end of Classic when it was 53%H-47%A. The reason for that is twofold, Ally participation in PvP is already very low compared to Horde and secondly, the Ally that rerolled Horde were MOSTLY PvPers and made up a sizeable portion of the relative minority of Ally that DID participate in PvP actively. Thats really the only logical explanation for queue times increasing to 2-4x what they were at the end of Classic despite a relatively small shift in faction balance in favor of Horde.
Even if the faction balance was hypothetically 60% ally to 40% Horde, horde would still have significantly longer queue times due to having a much more active, much larger community of people who actively PvP, which like I said shows that this isnt a Population Issue. And that means offering Faction Xfers really wont change anything at all, unless a sizeable amount of specifically Horde PvPers xferred to Ally…at least 20-30% of them. Now of course, I severely doubt that many would do that or that faction xfer will even be offered simply due to the logistical nightmare it will probably be.
So what are the options? Well, either you have a huge amount of Horde PvPers abandon thousands and thousands of hours of time/effort and their friends and reroll fresh on Ally(which is extremely unrealistic and a near impossibility) or you get a much larger % of the Ally population to start participating in PvP(which, you would think wouldnt be an issue for people who rolled on a PvP server), or Blizzard intervenes and proposes a solution like Mercenary BGs or some other solution. Almost all of the “solutions” are extremely unrealistic/exceedingly improbable which makes them not viable, the only real viable solution is some sort of intervention by Blizzard.
So for Ally that want to throw all the blame on Horde players and say petty sht like “you deserve it” or “this is your consequence for picking horde”, its actually just as much Ally’s fault, if not more the Ally’s fault for a majority of players rolling on a PvP server with 0 intention of participating in PvP and for the portion of Ally PvPers that decided to reroll Horde with TBC launch.
Very well written OP, thank you for the post.