I agree with the OP. Merc mode is not the solution, higher honor gains are. I’m one of those returning players that missed the prepatch honor gains. I have zero pvp gear. Although I want it, it’s just not worth the time investment so instead of queuing BGs, I run heroics instead.
If honor gains would increase I’d definitely queue more which would help horde queues
Any cloth class without 250+ hours of bgs? You say his assumptions are inaccurate but you confirm it with statements suggesting resilience isn’t essential for anyone other than a handful of disc priests.
You’d have to be some kind of jackass after all the changes Blizz have made in the first weeks of TBC Classic release to believe that they just suddenly got it right with no changes now.
I had a paladin and a warlock thorough TBC. I had full S1, S2 and S3 stuff on them.
Based on the current calculation that means I played 400 hours per character, per season, for 4 seasons, meaning 800 hours over on an average of 20 weeks? I don’t recall playing 40 hours a week doing only PVP.
On top on having my pvp items I was able to run heroics and raid. I was also working part-time and attended school.
Something is wrong with the current honor calculation and I’m pretty sure we are only receiving a tiny fraction of what we are supposed to get.
The more Blizzard wait to fix this the more it discourage people from playing TBCC.
It almost feels like they want to sabotage TBCC so people go to 9.1
I did the same but on warrior, paladin (full holy and ret sets), and mage. All had full resilience gear and I spent most of my time on PvE. The grind is just plain stupid right now compared to what it was.
Like I alluded to multiple times in my original post as well as my recent update comment, I think that increasing honor gains is the best solution to increase participation, especially on the Alliance side to try to alleviate the long Horde queues.
If people viewed the Honor gear as an actually obtainable set of gear as opposed to the insanely long grind it is now, I would argue they’d be much more likely to queue and deal with potential losses and unfun games if they were working toward an attainable goal. As is, you take a loss in a 20-25 minute game, say “that wasnt super fun,” look at the 200 honor that game yielded you, realize you’ll have to go through that experience anywhere between 600-1000 more times, and then just completely disengage with the system and quit queueing. Who knows how many people have done this, especially on Alliance side, resulting in these horrible Horde queues.
Honor needs to be buffed, anywhere between 3-5x in my personal opinion, to try to alleviate this huge slew of problems that have popped up both in and out of PvP. Every other solution feels like either a band-aid solution, or will bring about problems in other parts of the game that make it not worth pursuing.
Amazing post, no response from devs… big surprise…
Wrong. Any issue that effects the performance of the game negatively, or impedes others accessibility to the game is a design failure. It is blizzards responsibility to fix. Saying it’s up to the player base to solve is nonsensical. It’s entirely stupid to even suggest it.
exactly what happened to me:
Joined a game
15 min
Win
~300 honor
Nope, not a chance
Bye
I don’t see much issue with the honor grind honestly. Only have to do it once a season this season more than others because you probably want at least a 2/4 piece blue set.
I grinded 75k honor prepatch 100 all marks (did not grind at all when honor was bugged I was leveling a Shaman). I currently have all 5/5 blue pvp pieces, trinket, boots/belt/bracers.
At first I did around 10 bgs a day once I hit 70. Now I just do a couple of bgs to get my daily quest done and maybe do the Auch Towers daily pvp quest.
This needs to be bumped hourly until they address the atrocious pvp issues.
At this point I’d love to even see the pvp/resil gear from honored reputation get added to the game again. Not a long term solution but at least would help in the interim.
I’ve thought about this, I think ultimately the play is to just buff honor properly as a permanent solution and not add this gear in phase 1. It came out with sunwell patch back in the day, but I think phase 2 would probably be the ideal time to implement it as catch up gear. I’m not opposed to it being introduced now as a help, but I think it’d also burn the people who have spent so many hours farming pieces of the blue set who could have instead used that honor for epic offset pieces. Having a grace period where they buff honor, then wait a few months till the next patch and then introduce the blue gear on the rep vendors seems like the ideal play.
It’s quite embarrassing that Linxy-11302, Kaivax, or anyone else representing Blizzard can’t take any amount of time to respond to a single post on this subject.
It is entirely possible that alliance players already had well established characters and took advantage of banking honor in pre patch while horde had a larger number of boosts and rerolls that were either not interested in honor during pre patch or used it to purchase R14 gear for a more solidified leveling experience.
When you account for the faster queue times this leads to alliance PvPers completing their objectives much sooner than horde and having no real reason to queue BGs unless they enjoy BGs.
This would help explain why the alliance/horde ratio of people playing arenas more accurately mirrors the alliance/horde ratio across servers.
My basis around horde having more tourists and boosted players is rooted in both how queues inflated and then deflated during Classic’s P2.5 - P3 launch and the knowledge that Retail is majority horde, which will naturally lead more players to horde in Classic.
There are a ton of other factors I could mull over as well, but I think my overall point is that it’s not necessarily “Horde PvP more than Alliance”.
There is also a match making system for Battlegrounds that is supposed to be active right now which is accurate to this patch of original BC. It attempted to balance out gear disparity between players. I wonder if it’s working as intended?
Small update about another part of PvP I honestly haven’t even thought that much about but Mes (a high level BlizzCon champ PvP player) brought it up on a stream. They go into detail more about it, but here’s a blurb of them discussing it:
ttps://clips.twitch.tv/TameVictoriousAppleSquadGoals-UdQ4ZXAq4d1-xxjD
For context, these are the last people that should care about something like this because they benefit more from the system as it stands since they’re at the top of the ladder. But the fact that they are seriously worried about the longevity of the game and the playerbase, especially those who play primarily for PvP, is very telling and quite concerning. I don’t know if I agree or not with the increase in arena points given out per week, but I very much understand their point of view and agree with the notion.
Its fun to progress your character and earn your gear, and people need time to enjoy the end result and play with that gear, not be stuck in an eternal grind each phase never being able to fully complete a set or enjoy the progress before moving on to the next phase/season. It’s fine to get stomped in BGs when you have no gear, cause there’s the mentality of “Ok I’m getting stomped now, but I can work my toward this gear while continuing to get stomped and overcome that eventually.” But the grind is so beyond bad currently that not only are these players stuck in that terrible cycle, but it only will get actively worse as the higher rated players who walked in with 75k cap (plus hundreds of marks that they were able to refund to their mailbox for concerted efforts turn ins) who were essentially fully geared on day 1, get further and further ahead with much more arena points each week.
I used to think this was just a really terrible part of the game, holding out hope Blizz would recognize the problem and implement a quick fix, but I’m starting to realize more and more this problem has much more potential to be destructive to the player base than I thought. If Blizz sit idly by and do nothing about honor rates, and possibly even super slow/low arena point earnings, PvP is going to die a sad death.
Great stuff by OP. I’ve seen a lot of debate back and forth about if the honor rates are correct or not with a lot of people saying it feels very off from what they remember. This character I’m posting from was my alt in TBC that I only hit 70 on partway through the last season, season 4. I distinctly remember my parents went out of town during the fall break week from school, and in just those 8-9 days time I was able to take my character from 65 up to 70, and farm out this much gear. You can look at my characters armory to see I earned the helm, shoulders, chest, AND BOTH weapons. I didn’t even go that hard during that week either. Like I put in a good amount of time, but I was also out hanging with my friends and doing other stuff as well. If I was doing this at these current honor rates, I would have stood 0 chance at accomplishing this. I wouldnt have even come close.
#FixHonor
I’ve got news for you.
If you don’t already have an arena team or an armory link with 2k+ rating as well as being the right class - it is very hard to find a partner.
The same way dungeons are hard to find for people right now, the player base is very concerned about making it as painless as possible.
The character you are posting from did not unlock the level 40 achievement until 5/10/2009.
This achievement launched with Wrath in November of 2008.
I think you are misremembering.
It also shows I didn’t get the achievement for hitting level 50 until last year, and I have yet to accomplish the level 60 achievement either. It’s almost like Blizzard’s leveling achievements got changed when they did the level squish 
Also, the first time you logged into your character during Wrath era was the date you were awarded the achievements that you had completed prior to Wrath and achievements being a thing, as you can clearly tell by me also being granted achievements for winning a duel, getting 5k HKs, and getting a PVP mount on 5/10/2009 as well.
If you think I hit level 70 during Wrath, then stopped and randomly farmed this much PvP gear AND enchanted and gemmed it with TBC gems and enchants instead of just leveling to 80, then I don’t know what to tell you bud.