Blizzard must re-introduce Marks of Honor from world quests or the upcoming Assault events, similar to the old “PVP towers” that allowed you to get 4 marks of honor per alt on a regular basis for 2 minutes of slightly-riskier PVE work.
Marks of Honor are now more about transmog collecting and profession recipes than they are about PVP, and it is in the realm of professions that they are the largest problem.
I hate PVP and yet I diligently grinded out nearly 200 Marks of Honor for my LW, tailor, and blacksmith. I honestly could not be bothered to finish it out for engineering, JC, etc. because I was so sick of maybe winning a match and maybe getting marks. To find that I have to do the same thing every content update as the recipes are upgraded is absolutely disgusting.
This expansion has two notable aspects to it:
- It’s themed around a faction war and much of the content is WQ, yet we don’t have a faction-war themed WQ similar to Legion towers? Why not?
- It’s been stated that Blizz wants people to feel incentivized to PVP, such as extra rewards for war mode, but not forced into it. And yet they are forcing us into PVP by tying non-PVP recipes (without resilience and without “PVE” versions not tied to marks, these recipes aren’t “pvp gear”) to PVP gating.
It simply makes no sense and is unfun for people who don’t already enjoy PVP.
Further, on the point of fairness. With regard to the Warden towers, as I’ve stated they were a rich source of marks, which sadly I didn’t have the foresight to take advantage of before they were removed. However, may people were smarter than me, and I have guildies sitting on literally thousands of marks of honor from Legion. These people never PVPd either, they were just willing to grind world quests longer than I was. More power to them, but it leaves players who missed Legion at an extreme disadvantage for filling out their professions.
We either need Marks of Honor to be introduced to WQ or assaults, similar to how it was in Legion (or added back to old Legion towers, though I doubt that would happen), or we need a different system for ranking up our decidedly-not-PVP-specific crafting recipes.
Edited: I am going to leave the above in-tact so the progression of the thread makes sense, but for any joiners, note that I have revised my stance based on discussions in this thread.
I think it’s important in this discussion that we all recognize people are discussing two different questions:
- Should Marks of Honor come from x ?
- Should professions be gated behind PVP? (Some people are extending this to transmog as well.)
I think both questions are worthy of discussion, so y’all keep discussing as you’d like, but as the OP I want to clarify that the issue I have is that non-PVP content (profession advancement) is gated behind PVP content.
My proposal in the OP was just to bring back fast and easy PVP content so that we could still progress professions without needing to do arenas, BGs, etc. for weeks on end. However, in reading this thread and others’ ideas I’ve realized my original proposal was a bandaid. “If you’re going to PVP-gate non-PVP stuff, give us easier PVP currency routes.”
Not a bad idea, but I absolutely agree with what others have stated: It shouldn’t be gated behind PVP currency at all. Some options already in-game:
- We’ve seen some things (Monel-Hardened Hoofplates, Coarse Leather Barding, etc.) pushed to world drop recipes, we’ve of course always seen higher rank things on rep vendors. That would make much more sense.
- Put Rank 2’s at honored/revered and Rank 3 at exalted. This would also take away the pain of having to regrind something every content patch.