Now that I'm R14 I can have an opinion, right? (Honour change discussion)

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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(tl;dr @ bottom)

Ahhhh sorry, Tubbly, you didn’t do it in the old system. Wait, that’s not good enough, you didn’t do it in Vanilla. Actually, not even that, if you didn’t do it in the first 3 months of release you’re just bad and your opinion doesn’t count!

:stuck_out_tongue:

Hey so look, the bottom line is that I’ve finished a R14 grind and now I want to talk about the fact that I think it needs some tweaks. Even with the new changes, its a very long and challenging grind, requiring a level of time commitment that is probably not good to put in. I just happen to find myself in a position where I have the time and so I was able to commit to it but I can’t, in good conscience, say that this is a positive experience that I want others to have.

I do want to clearly state that I think that this rank and its associated gear should take a lot of commitment and effort to get. It’s generally great stats for PvP and for PvE, it serves as an excellent catch up for what are now very well established servers. The problem is really the breakpoint system, where you have to reach a certain amount of honour before any of your progress will count for that week. In particular, looking at the minimum breakpoints required for advancement, the last three caps are ~420k honour, preceeded by two ~340k caps.

For my own grind, I took the optimal path, except spaced out with a week or two break in between pushes. I ended on two 500k caps followed by two ~420k caps. To achieve this, I found myself playing 10-12 hour days so that I could make my breakpoint targets and be able to take a one or two day break in a week. You don’t have to follow the optimal path, but you’ll still be playing nearly that much to get what you need, and for your last two breakpoints.

The core issue here is how much honour you need for any of it to count. I think we need to look at that. I think having it take a lot of time overall to rank though is perfectly fine and could even be increased. With that said, here’s what I propose…

(tl;dr here)

  • Increase the total amount of honour required to reach R14. On the most optimal path this should not be more than 10-12 weeks but an increase to the current requirement would be ok.
  • Decrease the breakpoints such that the minimum honour required to keep your progress for any week should be no more than ~250k. There should be an increased number of breakpoints to compensate. A similar scaling progression should remain so that early breakpoints are lower and later breakpoints are higher.
  • Increase the honour rewards for WSG and AB slightly so that they are more appealing. I think AV is the best and most appropriate WoW BG the game has ever had to offer, but not everybody shares that opinion. People should not feel forced to play in AV.
  • For the love of all that is holy, strongly crack down on non-participation in BGs. If you’re AFK’ing, you get your honour for that match stripped. If you do it several times in a day, you get a ban for the rest of the reset week. If you keep doing it, you get a 3 month ban and this should only continue to escalate. Only people who are actually playing the game should get to progress their rank.

These are just my thoughts, if you have other ideas please share them! The bottom line is that a system that requires you to invest 8 hours a day or more in order to meet the minimum requirements for progression is just not a good thing. Removing decay was a great start, people can take breaks, but even folks playing 3-4 hours a day should be able to reach R14. It should just take longer than those who are putting in more time. Additionally, relaxing the requirements here will also encourage more people to participate in PvP, getting more folks in game overall.

(inb4 #nochanges :heart:)

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Agree, especially with the part about increasing participation. That is badly needed in Era, especially if fresh servers are created, which will greatly reduce Era’s population.

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I like the suggestions and agree there should be more stop points so people can earn the armor over a much longer period, even 420k weeks are pretty brutal and even with AV weekend is likely almost like having a full time job. So for example instead of doing 40 hours in one week having the option for 60 hours over four weeks as example might be reasonable.

I think for WSG/AB to be more represented, the premade problem has to be addressed in some way. While simply boosting the honor the losing team gets would help, the impact of a premade fighting a pug is huge, and often turns into the losing side (pug) getting farmed by the other side. Honestly I am not sure how you could easily fix this problem, but I think it will hard for these BGs to have any viability unless something does happen, and a simple boost of Honor certainly wont be enough, especially if it goes to the winners, making the problems even worse.

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I have done it in every system; you still have an opinion to weigh and your ideas are valid criticism of the existing system.

Now, you need to start ranking another character; my fresh now 60 mage (as of yesterday) is already R9.

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Agree - people can basically afk all the way to R14. (and they do)

I grouped with a GM warrior recently in scholo… it was a rough group. People clearly were new and undergeared, except for him. Humanoid runners kept running into 2nd and 3rd packs… so I (the healer, but I main a pumper warrior) decided to give some advice after we wiped and said “Try to hamstring/execute the runners so they don’t aggro extra packs”. This is how that conversation went… I’m not kidding or exaggering this exchange, I swear to god this is word for word…

Me: try and hamstring and execute runners so they don’t aggro extra packs if you can
Him: don’t have hamstring on my hotbar
Me: you’re a GM and you don’t use hamstring?
Him: ya lol
Me: lol
Him: gm takes no skill, i just afk’d in the cave

He was actually fairly nice and apologized, but this just goes to show the level of participation that’s currently required for that grind.

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you can afk to rank 14

Classic isn’t for everyone. Also, it’s a recent change that allowed for that, really. If this isn’t acceptable, then simply fight to reverse the honor system change. That’s all that’s needed. Continually changing era is not the way to go.

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This is the one thing that I would absolutely agree with. They should add a new rank for AFK rankers called “Oxygen Theif”. You can’t purchase anything from honor or battleground vendors and also cannot exchange AQ40, ZG, AQ20 or Naxx tokens for gear. All of your gear also has a maximum durability of 1 while at this rank. You must get 1,000,000 honor in a week to break out of this rank.

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Yea, I would be very hesitant to do anything there. Grouping is at the heart of the WoW experience and for WSG/AB, I can see how making a premade should be the defacto experience. It’s kind of a bummer right now though because one premade playing tends to dominate, but with an increased population you sometimes get a premade and you sometimes don’t. It’s mostly not a problem unless they decide they want to GY camp you to intentionally grief beyond the HK DR.

This is what makes AV so attractive. It’s a large BG with a lot of objectives, and there are things people who aren’t fully geared yet can do in order to contribute. You can guard a point and call incs. You can peel for your team mates. You can kite LTs to your team when they stack cleave. It’s very diverse and, to me, represents wow PvP as a whole. WSG/AB are much more focused.

To me though, it seems ok to have these two experiences existing. If you want that grand scale PvP, go AV. If you want more competitive and focused action, which rewards grouping, go WSG/AB. The reason I suggest boosting the honour reward for the latter though is because there really is a rather large discrepancy right now. People who want to do WSG/AB and have a team shouldn’t feel like their time is better spent in AV.

Haha well, I am going to take a bit of a break… :stuck_out_tongue: With that said, I do have a Horde Shaman I’ll be casually ranking. Currently R7. I don’t have any Alliance characters I want to do it on right now. I thought it might be fun to do it on a Rogue or a Hunter, but then I’d have to level one… and I hate leveling :smiley:

I can’t say I agree with your message but thank you for contributing to the discussion. With that said, I would like to challenge your statement here. The core issue I’m presenting is that the grind requires too much time investment in contiguous chunks. The old honour system is actually worse for this, so why would anyone advocating for a more accessible want to promote a return to a system that’s worse?

I do want to reiterate here that my goal isn’t to suggest that the gear be faster to obtain. It should still take time… in some ways, more time than it already does. However, it should require investing 8+ hours a day for a full week to progress in the later ranks. Playing the game is important, but so is encouraging balance in people’s lives.

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Does seem like there is some behavior that they should be able to score at the end of the game, which could help augment the “reports”, as example spending say 90% of your time in the cave, or running in one spot, or being in the middle of nowhere, and not moving. Obviously 1-2 games as example isn’t a big deal as people have RL stuff, but if you looked at say all the games on the way to GM, and over 80% were, in the cave, that would be a pretty good sign they were not actively participating.

I also realize we will never get rid of all cheating, as cheaters will always find a way, and at some point the cost of catching them gets to high, but there is a lot of options that they could look at before they get at that level.

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This comment is super funny to me because I started typing out a response to the OP before lunch and got as far as…
The issue I see is that the first 10 ranks are a joke. Without AV they might be more in line.

My alliance hunter is almost 45.

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From a development perspective, your opinion here has a lot of merit. This is why Blizzard did a way with it when they advanced the game into it the retail version. The issue is that Classic is a place where people who like Classic can play it. And Classic has this grind. People who like grinds have a place to play the game they like.

As you have stated, this isn’t for everyone. And your opinion is completely valid. But Classic is here for those who enjoy the aspects of Classic that not everyone else does.

As far as the change to the honor system, I don’t have too much of a problem with it. However, I do have a problem with turning it into a slippery slope. Where we are now talking about how we should timegate ranks because everyone will be rank 14. No.

If the results of the new system cause a demand for more fundamental shifts, that ultimately destroys a major part of the game, then either the new system has to be done away with, or those who don’t like the results just have to deal with it.

Absolutely DO NOT time gate ranks.

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Worth noting here that I, for one, would have no problems with them requiring more honour to obtain overall. For some classes, at least, that blue set is pretty strong. For my Ret Paladin, many of those pieces were better than the Soulforge set and that took a lot more time and effort to obtain!

My goal here isn’t “lulz, welfare epix plz” – It’s to encourage a significant time investment while still providing reasonably attainable path forward :slight_smile:

I completely agree with this as a core senitment and, by and large, I do try to maintain the purity of spirit of Classic Era where it seems reaosnable. While Vanilla did a lot of really great things, it didn’t do everything right. This is one area it kinda fell short. I think the design intent was really good, but the manifestiation of it fell short.

I think a grind is good. I want it to take a lot of effort to achieve R14. To me, that makes it meaningful! However, I also think it shouldn’t require sacrificing friends, family, and your professional life to achieve. If someone has the time to dedicate to the R14 grind at the point in their lives they’re at and can do it in 2 months, great. However, people who are willing to put in the time and effort to doing it over 12 months should also be able to achieve that goal.

I’ve thought carefully about this and, at least to me, I don’t believe a change here compromises what Vanilla was meant to represent. Combined with the other changes I highlighted in my OP, these items should not come for free. In fact, even with those changes, they would still require significantly more time and effort than other paths currently available to players on the PvE side.

I want to be clear here… ranks are current time gated. I’m not proposing a change to this. I want these changes to stay reasonably close to what we have now, primarily focusing around smaller breakpoints to save ranking progress.

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Yeah, im just trying to expand this conversation a bit on the reverse. We like to talk about the later ranks because they are more grueling and have good rewards. I think if we are making changes there, we also need to talk about the early ranks. I think they made the curve a bit too exaggerated. The first ranks should be pretty easy. But not fall face first into r5 because you did 10’AV’s over two weeks (that is about how much it takes).

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While ranking unto 10 isn’t super difficult, at the same time, there are little if any rewards unto that point, and that simply gets you to the blue set, with no weapons. Pushing back peoples ability to gear isn’t healthy for competitive PvP and gear already creates to much of a disparity, especially when you start looking at those in the epic PvP set and t3 gear who will do 2x the damage and have twice the health.

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R10 gives you BiS head and shoulder pieces for DPS warriors. Two pieces of gear that are literally better than anything in the game for raid DPS. That’s a pretty big deal. 2 piece blue set is near BiS for several other classes as well since the 2 piece set benefit is very strong.

Just saying.

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Stopped reading right here.

You should have stopped typing here too.

Rank 14 SHOULD be all of the above that you typed and all the following I am about to type.

It SHOULD be a tough grind.
It SHOULD be a large time sink.
It SHOULD require dedication.
It SHOULD require beating the competition (fellow rankers)

It in no way, should be accessible to people like you but here we are.

You not only think you have ground to stand on because you got the FREE rank 14 that was provided to you with a system altered to support a child’s constant demand for constant gratification and handouts, you are actually demanding that the already OVERLY SIMPLIFIED & NERFED GRIND BE MADE EVEN EASIER.

Go to retail. You don’t belong in Vanilla, BC nor Wrath.

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To be fair, r14 was waaaaaaay easier to get with the old system on a dead server. Waaaaaaay easier.

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It could be if you have competition. If you are alone it’s quite literally free. You have no one to compete with and a guaranteed spot at the top of the bracket every week.

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Dead servers didn’t have access to rank 14

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Yup. Would have to “pool party” your own spot on the bracket to obtain it.

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