First and foremost, I’d like to mention how much I appreciate how The War Within has improved gameplay to become much more alt friendly. For the most part, I have no gripes at all and I am having a lot of fun. However, I have one massive concern, and that is the cost of sockets for PVP gear, which currently costs an astonishing 15,000 honor.
With us now being able to apply a total of 9 gem sockets to a single character, this will require us to grind 135,000 honor per character. Now say you are like me and like to play multiple alts and just placing an estimate of wanting to play and gear 5 characters this season. That would require us to grind 675,000 honor to gem all our characters to be relevant in the top ladders. If you play 8 characters, this will push the honor needed over the 1,000,000 mark. This will be even more challenging for those who are casual players looking to group with others for higher rated content. When comparing to the old process, it was much more reasonable and accessible. Now, it’s going to be a slog fest in which many likely won’t accomplish at all this season unless the honor gains for rated content have been significantly increased or they allow sockets to be randomly acquired in PVP chests and air drops, which I think could remedy the issue. This also puts casters at a large disadvantage at the start of the season until they reach this large honor threshold as Precog is now a gem socket feature which will be even worse for those playing multiple casters.
I know the season hasn’t even started and there is an inherent lack of transparency while speaking from the pre-season of season 1, but I am already feeling discouraged by this. What is everyone else’s thoughts? Personally, for us needing 9 sockets, I think the cost should be much lower. Why gate players from something so trivially required to min max? This is the exact opposite of being alt friendly which has been done very well so far, in the War Within.
Specifically because it’s for min/maxing. It will keep engagement as something to work towards for many. Not saying I love it, but I do see why. You can also cut costs/time abit by buying the pvp bloodstones. It is a negligible bonus that everyone can works towards and rewards doing multiple forms of pvp content (daily first wins, weeklies, etc)
you can see them for sale in the pvp vendor room, it currently costs two bloodstones and about 9500 honor or something. Blood stones cost I believe 2500 honor. As someone mentioned, those can be bought and sold on the ah, but we are still required to fork up about 9000 honor even if you buy the blood stones.
Other than meta (gems, i.e. precog) sockets have very little gameplay impact. Additionally, it really only makes sense to apply sockets to conquest gear (or it’s crafted equivalent) which you won’t be getting all at once. Which means this honor grind occurs incrementally over many weeks.
Alts later in the season may be a bit of a grind, especially if you are someone who plays many. Logic would also dictate, though, that if you play many alts you should have a ton of honor banked to transfer anyway once main(s) are capped on sockets.
There are also a semi-reliable source of sockets out in the world which can also help alleviate the grind.
This is what seems to get overlooked. Over the course of normal PvP activities one should wind up with enough (or close to enough) honor for a socket every week or so-ish. There will also be weeks when a player will be buying gear that isnt socketable. People freaking out like they HAVE to scratch out 135k honor like right now, when it just isnt so. It’ll be fine.
I think you’re right here. I think it would become better if we could sell back the bloodstones for the equatable honor or slightly less too maybe once we reached a certain rating in PvP. That could balance my concerns as well.
While I do agree with and appreciate your stance and context, it is still just wild to me that we could have to inevitably grind enough honor to get more than 100 honor levels just to socket 8 total characters, but who knows. maybe gems won’t be as important as I am imagining.
That or gold to buy the PvP gem things + 9750 honor.
Yesterday I got the world PvP chest that spawns every 6 hours and that was pretty easy now that many people don’t show up to loot it. Those have 1 socket, but I think you can only loot it once per week.
There is no problem. I’ve already earned 100,000 honor and the season has even started yet. With the old season you wouldn’t get full sockets until months into the season.
I’ve heard it’s every 3 or 6 hours. I was doing dailies and it popped up on my map and it was like around 3pm? The locations are always the areas where the world PvP quest are.
I actually never tried to do it before because I figured it’d be a ton of people just spam aoeing, but it spawned and I was like okay whatever, might as well try. Went there and it wasn’t that difficult to get. I didn’t even have to kill anyone I just kept trying to loot while other people were fighting.
