The current PvP system and meta are extremely dull and unengaging—it’s just repetitive 6-minute AV games. It barely feels like real PvP anymore.
Blizzard already figured out a better approach in Season of Discovery by increasing the Honor gains in WSG and AB, and by adding bonus marks based on objectives like flag captures or time spent in WSG, and accumulated points in AB.
Can we please see the same changes applied to the WoW Anniversary Realms? I believe most of the community would enjoy PvPing for Rank 14 far more if it actually involved PvP. But right now, the Honor per Hour and effort disparity is so massive that people just mindlessly farm AV, like mice on a wheel. That’s not good game design, Blizzard.
It’s disappointing that Season of Discovery was meant to be a testing ground, yet the lessons learned just months ago weren’t carried over into these anniversary realms.
Here are a few obvious and needed adjustments that should be standard in every version of WoW Classic:
1. Increase Honor in WSG and AB, especially for the losing team, to bring them closer in line with AV’s Honor per Hour. This promotes real PvP and objective play rather than AFK farming.
2. Add post-R14 incentives to PvP. A simple yet effective change would be increasing the gold reward for mark turn-ins based on your final rank. This would encourage casual PvP even after hitting R14. There are also other possibilities, like using marks for cosmetics, consumables, or materials.
3. Fix the weekly cap system. The current weekly honor caps and thresholds are demotivating. Some weeks you just don’t bother PvPing because you know you won’t have enough time to cap. A better system would be to keep weekly updates and thresholds, but let players retain any Honor earned below the cap if they didn’t hit the threshold, instead of resetting it entirely.
Please consider these changes—this would go a long way in making PvP feel fun and rewarding again.
If you’re playing any version of regular vanilla wow thinking it’s going to be anything other than warriors and mages owning everything with the occasional lock or rogue you’re going to be highly disappointed
lol you think it’s bad now… wait until all those warriors are rocking rank 14 gear and weapons and 2 shotting everyone non-stop. For classic, this is the absolute BEST pvp the game has to offer right now. It get’s MUCH WORSE as gear inflation increases.
I don’t think Blizzard should touch player-created problems. A focus on HPH is a player-created problem created by people who don’t find the game to be fun. People who like PvP do AB. You can do some AVs to get much of the honor you need but if you actually want to have fun then play AB.
Sadly, many WoW players don’t know what ‘having fun’ is anymore.
SoD has the worst pvp in the game with more burst than regular vanilla… no resilience… rank 7 gear that was added for some reason that’s not even competitive at all with r13 gear… r13 gear that’s not even competitive with pve gear… 100% premades full of gm’s or hwl’s farming salt.
Your comment is disappointing. A decent Spriest is the biggest threat in a BG. Can easily handle 1-2 warriors and most mages will poly and run away. Most rogues are a joke and locks don’t matter.
Guys you are missing the point, i am not talking about PvP balance in classic or SoD, this thread is about the PvP system on Anniversary realms and how Blizzard could make small yet impactful changes that would give the player base proper incentive to actually PvP and have fun in the ranking journey!
Blizzard didn’t create the unpopularity of WSG and AB, players did. It isn’t Blizzard’s fault that the stupid “meta” is to the same boring thing every game to collect honor and whinge if someone doesn’t follow the script. Classic players will optimize the fun out of literally everything so the blame goes there. Can you imagine the whining if they cut the honor in AV to encourage people to do something else, or change strats?
Where Blizzard might carry some blame is putting in the new Honor System in the first place. A lot of people are only doing it because the gear rewards are amazing for Phase 3 and all you have to do is devote a few hundred hours of your life doing the same thing like a robot.
SoD is sort of a Classic+, it is not Classic “Anniversary” which is more or less a version of “Vanilla”. Something that doesn’t track for me is all the requests for cherry picked changes from SoD but also the population of that game is in decline. If the changes in that game are a lot better why isn’t everyone playing there?
WoW is a business for Blizzard, it is 100% their interest to adapt in order to keep subs high, and keep tracking of playerbase behavior and incentives to play is part of it.
SoD has tons of changes, OP only mentioned a very small one, smaller than implementing dual-spec for eg…
This is 100% a player created problem. I say this with 100% confidence because the experience on Classic Era is fully different.
Anniversary players as a collective have eliminated all the “FUN” for the game that they can and then when they don’t get what they want exactly as they expect it they freak out and tell you to uninstall or something or self harm or whatever the popular verbal vomit is.
SoD PvP is kinda terrible, it’s partly a player created problem and partly a blizzard development is failing to understand class design and tuning problem. I would not recommend SoD in respect to its PvP at any point; it’s the worst PvP game ever made.
The only way to do so is by putting emphasis on actual play objectives rather than only on win condition. It may actually also require nerfing honor gains of some objective to put more focus on others or even placing bonuses on activities in the BG’s that lead to a win condition rather than only the win itself.
Additionally “For Great Honor” & “Concerted Efforts” should be massively buffed and the number of tokens distributed is based on final score / duration of game played so that say 1 team farms the other into the dirt… only one mark for the winner… even if the hold them hostage for a long time; only one mark.
SUPER hard fought game should be 2/3 marks. But each mark should be worth heaps on the 3 BG turn in… NOT THE SINGLE BG TURN IN…
The reason for this is to drive participation in all 3 BG and so that players are rewarded for pushing hard to win rather than “get the free mark”
Very much this. I’ve said this before but this change really just seems like a trap. Accessibility can be a double edged sword. And when players realized, “Hey, even I can achieve rank 14!” …that’s all they end up caring about. The experience loses all meaning. It’s just about efficient grinding now. It’s why we see daily threads whining about PvP happening in a battleground.
I really think the change did more harm than good. Players might actually just be enjoying the game otherwise. It’s ok for everyone not to be able to achieve everything. That’s how old mmos worked.
Its not so much feedback on the pvp system as it is a commentary on the majority of people who play the game.
Blizz can’t fix stupid and things get seriously borked when you start trying.
However, where I can agree is that the PvP system still has room for improvement. All the current caps are fine but honor gains should be accumulative as opposed to resetting. In other words, 500k for R13/14 can be done over time at 25k a week for however many weeks as opposed to having to no life the game over a holiday weekend.
That probably wouldnt achieve much in the short term but it makes more sense over the longer haul. Eventually such a system would “relax” the divide between meta and non meta pvpers to a point where they can peacefully coexist.
Yeah but when things are beyond peoples’ reach…they don’t have to worry about them. They’re free to just relax, not take things so seriously, and simply enjoy the experience.
I don’t agree that everyone needs to achieve a certain rank. In actual Vanilla I never once worried about my rank. Play to have fun and get that you get. But I do have to acknowledge many (if not most) anniversary players have simply forgotten this is just a video game. A game to enjoy and have fun.
The post R14 incentive to PvP is the fun of it. There’s a title later on for having all 3 factions at exalted and another for having 100k HKs if you really need a carrot to chase.
Weekly cap is fine, later ranks should be hard to get. I’d even argue getting R14 is too fast, its supposed to be the pinnacle end goal of PvP, not just a PvER checklist thing todo to look good on a spreadsheet.
Put AV on a timer to and enforce pug v pug and premade v premade in AB/WSG and all will be fine.
The real problem is milestones, if one needs 418k and they can’t get it they just give up and don’t. The milestones for advance or lose it pushes toxic HPH meta so they can hit the milestone and move on to something after committing 30+ hours into hitting a milestone.
A progress at your own pace would be more beneficial. We tried to put together a WSG group last night and so many people complaining the HPH is worse than AV I need 300k in the next 3 days so Ill pass. If the same individuals could progress rank without hitting cap PVPing without worrying constantly about hitting a milestone would help.
TL:DR bring back diminishing Honor (to be honest I didn’t even read your wall of text). I’m over seeing all these Marshal’s knowing damn well that back in Vanilla (OG) AND even Classic 2019, well over 50% of these nerds wouldn’t be…80% of the Marshal’s don’t even PvP regularly and 93.5% of percentages are made up 78.9% of the time.
Min-maxers will always complain about HPH even without breakpoints and again only the highest ranks have breakpoints that high and i think it’s warranted.