honor grind inc... someone shoot me

[RUiN 427]

so i finally got my 2nd little guy to 70 and so begins the grind for honor... Call them welfare epics if you want, but there is nothing easy about days worth of BG's where players with names like "skysong" make fun of you in BG chat for wearing blues and greens... /sigh

[Kail]

Yeah, no joke.  What really gets up my nose are those "better a quick loss than a protracted win" jackasses.  I've captured Stonehearth Bunker about eight million damn times, call me crazy for wanting to actually fight someone in a battleground once in a while.

Anyone have any official word on what's happening to the BG honor vendor in season 4?  I'm hearing that the S1 items will be removed, that they'll be slightly cheaper, that they'll be way cheaper, that they'll stay the same price and the new S2 stuff will be even more expensive, and all kinds of crazy stuff with no one able to point to an official post or anything to back it up.  I know that there'll be changes to the arena vendor, but I haven't heard anything definitive about the BG vendor.

[Gobbeldygook]

so i finally got my 2nd little guy to 70 and so begins the grind for honor... Call them welfare epics if you want, but there is nothing easy about days worth of BG's where players with names like "skysong" make fun of you in BG chat for wearing blues and greens... /sigh

Tips to make it suck less:

1. Go buy the blue honor set.  Why are you still reading this?  Go buy it!
2. Start losing 10 matches a week in a 5v5.
3. Do the daily every day.  Even if it's WSG.
4. Find some well-geared friends you can mooch off of in non-AV bgs.  In non-AV BGs, personal performance matters a lot more.  A single well-geared player can swing a match.  For this reason, try to score your first pieces with just AV tokens and honor; your suck and squishiness wont matter as much.  The 2 minute trinket is your first buy.
5. Pray to the good lord to grant you a fair match.  Virtually every EOTS I play starts out with my Horde-side team down 5-10 players.  I spent half of an EOTS match yesterday fighting 10v15 vs 2 2200 rated players and what I believe was a 5 man premade.
6. Do it with friends.  Failing that, PUGs.  Depending on how populated your server is, you can probably find a premade for at least the daily.  Simply reducing the chances of getting an AFKer and getting a group of people that will help you out and listen helps a lot.

[Nebu]

Sounds like fun!  No wonder 10 million people play this game.







The game is great to level 70.  After that, not so much. 

[Righ]

I wonder if there is anybody who has a level 70 in every one of their 50 character slots on one account. There must be - I knew several people who had 9x 70s on Earthen Ring Horde alone.

[Xanthippe]

I am in the minority who plays in the battlegrounds because I actually like playing in the battlegrounds.  I don't do it for the honor or the gear, I just do it when I feel like it - which is sporatic at best.

I don't raid, I've won the auction house game, I play alts when I feel like it - with no compunction to ever get to 70 because I already know what 70 is like - there's little to do for someone like me.

I'd love more battlegrounds.  I prefer playing AV, although I think it used to be more fun in it's first incarnation than any since.  I'd play BGs without honor.  I'd play them if everyone had the exact same gear or no gear at all.  In fact, that might be more fun because the honor farmers would be gone.  Imo, honor farmers (who say "let's just lose and get it over with" when you're down one flag in WSG and the other side isn't farming HKs, or down 100 in AB at the beginning of the game) ruin battlegrounds more than "scrubs" in blues and greens.

I want fun battlegrounds.  They don't have to be meaningful.  Removing honor grind would go a long way toward restoring fun.  It might mean long queues, but I'd rather wait for an hour to play a fun game than get in one where people cry "just lose already" within 5 minutes of the beginning of the game.

Arenas don't do it for me.  Too artificial.  Min/maxing ruins it.

[Tarami]

I haven't played much WoW lately (the recent year or so), and no endgame at all, but it seems like all they've done is to move the tedious grind from being raid-exclusive to being soloable. Of course, this will also mean everyone will try to circumvent as much of it as possible, making even the soloable bits about min/maxing. This is atleast what it sounds like when listening to friends who are active in the WoW endgame.

Would this be correct, those of you who do play?

[Zetor]

What Xanthippe said, especially about AV... gawd, I'd love a persistent version of 'old' AV. I like BGs because they can be pretty intense fun, and I don't have the time or inclination to raid. Even when I don't have much time to play (which has been the last few weeks, and will probably continue... writing a master's thesis is a pain), I can just hop into AB or AV, get a good game in and log off. Way, way, way more fun than it was before BC, even though the actual win/loss is very much a tossup. (preBC, one of my guildies got to rank 10, another to rank 12, and they were both extremely burnt out after the grind; I also know several grand marshals, that stuff is just craziness :p)

I'm probably alone with this, but I hate daily quests, which seems to be blizzard's idea of "casual post-70 gameplay". It's like a very-thinly-disguised 'job in a game', the only ones I do are the daily heroic [with guildies] and daily battleground [ditto].

Arenas suck (especially on live, with the win traders, point sellers, dodgers, countercomps, and huge gear differentials) and the 'esport' aspect makes me ; a class/level/gear-based diku with random factors like mace stun is going to have balanced small-scale pvp? yeah....


-- Z.

[Merusk]

I haven't played much WoW lately (the recent year or so), and no endgame at all, but it seems like all they've done is to move the tedious grind from being raid-exclusive to being soloable. Of course, this will also mean everyone will try to circumvent as much of it as possible, making even the soloable bits about min/maxing. This is atleast what it sounds like when listening to friends who are active in the WoW endgame.

Would this be correct, those of you who do play?

Which 'endgame' are you talking about? PvP or PvE?  The PvE endgame is still very much about raids and finding 25 folks to get together.  You simply have more avenues of upgrades you can do rather than "25-man raid only" if you want T5 level gear what with  Badge rewards, and 10 man ZA runs.   The uber endgame stuff is still pretty much 25-man only, and comes from Sunwell, Hyjal and BT, but its easier to get into HJ and BT now with the requirement of killing the T5 bosses removed.

The PvP endgame never was raid-centric and was always solo-based.  You just got into a raid to roll PUGs if you wanted to win and progress faster than you could solo.   Until Arenas, that is.  Those are 2, 3 and 5-man focused groups that have their own bag of problems if you want the highest-level stuff.

[Musashi]

DO NOT BUY THE BLUE 2 MINUTE TRINKET!!!!!

There's a purple one in the next mini patch (2.4.2) with 45 resil.  It will be 40k honor, so start saving now.

Link to Unofficial 2.4.2 stuff.

[Hutch]

I'm probably alone with this, but I hate daily quests, which seems to be blizzard's idea of "casual post-70 gameplay". It's like a very-thinly-disguised 'job in a game', the only ones I do are the daily heroic [with guildies] and daily battleground [ditto].

I think the dailies serve multiple, related purposes.

- Pre-designed cash farming tasks. By this I mean, you do a daily, you get a pile of cash (among other things) as your reward. Now, you can go design your own cash farming "quests", be it farming belves in Netherstorm or whatever, but the effect is the same. Go grind some mob or perform some task for a cash reward.
- Daily quests provide you with a pile of easy-to-obtain cash, in a relatively short amount of time. This won't keep people from being completely lazy and buying gold from gold sellers, but it does make gold extremely easy to get, assuming you don't mind doing the dailies. So I would say that it reduces the perceived "need" to buy gold.
- Many of the dailies are given out by faction NPCs (Ogrila, Skyguard, Netherwing, SSO, etc) and so as you grind the dailies, you grind up your rep at the same time.

So. Cash and rep. If you do cooking and fishing, then you've got a source of buff food. I tend to make more food than I can use, so I sell the leftovers on the AH, thereby creating yet another cash flow.

[Xanthippe]

- Many of the dailies are given out by faction NPCs (Ogrila, Skyguard, Netherwing, SSO, etc) and so as you grind the dailies, you grind up your rep at the same time.

So. Cash and rep. If you do cooking and fishing, then you've got a source of buff food. I tend to make more food than I can use, so I sell the leftovers on the AH, thereby creating yet another cash flow.

I don't even bother with rep once I get what I want off the vendor - which is usually recipes for crafting, another of the mini-games that I play.  But I won that one, too (although yes, they do keep coming out with more better more better more better more...).

I'm exalted with the AV faction, maybe honored with the others.  Revered with Sunwell guys due to doing the dailies, but probably won't bother going to exalted because they have nothing for my warlock jeweler that she needs.

Never finished the rep for the other factions either.  By the time I get the rep to get the gear I want, I have found some other gear through my trickling honor, or had something crafted with my piles of cash.  Or I have something that's almost good enough.

Levelling doesn't bother me, I enjoy the ding.  Rep grind though - I hate it.  Don't know why.

[Oban]

Pro tip: Turn off the party/battleground chat channel when joining AV. 

It makes the games really quite fun and more battle-ish.

[Tarami]

Merusk;

Thanks, I was mainly considering PvE as I don't consider PvP to have an endgame - it's all endgame, if you will, as endgame would take place when you can no longer level - which you don't do from PvP.

Just throwing this out there; the gap between the raid-grinder and the badge-grinder seems fairly small today compared to pre-BC times (when I was most active, also as a raider) but yet the effort seems to be approximately the same (to raid). The epics haven't really gone welfare, they've just been chipped up in tiny chunks so a single person can obtain them. Raiding pre-BC wasn't honestly that much of a job, not until TAQ and especially NX. If you were to compare the time (actual time) you have to spend to get equivalent gear today, I would suggest it has actually increased. A relatively normal guild that ran MC had two gettogethers aweek, and each member occasionally got an extremely good item. It is true that this (chipped up method) is more "casual", but I believe it would be a little delusional to say that the time:reward ratio has actually improved. Again, I haven't really been in the loop in a good while. The delusion might be on my part.

Hutch, on dailies;

I think what Blizzard thought, aside from game mechanics, was that it creates retention. I believe it does, too, as it creates routines around something static and invariable. The job factor often mentioned. Prior to their introduction instances and PvP filled the 1+ hour timeslots people could fit into their schedule, and both of those are liabilities as they involve other people. If you can't get a group or is getting steamrolled in BGs, it's likely that you log.

Grinding rep or mobs for drops are what I would call high initiative (for an MMO atleast) actions that requires people to produce the thought of doing it and then actually doing it, often for no up-front reward. Dailies do just this - present perfectly sized, instant gratification tasks to fill an hour or two with. If not getting people to log on more, it atleast stops some people from logging off. Which is good for long-term retention.

[Ratman_tf]

When I do Battlegrounds, it's because I like to do battlegrounds. The rewards are nice, and part of it, but if I did it just for the rewards (and I have gotten into that minset from time to time) the fun drains right out of it.

FWIW.

[Kail]

DO NOT BUY THE BLUE 2 MINUTE TRINKET!!!!!

There's a purple one in the next mini patch (2.4.2) with 45 resil.  It will be 40k honor, so start saving now.

Are you joking?  Forty thousand honor points for twenty-five more resilience?  That's more than half the cost of a full suit of S1 armor... Are people seriously considering buying this thing?  What am I not seeing here?

[Hutch]

DO NOT BUY THE BLUE 2 MINUTE TRINKET!!!!!

There's a purple one in the next mini patch (2.4.2) with 45 resil.  It will be 40k honor, so start saving now.

Are you joking?  Forty thousand honor points for twenty-five more resilience?  That's more than half the cost of a full suit of S1 armor... Are people seriously considering buying this thing?  What am I not seeing here?

You're seeing people who've been grinding honor since they hit 70 a year ago, and haven't got anything else to spend it on.

[Hutch]

I don't even bother with rep once I get what I want off the vendor - which is usually recipes for crafting, another of the mini-games that I play.  But I won that one, too (although yes, they do keep coming out with more better more better more better more...).

Many factions don't have solo-able dailies, or not that I know of. Consortium, lower city, sha'tar, etc. I use the same criteria with these factions, i.e. what do I want that their quartermaster sells?

P.S. I've seen the tabard from SSO, so I'm going to get exalted with them eventually. I like that one.

[Paelos]

It's still a bit ridiculous. I mean if they lessened the cooldown to 1m, yeah it's totally worth it. However, a simple upgrade in resilience isn't worth the extra 22k honor at all.

[Musashi]

Well, it's still 25 more resil in a slot that's hard to get resil in otherwise.  Yea, 40k honor is tarded.  But it's just a one time investment.  Resil is a stat that can be effectively capped.  So that trinket frees up a lot of options as far as gearing other slots, and/or gem slots.  I don't think that they can drop the cooldown much lower than 2 minutes without rendering most forms of cc nearly useless in arenas. 

[Merusk]

It's still a bit ridiculous. I mean if they lessened the cooldown to 1m, yeah it's totally worth it. However, a simple upgrade in resilience isn't worth the extra 22k honor at all.

What's happening is the dedicated BG folks have a shitload of honor to spend on absolutly NOTHING.  40k honor for a guy who does BGs like I do daily quests. It isn't trivial, but it's not several months work, either.

[Dren]

I can casually do the daily and a few more BG's within 30-45 minutes and end up with around 1000 honor.  If I dedicate a night to PvP, I can get 2-4k in about 2-3 hours.   The latest changes to honor kills really helped keep the tally directly related to time spent.  There is still the issue of never knowing if you get into a good or bad PUG, but even in a bad PUG the amount of honor earned isn't bad.

The point is, 40k is pretty high, but if you really wanted it and stayed consistent with nightly PvP, it really isn't a big deal.

That said, I wouldn't do it.  I isn't worth it when I have so many other things to burn time and honor on.

Now for a somewhat related bitch:  Why the hell doesn't the trinket clear being counterspelled (of any kind?)  So, I can move now....so what?  I still can't heal or  use any other spell (healadin.)  Counterspell and silence kill me way way more than stuns or snares.  Lesson to mages, etc.   If you aren't using your counterspell, you deserve to lose.

[Mrbloodworth]

Sounds like fun!  No wonder 10 million people play this game.







The game is great to level 70.  After that, not so much. 

But 70 is where the game starts!


I hear that tossed around all the time.....

[Gobbeldygook]

Now for a somewhat related bitch:  Why the hell doesn't the trinket clear being counterspelled (of any kind?)  So, I can move now....so what?

Ok.  You just got counterspelled.  Now either run up to the mage and start melee'ing him to cause spell pushback or run away and LOS him.  If you're a belf, run up to him and use arcane torrent.  If none of those are options, bubble.  You also shouldn't just be spamming spells; juke their counterspells and kicks by faking them out with cancelled casts.

The difference is that counterspelled people can still take SOME actions.  CC'd people often cannot.  Depending on your class, counterspelling isn't that bad either.  PVP Priests use both schools of magic available to them regardless of spec, mages can use all three schools available to them, etc.

[Merusk]

Problem is long-cast heals on pallys usually = dead person or OOM pally really quick.. so you spam flash heal.  Juking kicks/ cs's gets much trickier.

Second problem is that ALL of a pally's spells are holy.  CS/ Silence are the best way of keeping them from ever doing ANYTHING at all.. since even their Melee seals can't be cast under the effects of them. Screw CC on the pally, just keep him from casting and he's useless.  (Pally auto attack damage..  .)

[Zetor]

Now for a somewhat related bitch:  Why the hell doesn't the trinket clear being counterspelled (of any kind?)  So, I can move now....so what?

Ok.  You just got counterspelled.  Now either run up to the mage and start melee'ing him to cause spell pushback or run away and LOS him.  If you're a belf, run up to him and use arcane torrent.  If none of those are options, bubble.  You also shouldn't just be spamming spells; juke their counterspells and kicks by faking them out with cancelled casts.

The difference is that counterspelled people can still take SOME actions.  CC'd people often cannot.  Depending on your class, counterspelling isn't that bad either.  PVP Priests use both schools of magic available to them regardless of spec, mages can use all three schools available to them, etc.

You can't bubble while counterspelled [it's a holy spell], and the mage will probably have ice barrier up to nullify pushback from the minimal dps of a pally beating on someone (maybe with seal of righteousness up, even) + if you get close, you'll get frost nova'd (which you can't dispel or BOF since you're counterspelled) and shatter combo'd for 6+k damage which'll probably kill you if you're already hurt. Juking works in theory... unless you have a bad ping, curse of tongues (which pallies can't remove), or if you absolutely need to cast a heal and spending 3-4 seconds on trying to juke (against good rogues/warriors/mages you need to almost let the cast finish and THEN cancel, or they won't fall for it) will get you / a teammate killed.

When I played arenas 'competitively' on my warlock, I single-handedly made enemy pallies completely useless. Curse of Tongues meant that my fear would always land before their heal would (even the quick casting one), and by spell locking them shortly before their heal target was about to get bursted, they were completely helpless in watching them die. The only way they could avoid this was by LOSing me like crazy, but that'd mean LOSing their teammates as well, and with curse of tongues on, getting back in LOS to heal meant they were screwed anyway. Pallies are the #2 worst healer in arena (#1 is resto shamans; pallies at least have plate and bubble to save *themselves*, shamans don't even have that and are completely screwed if the enemy team has offensive dispel + a rogue) and are only really effective in 5v5, where their teammates make up for their shortcomings (disc priest for instant heals, mage or druid for curse removal, etc).

Edit: The trinket breaks snares and roots [neither of which remove all control of your character... snares are spammable, even]; extending it to lockouts wouldn't be that big of a stretch.


-- Z.

[Dren]

Merusk and Zetor have it right.  No Holy = NO SPELLS including my precious bubble.

Also, I'm not going to find an LOS situation when my teamates are all dieing and I'm supposed to be healing them.  Hell, when I turn my back on anything and run, I might as well die, because I'm worthless at that point.  If I'm in a one on one fight, maybe I'd do that.  I never one on one.

Counterspell, silence, curse of tongues, mana burn/drain....  They all make Healadins dead.  If I'm reduced to melee?  8-15 hps a whack just don't mean a hill of beans.

[Gobbeldygook]

You can't bubble while counterspelled [it's a holy spell]

It is?  Huh.  I learn something new every day.  From my warrior perspective, it's always just been 'That annoying as fuck thing they do where they heal back to full health'.  It does explain how I've sometimes bursted pallies down before they had a chance to bubble.

Pallies are the #2 worst healer in arena (#1 is resto shamans; pallies at least have plate and bubble to save *themselves*, shamans don't even have that and are completely screwed if the enemy team has offensive dispel + a rogue) and are only really effective in 5v5, where their teammates make up for their shortcomings (disc priest for instant heals, mage or druid for curse removal, etc).

I'd disagree; Resto shaman have experienced something of a renaissance in the smaller brackets.  Warrior/retadin/resto shaman and warrior/shaman have both established themselves as teams-to-beat in the past few months due to strong performance vs druids.  When I tried a double-healer team in 3's the other day, we seriously ran into a war/ret/resto one out of every 3 games and it was a different one just about every time(They're not that common; we were just extremely unlucky).  So, paladins are now very arguably the absolute worst 2's and 3's healers.

Edit: The trinket breaks snares and roots [neither of which remove all control of your character... snares are spammable, even]; extending it to lockouts wouldn't be that big of a stretch.

I wouldn't be TOO put out by the trinket working on counterspell-like things; it'd be one more thing for casters to waste their trinket on that isn't a true CC.

[Dren]

You can't bubble while counterspelled [it's a holy spell]

It is?  Huh.  I learn something new every day.  From my warrior perspective, it's always just been 'That annoying as fuck thing they do where they heal back to full health'.  It does explain how I've sometimes bursted pallies down before they had a chance to bubble.

If you aren't counterspelling them, then they can bubble.  Normal stuns, fear, etc. can be bubbled out of.  Counterspell is the ONLY thing that prevents me from hitting my bubble.  Mass Dispel gets rid of the bubble after I've cast it.

[Ingmar]

I don't even bother with rep once I get what I want off the vendor - which is usually recipes for crafting, another of the mini-games that I play.  But I won that one, too (although yes, they do keep coming out with more better more better more better more...).

Many factions don't have solo-able dailies, or not that I know of. Consortium, lower city, sha'tar, etc. I use the same criteria with these factions, i.e. what do I want that their quartermaster sells?

P.S. I've seen the tabard from SSO, so I'm going to get exalted with them eventually. I like that one.

You can theoretically get to exalted with most of them solo, but it is an open question whether you could do so before the heat death of the universe. The way you do it is by farming ethereals for prison keys, then opening the solo prisons in Netherstorm. Occasionally instead of a mob, you free an NPC attached to one of the other factions and get 500 faction (550 if you're human of course.) The factions you can get this way are Lower City, Sha'tar, Cenarion Expedition, Consortium, Keepers of Time, and Sporeggar (lol). Sadly you can't get any Honor Hold/Thrallmar faction this way, but that one is theoretically doable with the Hellfire pvp daily I think. You will also get a bunch of BOE greens, some BOP blues that can have nice mods sometimes, and the occasional BOE necklace that you can sell on the AH if it has good modifiers.

In practice, doing instance PUGs will take a lot less time, but if you were *really* stubborn or trying to prove a point and had a lot of time on your hands, you could do it solo.

[Register]

You can't bubble while counterspelled [it's a holy spell]

It is?  Huh.  I learn something new every day.  From my warrior perspective, it's always just been 'That annoying as fuck thing they do where they heal back to full health'.  It does explain how I've sometimes bursted pallies down before they had a chance to bubble.

If you aren't counterspelling them, then they can bubble.  Normal stuns, fear, etc. can be bubbled out of.  Counterspell is the ONLY thing that prevents me from hitting my bubble.  Mass Dispel gets rid of the bubble after I've cast it.

Erm... you can't bubble out of cyclone.

[Azazel]

Yeah, no joke.  What really gets up my nose are those "better a quick loss than a protracted win" jackasses.  I've captured Stonehearth Bunker about eight million damn times, call me crazy for wanting to actually fight someone in a battleground once in a while.

Meh. I'm a quick-game guy. There's plenty of fighting either way, but I don't want to spend 45 minutes in a protracted shitty battleground when loss is inevitable. Giive me a quick win, a quick loss, or better yet, a hard-fought even game. None of this turtle-to-lose bullshit.

[Merusk]

Yeah, no joke.  What really gets up my nose are those "better a quick loss than a protracted win" jackasses.  I've captured Stonehearth Bunker about eight million damn times, call me crazy for wanting to actually fight someone in a battleground once in a while.

Meh. I'm a quick-game guy. There's plenty of fighting either way, but I don't want to spend 45 minutes in a protracted shitty battleground when loss is inevitable. Giive me a quick win, a quick loss, or better yet, a hard-fought even game. None of this turtle-to-lose bullshit.

Agreed. When it's 2/0 after 5 mins in wsg -an obvious steamroll - I'd rather my side just drop the flag instead of hiding with it.   Ditto if it's an AB that we haven't been able to hold more than 2 nodes in and the score is now 700/1200 or better. If you've got to 4-cap to win, and you haven't been able to even 3-cap just let them have the last 2.

[Dren]

Erm... you can't bubble out of cyclone.

Yeah, I thought that was the other one, but couldn't remember for sure.  I knew I hated cyclone for some reason.  That'd be it.

I can't remember if I can even trinket out of that one either.  Anyone know?

[Driakos]

Cyclone is spotty for bubble.  There seem to be a few frames where you can escape a cyclone with a bubble, but it is unreliable.  Sometimes my 2v2 teammate gets out of it, usually not.  Counterspell is absolute.