PVP Patch Coming Tuesday Dec 5th

[Paelos]

One of my guildmates managed to grind a HWL one hander in two days.

To quote him "honk honk".  Gooses was always an odd one.

I've only PvP'd about 6 hours in total since Tuesday, and I'm 1/2 way to my Grand Marshall x-bow (or gun..) and Alliance loses AB a hell of a lot.  It's damned easy to get these.  I'm pleased.

I'm on the opposite side of the fence, queuing up in AV because the Horde have a pathetic record there in my battlegroup. It's an easy 500 honor in the matter of 20 minutes plus 3x those lovely badges. AB is a freaking joke, I put together a 10 man group out of my raiding alliance last night, and we won 2 out of 5 battles. The three we lost were to AQ geared 12-15 man horde teams, and the two we won were Pugs. Considering the stats, when i was running with pugs solo in AB, I won 1 out of 10, and that was because I happened to get in a group that was a 10 man team.

In short, to the organized in AB goes the victory. In organized vs. organized it becomes infinitely more complex.

[Merusk]

I play Alliance.  That was my point, it's so damn easy, even on the losing side.  :-D 

[caladein]

I play Alliance.  That was my point, it's so damn easy, even on the losing side.  :-D 

AV's even easier if you try and kill all the Lieutenants (on Horde I kite them to SH, I imagine you could do the same to IB or even SF). Even if you lose, you still get within a hundred points or so of the "winning" team.

[Rasix]

One of my guildmates managed to grind a HWL one hander in two days.

To quote him "honk honk".  Gooses was always an odd one.

I've only PvP'd about 6 hours in total since Tuesday, and I'm 1/2 way to my Grand Marshall x-bow (or gun..) and Alliance loses AB a hell of a lot.  It's damned easy to get these.  I'm pleased.

Better than my battlegroup Horde side. In 6 ABs we won none, and only 2 of them were competitive (4 were 5 cap wins), probably due to the fact that every match was against a premade.  ABs are just brutal in a PUG, but at least they're mercifully quick.  AV is really going to be the only place I'm going to be able to get honor. Which is fine, I'd rather just spend 2 nights to get my AB medals and then the rest of the time playing the battleground that I actually like. 

I'm finding out that the dual wield shammy is pretty low on the totem pole for survivability unless I respec with some resto to get the healing interupt talent (my gear is not quite there). My friend that was big into Dark Age is practically bursting a vessel in his forehead over WoW pvp.  He doesn't understand why he gets destroyed when his gear is all sub tier 1 (hell, it's sub Dire Maul), he has no experience playing WoW bgs (when you start out, you really aren't good), is playing strictly in PUGs v premades, and is playing a spec that has absolutely no survivability and is only effective with good gear (he's got no melee gear but went dual wield  ).     

Heh, with as bad as a battle group as ours is and not being in a guild/premade, my major choke points for this gear will be AV marks and honor.  Maybe it's time to go searching for a real guild again (not for raiding).

[SurfD]

Rumor from someone in my guild who knows someone who kows a dev (or something like that) has it that Honour prices of stuff are going up on tuesday (way too cheap as it stands).

I mean, i did AB for about 4 hours with guild today, and i can almost afford a Warlord 1 hander.

[Righ]

I play on Earthen Ring, an RP PvE server, Horde side. The population imbalance is extreme, and Horde is severely underpopulated, bringing with it a whole bunch of problems, both PvP and PvE. I'm in one of two Horde guilds regularly doing Naxx, but we're only six bosses in, and most of or guild is in T2 and even T1 gear. So our gear is well above par for our server & faction, but nothing special in the grand scheme of the battle group. Being dirty arrpees on a care bear server, we should rightly suck at battlegrounds, especially against hardcore PvP kids in grand marshal or T3 gear. We played 18 games of AB as a guild group last night. Some of our opponents were random PUGs, some pre-made. A few were considerably better geared than us. We won all 18 games, five-capping several. I'm pretty chuffed. That was my second night of the new honor system. The previous night I earned 8000 points. Made 9000 last night, so well on my way to my first of two high warlord axes (22.5k each).

I'm lucky enough to have a crossbow of smiting so I wouldn't consider the PvP one. However, I don't feel that 2.9s is sufficiently slow for a crossbow in any case. Beats the girly hunter quest bow though. If I keep doing enough PvP to get the honor for non-essentials, I'm interested in the 1.8s bow. With quiver haste, that brings it down to a speed highly effective for an arcane/steady rotation in TBC. In any case that will have to wait - I'm now quite interested in getting a set of the PvP armor (95k) too - I fought an alliance hunter in the stuff, and although he hit for around the same damage as I did, he had a good deal more health. My guild mates scoffed at the idea of a hunter needing health, and said that I wasn't doing things right if I was getting hit. They may be quite good at it, but I don't think they've quite fathomed all the subtleties of PvP yet, bless them.

[Rasix]

Heh, I did about 6 ABs and 3 AVs last night and walked away with only around 2.5k honor.  All PUGs though.  People in decent guilds or premades aren't going to have much trouble getting this stuff, PUGers will.

Still, I don't think the costs are too high.  I'll have that high warlord axe or claw within a week easy. Then I can use my AV medals and some more honor to upgrade to some decent gloves.

I'm starting to figure out how to play the DW shammie effectively and am doing a lot better (I'm surprisingly effective against warriors). I still suck righteously at this PVP. It's funny though, I've had someone commenting on me healing every AV bg I've played. 

[Merusk]

I'm lucky enough to have a crossbow of smiting so I wouldn't consider the PvP one. However, I don't feel that 2.9s is sufficiently slow for a crossbow in any case. Beats the girly hunter quest bow though. If I keep doing enough PvP to get the honor for non-essentials, I'm interested in the 1.8s bow. With quiver haste, that brings it down to a speed highly effective for an arcane/steady rotation in TBC.

Lucky bastard on the x-bow.  We've yet to see one, and I'm 3 hunters back in DKP since I picked-up my DS legs last week.  I'm going straight for the ranged GM weaps, given that an upgrade is an upgrade and the likelihood of Chromag dropping 3 bows in the next 4 weeks is about nil.

   Interesting point on the GM longbow, though.  I initially discarded the idea of aquiring it due to being just so damn fast.  You'd blow through arrows like mages do water with one of those.   Also, I'm not sure I agree on the 'not sufficently slow enough' criticism for the other two.  It's all about RAP and DPS of the weapon now that Aimed/ Multi rotations are out the window.

[SurfD]

I'm starting to figure out how to play the DW shammie effectively and am doing a lot better (I'm surprisingly effective against warriors). I still suck righteously at this PVP. It's funny though, I've had someone commenting on me healing every AV bg I've played. 

How are you likeing the DW shammy?  I was going to go DW, and then found out that blizzard hotifxed one of the weapons i was going to offhand into a Main hand only weapon (fuckers).  So right now I am Earthshield spec, and grinding my way to 2 HW Cleavers.

Full resto ROCKS by the way.  Rogues Paladins and warriors (other then MS) are just screwed, hunters also, but to a lesser extent.  It is AMAZING how long i can last even with 3 or 4 mele types pounding on me.

[Rasix]

I'm starting to figure out how to play the DW shammie effectively and am doing a lot better (I'm surprisingly effective against warriors). I still suck righteously at this PVP. It's funny though, I've had someone commenting on me healing every AV bg I've played. 

How are you likeing the DW shammy?  I was going to go DW, and then found out that blizzard hotifxed one of the weapons i was going to offhand into a Main hand only weapon (fuckers).  So right now I am Earthshield spec, and grinding my way to 2 HW Cleavers.

Full resto ROCKS by the way.  Rogues Paladins and warriors (other then MS) are just screwed, hunters also, but to a lesser extent.  It is AMAZING how long i can last even with 3 or 4 mele types pounding on me.

It's OK, it's suboptimal with the gear I'm trying to use it with.  Aurastone hammer + gutgore ripper isn't the world's best combination. I'm sitting at 440 AP and 19% crit; ideally you'd want 600-700 AP with about 20-25% crit.  None of my gear is enchanted.  With agil enchants I could probably add at least another 3% to crit and boost my survivability some.  I've somewhat neglected this character since I stopped raiding; I really wish I would have at least ganked a Therazine's Link before I left.

You function somewhat like a shock troop.  There were a couple times today in AV where I was on defense and the alliance was working on getting to drek where I just ran in and wiped out the main tank before someone could react. You can lay down some serious hurt if you close range on someone and when the windfury procs start going you just melt people. Frost shock + storm strike + earth shock = pain. The DPS is also a lot more steady than going the 2handed route.

The problem is you give up a lot of survivability.  No more are they days solo defending farm against 3 people  :-D  Resto gives you a better shot against rogues and hunters and other DPS heavy classes (god warlocks are mean now).  I'm still learning it though and most of the rogues that are owning me seem to be wearing full tier 2 or better.

If you go for a PVP spec you can leave out the 40 point talent.  It's useful for PVE, but near useless in PVP.  I like it despite the change from being durable to being somewhat squishy; it's the way I've always wanted to play my shaman.

[Shavnir]

I've heard that if you put an earth shield on someone and they zone it lets you put another earth shield down.  I had an Elitist Jerks shaman (mostly teir 3 for reference's sake) put one on my warlock and I was able to survive dotting up a large group of people and running to hide several times.  That thing popping a heal on you for 600 outa nowhere is delicous.

Other shamans in my guild mentioned they'd put on their healing gear, pop a ZHC and cast earth shield on themselves, then change into Enhancement gear. :)

[SurfD]

There is currently a bug with the way Earthshield works.

Only 1 ES per shaman is supposed to be active at a given time.
If I ES someone, and I have ES on, Mine gets removed.
If I ES player A, and Player B previously had my ES, Player Bs ES gets removed.

However, There apperes to be some kind of range or location check going on when i cast it, and it only checks for duplicate ES's when cast.

Ie: If I cast ES on a player, and they change zones (zep / boat to other continent, zone into instance) there is no longer an active ES with my ID on it in the zone, so I can cast ES on another player, and the first player's ES stays, casue they are in a different zone.

Essentially, 1 shaman could ES an ENTIRE raid 1 by 1 as they zoned into an instance, then ES themself and zone in, and all 40 players would have an ES on them.

The only thing i havent managed to test yet is if I ES 5 people, zone in with them, and THEN ES myeslf, will it remove all 5 es's off the other people.

[Jayce]

This appears to make me a noob... and maybe I missed a patch note.. but I noticed a distinct lack of AV battlemasters this weekend.

What's the story?  I asked in chat a few times over the weekend and no one seemed to want to field the question.

[Merusk]

They were up on my BG cluster all weekend.  (When the BGs themselves weren't crashing, that is.)   Perhaps the AV servers bugged out on yours and Bliz couldn't get them rebooted?

Also - I suspect that honor-gains have been somehow quietly nerfed, or there was a huge bug after the patch.

  I PvP'd for ~3 hours on Wednesday (AV only w/ a 20-30 min queue) and came out with 4k honor and 6 tokens.  Being that it was Wednesday, there was no honor-bonus so this seemed a phenominal gain. "I'll have those GM weapons I want in no time!"

  I catassed BGs Saturday and Sunday for 6 hours each day, doing a combo of AV and AB.  I won about 6-8 ABs (yay getting dropped in the last slots of a premade) and all but 2 AVs, and still only earned about 5k each day.   Considering I now have 70AB tokens and 15AV tokens, that's very disproportionate to Wednesday's gain.

[Rasix]

2.5K per day for me over 3 days.  Each day was within a few hundred of each other.  Tried to balance out the AV/AB and ended up with around 27 AV tokens and 24 or so AB tokens.   I think it was about 3 hours per day. Not bad. 

Had an insane-o AV match last night (probably cost me a few hundred or so honor by staying).  The alliance was on Drek and we hadn't even gotten to Stormpike graveyard yet. We weren't even trying and really just got the graveyard by 7 of us deciding to finally just ninja drop and capture it.  The rest of the morons were still trying to "cap the road".  Then we half ass it and manage to destroy both bunkers all the time fighting on the bridge like a bunch of idiots.  We hear the defense managed to wipe the Alliance team.  So we end up taking the aide station.  Then we hear that the marshalls respawned on the alliance team and they wiped again, and we begin pulling marshalls and then procede to take down Van before they get Drek down.  They must have been on Drek for 20 minutes and we had all but given up.   One of those matches you'll remember for a lot longer than a 5 cap AB :)

[Righ]

You get a lot more honor for objectives than for kills. Wins are only part of the objective - killing named NPCs in AV, captures and defenses of a flag, number of nodes controlled at the end of a battle, these all play a part. It may be called 'bonus honor', but its where you can make the greatest gains. Winning AB after capturing five nodes nets much more honor than winning with four nodes. In AV, I try and kite NPCs across the bridge from the alliance base one at a time. Even if nobody really helps (zerg the aid station, lol), I can kill them with the help of our guards if we've captured the Stormpike graveyard. The beefy ones are 20 honor each. Your honor rate is ludicrously low, even on an AB weeked, if you lose, or win matches in AB slowly at 3-2. I don't know about WSG. Haven't had the heart to play it yet. Last time I did, before battlegrounds, it was an epic alliance multi-paladin graveyard turtling clusterfuck that ran for hours each game.

I was having terrible lag in BGs most of the weekend, made worse by the fact that only certain servers were lagging. Quite discouraging to have instant shots take 10 seconds to cast while melee characters zip around you, wailing on you in stop-frame speed. Our server crashed three times on Friday night, twice on Saturday night and four times on Sunday night - thats on top of the battleground server crashes. Earthen Ring is currently about as stable as a Shadowbane server. As a result, it was impossible to achieve the honor targets I had in mind. I did finally manage to get my first axe this morning, however.

[Morat20]

I finally -- took the last three months off, more or less -- logged back in with my Hunter. Respecced as BM, and tried out PvP. It took a little getting used to -- no aimed, no scatter, etc -- but I like the changes. TBW is really screwing rogues -- either none of those who tried could stunlock effectively, but I managed to trigger Bestial Wrath everytime some rogue tried to make me his bitch.

That broke the stuns and I proceeded to eat him alive. (Between me and the pet). Then again, if BW wasn't up and the rogue found me first, I was dead -- pet or no pet. The new shot is nice -- all hail 22dps shot. :)

I did a bunch of ABs and AVs -- usual pattern for my server, in that at least half the AB matches were against premades and we got rolled. The AVs were steady wins -- although we had one godawful match where it started lagging out as the Alliance was working on Drek. I was playing D, and the Horde were trying to take our towers at that point. 10 second lag sucks -- must have really pissed the horde off, because it's probably easier to hit an NPC than to PvP in that sort of lag.

I don't know how much honor I got -- my honor plugins are all kaput, and I haven't bothered to find a new one yet.

[Merusk]

I don't know how much honor I got -- my honor plugins are all kaput, and I haven't bothered to find a new one yet.

Honor updates daily now.  :-D

[pxib]

You get a lot more honor for objectives than for kills.

I don't think you do anymore. Check the numbers. They have raised how much kills are worth and lowered how much objectives are worth relative to one another. Diminishing returns no longer reach zero... you continue to get an assigned minimum from every kill no matter how many times you've ganked that player before.

Admittedly this doesn't matter much in AV where the Alliance can win in less than fifteen minutes, or AB where a solid team can win in less than four, but in a WSG that bogs down for half an hour to an hour, kills will be by far the majority of the honor received.

[Threash]

Is honor for kills still determined by rank? i don't know how i feel about being worth a lot more honor forevah! just because i got grand marshal a year and a half ago.  I still see the rank pop up when someone gets killed though so i assume thats the case.

[Righ]

You get a lot more honor for objectives than for kills.

I don't think you do anymore. Check the numbers.

That's what I was doing.

[SurfD]

im not sure what the exact math is, but if you can get into a good team, rolling AB is MUCH faster honor then nearly anything else.

Assuming you can 5 cap them you get roughly 250 honour for winning the game (i think each side gains honor based on how much total resources you can gather, and how many resource points you controll at the end of the game).

From what i can tell, you get VERY little honor per individual player kill comparative to what you used to get.  Something in the neibourhood of 10 honour for a player who used to be rank 14.  Even that might be high.  3-5 honour is probably the norm for a first time kill on a given player. And i think diminishing returns DO still count, so killing someone 3 or 4 times in a game will probably result in you hitting 1 honour per kill fairly rapidly.

I managed to get into our guild AB group for about 6 hours yesterday.  At any given time 1/2 of the group was Mains (naxx/bwl type gear), the other half Alts (MC/AQ20/ZG) and the occasional random pug if we had someone rotate out and couldnt find a replacement. Any pug group was usually a total stomp (5 cap, game over in 2 minutes), occasionaly we would get another organised team (4 or 3 cap and hold for win), and very rarely a good organised team (we had a very close fight with one Blackrock team that ended with us winning by about 200 resources after tradeing taps on damn near every point on the map multiple times)

In the end, i made roughly 10k honor in that 6 hour period, and ended up with 2 pages of AB tokens that are going to rot in my mail cause i dont have enough honor to go with them to spend on anything.

AB can be a REDICULOUS source of fast honour if you can 5 cap.  A 5 cap wins in under a minute once you cap the 5th pt.  4 caps in under 6 i think.

[Rasix]

My character died while in AV.  It was so laggy and broken players had to run by to the spirit healers to rez.  Finally I got sick of it and tried to /AFK out as a ghost.  DO NOT DO THIS. I was still a ghost but with the deserter debuff.  I could still see action happening but all of the spirit healers had disappeared.

I was unable to logout.  When I tried to talk in guild chat after logging out, it said I was not in a guild.  I couldn't /quit out.  I had to close the app from the task menu.   

Now I cannot get to any of my Shadowsong characters. It just gets stuck at retrieving character list. 

 

Edit: Seems like this might be a pervasive issue across all realms for me.  Possible just WoW grinding to a halt under the strain of all of this pvping.

[Kenrick]

Yeah, the servers all collectively farted tonight just before midnight.  Weird stuff was going on everywhere.

[Merusk]

Edit: Seems like this might be a pervasive issue across all realms for me.  Possible just WoW grinding to a halt under the strain of all of this pvping.

Yeah, it had nothing to do with /afk-ing out  while ghosting.  The PvP and normal servers are simply fucked up.  Friday, Saturdy and Sunday night there were not only BG problems like what you just mentioned, but normal realms were crashing like they ran Windows  95. 

I had similar problems on Thursday & Friday in battlegrounds.  Friday the realm crashed at 7 and didn't come back until about 9.  Saturday the same thing with the prime time crash, and then our Sunday night MC run was hosed after Shazz because any action that created loot, or moved loot caused that person to lock-up.

Prople more knowledgable about this stuff in my guild all think it's a DB issue.  The 2.0 patch changed a lot of things and it looks like the game's db is misconfigured, or somesuch.  Hopefuly they'll be able to fix part of it on their end in today's downtime.

[Lantyssa]

Yeah.  All of Kirin Tor was acting strangely last night.  I still had access to channels, and could "move" but NPCs were not responding and some of us could not log out.  I had to force it to log by unplugging my network cable.  It entered this state in the middle of receiving my quest reward, so gods know what will happen there.

[Morat20]

I had to expressly kill the client last night. I was "Stuck" in AB. Couldn't do squat. Couldn't HS, auto-unstick didn't work, couldn't recieve chat -- tried to log back in and was stuck at "retrieving character".

Figured the server died. I did learn that a BM specced Hunter can eat a warrior alive, one-on-one. At least stupid ones. I was guarding the mill flag by my lonesome, and got attacked by a single warrior something like four times. Three of them by the same guy. You really can't ignore my pet now.

I had a ball in AV -- when it wasn't lagged out. At one point, I was standing on the Stormpike road, holding six Horde at bay. (Admittedly, I had two priests peaking around the corner healing me and my pet). And the Horde were stupid. Yes, let's fight the Hunter at range. Don't close, or god forbid attack the priests healing him. And let his pet rampage on your clothies more or less at will.

[Slayerik]

Honor nerfed by 30%

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=55975614&sid=1&pageNo=1

Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor, and subsequently how easy it's been to obtain honor rewards. In gauging these elements, we've determined that the effort required to obtain honor rewards is more trivial than we had intended. As a result, during today's maintenance we’ve applied a hotfix that reduced the amount of honor gained by approximately 30%. This change allows the honor rewards to be obtained at rate that better reflects the item’s in-game value.

The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished. As this change will only affect future honor accumulation.




Good thing i only needed a piece or two....

[Rasix]

That's kind of assy.  Sure people playing in guild premades on an AB weekend are going to rake in the honor.  Doesn't mean the rest of us are so lucky.

 

Edit: I guess I'll just go back to leveling my druid with the occasional BG thrown in on my shaman.  My honor gains from now on are just going to feel like futility.  Goddamn it.

[AcidCat]

Poopsocker shitheads who play 24/7 screw it for the rest of us. Thanks for the love Blizzard. The fucktards already got their "trivial" rewards this week anyway, so let's screw the people that play for reasonable amounts of time because they have a life outside the game.

I have never gone all emo about WoW in two years of playing but this shit pisses me off. I was looking forward to getting my Druid and Priest into some pretty good gear - not full sets, but enough to really improve over the auction house blues I've got since I don't raid. And I'm already playing as much as I can without pissing off my wife and ignoring my kids. The poopsockers already had epics from their raiding anyway, the people this hits hardest are like me, in shit gear. Blizz gave me a system where I could upgrade it in a reasonable amount of time and then turned around and shit in my face.

Ah, I had to get that out. /emo

[tazelbain]

Wow, you guys are spoiled as fuck.

PvP Rewards: Impossible -> Possible -> Possible - 30%

...and now you start pissing and moaning?

[AcidCat]

It's all in your perspective I guess. Say you win $ 1000 bucks at a casino. Then before you leave, they say sorry, too many folks have won tonight, we'll have to reduce your winnings by 30%. I'd guess that telling you "you shouldn't have had that money anyway, be happy with what you have" would make you feel just fine about it?

[Dren]

Considering I didn't even have a chance to try the new changes yet due to my casual schedule, yeah, that sucks.

They must have underestimated the number of poopsockers that would poopsock even though they already had their poopsock awards.  They've gotta catch em all you know.

I'm tired of those guys forcing changes like this.

[Xanthippe]

I bet the shit is flying on the official forums today.  If Blizzard thought people were pissed off by the BG changes with the patch, I imagine there's a lot more people mad now.

Of course, it doesn't help that mere days ago Drysc (blue poster) said this in response to people wondering if the prices would go up:

Q u o t e:
More than likely the prices will be adjusted for the current honor rewards sometime after the expansion releases to reflect their 'value' more appropriately when compared to expansion items.

That would mean the prices would be going down though, not up.

I don't care much about changes, but I care greatly about the CMs fibbing to the players.  Way to fuck up, Blizzard.

[Nebu]

If the PvP is a fun activity in and of itself, who cares if you get 30% fewer points?  It's the pvp that's supposed to be fun... not the getting of teh shiny.   

The people pissed off by this are apparently getting their fun more from accumulation of "teh shiny" than the gameplay itself.