In late November, I complained about reaching end-game late compared to many World of Warcraft (WoW) players. This follows not only from me picking up Burning Crusade (BC) a handful of weeks after it was released, but also by the fact that I didn’t bring my pre-BC endgame characters out of retirement, and instead rolled two new toons, one of which I stuck with and just now reached level 70 with.
My intent was to begin PvPing a few levels before hitting the level cap, so as to reach level 70 with enough marks of honour (MoH) to immediately purchase some decent PvP gear. In today’s state of PvPing, gear with resilience significantly changes the game, and as I quickly realized, the level 70 BG bracket plays out very differently than the 60-69 bracket. This difference mostly results from resilience gear, which allows practically everyone to outlast me in a one-on-one scenario.
My plan to stick with BGs before dinging 70 didn’t work out; after realizing that the rate of BG MoH collection is not proportional to the amount of honour gained, it made more sense to just hit the level cap so I could at least equip my Don Santos’ Famous Hunting Rifle. At 70 with an abundance of MoH, it’s rather painful to have to grind honour as per the old pre-BC method. For those players who weren’t around for the old system, PvP gear was unlocked after gaining a certain amount of honour, and the gear could then be bought with gold. The system was poor for two reasons:
- Winning a BG match didn’t matter as much as gaining pure honour, which was often easier to do by killing as many players as possible, and not defending key BG areas.
- With the reliance on gold to purchase gear, PvP gamers needed to do PvE content, which made achieving the honour necessary to gain rank very difficult for anyone but hardcore players. This is because the honour gains to achieve rank were computed weekly, in-relation to other players.
The current PvP system fixed this second problem, in that a player could do nothing but PvP and still be able to appropriate gear for themselves. Unfortunately, the current system still refers back to the first problem noted, in that a player who has achieved enough BG MoH is still a fair ways from gaining the honour needed to purchase gear.
My weekend with my new level 70 Hunter illustrates this concept well: after hitting level 70, I had enough honour saved up to purchase one piece o Vindicator’s gear. It took another day of BGs to earn the honour necessary for my second piece of Vindicator’s gear, wiping my honour almost entirely. Having played BGs for at least half the day, I’ve earned back just over 3.5k honour, leaving me only about a third of the way to another piece in the Vindicator’s set.
This is an important point for those who ardently oppose so-called “welfare epics”: the current state of the PvE game is that an accomplished set of raiders can generally obtain numerous epic pieces for their guild per day of raiding. A similarly accomplished pre-made BG team may be able to win various BGs in a day, but the honour they earn one another is still not on par with what is needed to buy epic gear. In other words, there is still a significant honour grind inherent in the game, and this grind is what makes PvP epics anything but “welfare”. In fact, for the casual gamer, completing a full set of PvP gear purchased purely through honour and BG MoH is nigh impossible due to the time investment needed. The only thing Blizzard did to make PvP gear more accessible was to remove the reliance on PvE-earned gold.
Announced changes for Patch 2.4 already refer to PvE content earning participants PvP gear, which only serves to further dismiss the accomplishments of those who have sat through BG after BG. After Patch 2.4, raiders will have the upper hand in both PvE and PvP content, because as soon as a guild has a dungeon on farm status, they can begin getting their members not only infamous Tier 4+ gear, but also PvP gear. For PvP veterans of both BGs and the Arenas, this should be seen as a smack in the face, and is another example of Blizzard cowtowing to end-game raiders, who it seems have nothing better to do than complain about gear that other players are getting in a different way.
if Blizzard is adamant about allowing PvE gamers to obtain PvP gear ahead of those who strictly PvP, then they ought to do something similar for PvP players: allow BG/Arena veterans to purchase Tier 4+ gear by turning in Arena and honour points, or even BG MoH. At least then, there’s a clear message that Blizzard doesn’t favor one group of players over another.
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