If you looked at that title and said "What???" you probably want to stop reading now :P
My Rogue is currently grinding Honor for two Gladiator swords and after two nights it's very obvious that by the time I have enough Honor to buy the Swords, I'm going to have Marks coming out of my ears. It seems to me it's a flaw in the system when I have enough Marks to make a purchase, but I'm still lacking in Honor. Part of the reason is the way Honor is awarded on the BGs, but it also comes down to the price of items being too high...or perhaps more correctly, the number of Marks needed is too low.
The Honor price of an item should be in proportion to the number of Marks required to buy it, which should be directly related to the Honor earned by the average losing player in a BG. Now before you fire up those Flamers, I am not advocating ZOMG! Welfare Epics! I'm prepared to work for my epic Blades, I just don't think I should have stacks of Marks by the time I have the Honor to buy my Epics, and I certainly shouldn't have stacks of them left over after buying my Epics, either.
Blizzard need to calculate the average amount of Honor earned by a player on the losing side of each battle, and use that to determine the Honor & Marks needed to purchase an item. So just for the sake of argument, let's say a player earns 100 Honor for losing one EOTS match, that means he has 100 Honor and 1 EOTS Mark. If he wants to buy a Sword that requires him to spend 10,000 Honor he should also be spending the equivalent in Marks, being 100, but that's never the case. In fact you rarely need more than 40 Marks to buy one item, and most can be bought for 20 Marks or less. Both of my desired swords cost 20 Marks each, but one requires 9,000 Honor and the other 18,000 Honor. I have 10 Marks but barely 2,000 Honor, so I have half the Marks but not even 1/4 of the Honor for the cheaper blade. A lot of that Honor came from doing several AVs in my 50s, so it's not like there's a slight discrepancy between Honor earned and Marks received; it's a huge difference.
As it currently stands it will probably take me close to a month of several BGs per night before I can buy one of my Blades, unless I get lucky and win a few BGs (and it happens, my PUG beat their PUG last night), or I join a Premade and increase my chances of winning. Considering how often our PUG loses to a Premade, I'm actually thinking of joining a Premade next time I see one being advertized. Then again, considering how geared up my Rogue is not, I might join a Premade only to get kicked out when someone better equipped comes along.
What I'll probably end up doing is running EOTS for the Marks and unless I get into a Premade, I'll then grind AV for both Honor and AV Marks, as I can turn AV Marks in for the quest and bonus Honor. And this is definitely a flaw in the system, when I have all the Marks I need but am forced to grind an unrelated BG to earn more Honor.
Part of the problem, as I said, is the price discrepancy between Honor & Marks, but part of the problem (despite my willingness to become part of the problem) is the Premades. Currently you enter a BG with several other people from various other servers and you inevitably face a Premade. Of course you don't know it's a Premade, at first, initially it's one or two players from the Premade who stick their heads in to determine if they're facing a PUG or another Premade. It's when they report back to their buddies and your opponents' roster suddenly fills up with players from the same realm that you know for sure it's a Premade...and there goes the neighborhood.
The simple solution to this, one which would be easy to implement and which would cause a lot of concern among the Premades, would be to change the way Premades enter the BG. If it's the Leader that Joins everyone as a Group, then when it's time for the Premade to enter the BG only the Leader should get the Enter prompt. Not one member of the Premade enters the BG until the Leader goes in, and then everyone enters all at once; no testing the waters before committing to the battle. This would not make a lot of people happy, because now they can't pick & choose their battles, but why should they be able to? This is PvP. This is WAR! You'll fight when you're told to, Soldier, and you'll fight whoever I tell you to! Now get out there and FIGHT!
Another solution, one that's already been implemented in the Arenas, is preventing players from seeing who their opponents are prior to the fight. If you bring up the Battle Chart it should show your own team mates and that's it. You should have no idea who's waiting for you on the other side of the battlefield...and doesn't everyone love surprises? This is supposed to be PvP! Why you should be able to pick and choose your battles?
The final solution would be to remove the Join as a Group option, but I don't hold with that. If a Guild wants to get together and do BGs as a team, they should be able to do that. What they shouldn't be able to do is handpick their opponents and the current BG system allows them to do just that, and that's a big problem.
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4 comments:
I'd say you's hit the nails on the heads there, Cap'n. Well done. Ratio of honor point to marks is outta whack. Can't help but think that increasing the mark prices would encourage some peoples to, ya know, try harder to actually win, since that woulds triple yer reward. At the 10-19 WSG bracket is the opposite. The 19 rogue on me team has all the honor she needs to buy the rewards, but getting marks is he grind. Dang straight she wants to win every fight.
So that's why people drops out before the BG gates open - they's tellin' their buddies nevermind let's go find easier pickins. Leavin' the rest of us to have to PUG a premade. Wankers.
you can spend your marks on potions. granted, they need to buff the amount healed by them but it is still nice to have free potions.
Another option I wouldn't mind seeing would be if blizz allowed us to trade in our excess badges for more honor.
Patch 2.5 maybe?
Several patches ago you used to be able to trade in Marks for Honor. I remember being able to turn in three of the same BG Mark for something like 250 Honor, or turn in three of each Mark and get 1,000 Honor (or something like that). I thought you could still do that and was planning on turning in the AV Marks I've been accumulating, but no such luck.
I've been PvPing for close to a week now and won a couple of AVs. Yes, Alliance actually won AV (more than once, in fact) as well as won a few EOTS matches w/o joining a Premade, although not joining a Premade means I get creamed more often than not. I now have a shade over 7,000 Honor, thanks to one AV and one EOTS win being for the Daily BG and Bonus Honor (500 per), so I have less than 2,000 Honor to go to get my Offhand Epic. I have about 30 EOTS Marks and about 15 AV Marks in the Bank, testament to how much imbalance there is between Marks and Honor.
On the plus side, when 2.4 goes live, it apparently removes the Law of Diminishing Returns with respect to HKs, so AV will be worth a lot more Honor and we just might see more PvP going on. At the very least, hanging out on D and racking up the HKs will become more worthwhile for the Honor farmer. On the downside, the AFK Honor Farmers hanging out in the tunnel will get more Honor, too.
Trebormojo, that's a good recommendation. I did the Nagrand Arena quest line and had over 20 Super Pots in my pack, but while questing in Netherstorm (& running Shadow Lab) I was chugging them down like there's no tomorrow...and now there isn't. I drank the last of my Super Pots last night while farming BRD, but at least I got two Fiery Enchant recipes. At 45G each (if they sell) that will buy me a lot of Super Pots :)
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