I saw this being discussed on the US forums. The amount of honor you earn from arena is very low, so it’s basically making arena suck for earning gear now. This seems like an obvious reaction to people asking for better gearing in BGs which is great blizz are listening, but by no means did I think anyone meant this would be at the expense of arena. If the amount of honor from arena is increased this would be ok but for now it’s just making arena not worth playing either now.
The time investment for gearing in pvp, either by doing bgs or arena, should be as close as possible imo.
That’s actually why they changed from conquest to honor. You do not need to win to get some honor. Meaning if, in the past, you played at your highest, so around a 50% winrate, 25 wins was on average 50 games. It should be less now, as losses will count towards the vault, albeit less than wins.
The Rated PvP requirement strikes me as annoying. It shuts out a lot of PvP activities and crams everyone be into Rated Arena and RBGs. And no one does the latter, so…
Honor and instead of Conquest is nice though. It rewards effort as opposed to only rewarding wins.
I got excited about the change initially, thinking it’s going to offer PVP gear for honor obtained anywhere, but then I saw ‘in ranked PVP’ and went meh.
It’s just the same issue over and over and over.
(1) They cannot reward high-ilvl gear for random PVP because then everyone will go there and AFK for it, to the detriment of everything else (not exaggerating, as easy as low-mid-level PVE is, AFKing or doing a couple of hits watching YT is even easier).
(2) This can be easily solved by rewarding low-ilvl gear with PVP power / PVP resilience -like stats that do not work in PVE (Cata / MoP), or by rewarding low-ilvl gear which would scale to high-ilvl in PVP scenarios (WoD), but they are refusing to do it. For reasons unknown (seriously, I don’t understand why aren’t they doing that).
So, we have to live with high-ilvl rewards for PVP being limited to rated PVP. Which means that for the vast majority of people, PVP is not going to give you any useful gear, you will be able to get much higher-ilvl gear from PVE faster and easier. Which means that PVP remains something only played by a couple percents of the players.
GG, I guess.
Although, who knows, maybe they’ll still add ilvl scaling later.
I kind of like this change. After all, PvP is and should be for people who want to compete in pvp, and of course, who wants to just play non-comeptitive random PvP, shouldn’t expect much reward (as in quality).
But for participating in rated PvP rewards should be good and on par with high lvl PvE.
Same goes for PvE, if you go farming world quests or non keys you shouldn’t expect anything special as a reward, once you get into the M+ rewards would get better.
This way, more ppl who actually want to play pvp will have the incentive to play ranked.
Also, arena late seasons suffered from less people playing it because it had poor reward system.
If they up rewards from rated PvP and rated PvP is required for the weekly vault, more people will play arena and the community might start coming back to what it was several xpacs back.
And frankly, 20ish 2s wins per week is nothing if you enjoy PvP and spam it. I’d rather do that especially if I don’t need to step into PvE dungeons.
Why should people who do random BGs get worse gear than other people who also come to random BGs? If gear obtained via arenas was scaled down to the ilvl obtainable through random BGs upon entering random BGs - same for raiding gear - it’d have been fine. But since it doesn’t get scaled down, it isn’t fine.
Tons of people just want to do random BGs all day and all they want is not to be outgeared while they are there (and nowhere else). They are completely in the right in wanting this.
I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the change only pertains to the weekly vault item. You can still earn Conquest from non-rated PvP. It’s just that you need Honor from rated PvP (which is rather arbitrary and convoluted) in order to access the weekly vault item, which will then be of a quality reflecting your rating in rated PvP.
I’m not sure if it’s a big deal for casual PvPers. They’ll probably do the necessary rated PvP if they feel like it, or not if they don’t. The consequences are insignificant if all you’re doing is queuing for Alterac Valley anyway.
For people who do play rated PvP, like rated Arenas, the change just shifts the focus from having to win games to simply playing games.
That should hopefully lower the barrier to entry and make it easier to form groups and have groups stick together, because you can still progress toward your goal even if you keep losing. So there’s less reason to rage-quit after losing the first game with the guy you found in LFG. Hopefully…
I don’t agree here. First of all, you still get gear from random BGs - the honor gear, you just won’t be able to get the vault gear (as far as I understand).
Yes, gear one could take from random BGs would be lower quality, but what you asking otherwise is similar to ask that people should get same gear from PvE m+ dungs as from the non-keyed, so they are then invited in Heroic in Mythic raid and not isolated based on their gear.
Doesn’t sound very logical - this is a progression based game and better gear is rewarded for progression in rated (PvP) or similar (PvE) activities.
The bad thing is when they both get mixed and one has edge over the other in the non-native activity. Also when rewards are cut-off for the majority of people participating in said rated activity (like it was many years ago when a certain rating was required for a particular slot item, which was bad).
Otherwise, it’s not very logical to want to have same gear as people participating in the higher lvl of said activity.
Also, this seems to shift the focus (in PvP) that good gear, comes strictly from rated participation. This might open the possibility for Blizzard to up the quality of said gear while keeping it away from AFK farmers in BG.
As was before, because BGs still rewarded small amount of conquest the weekly chest could be AFK farmed. Now as this wouldn’t be possible, the weekly chest might give better rewards.