WoW Battlegrounds - Part 3

I did some more battleground PvP fighting in World of Warcraft this weekend. With my level 29 gnome warlock I did the Warsong Gulch battleground three more times, well, make that two-and-a-half. The first two times I had less than 10 minutes wait in the queue, but for the third battle I had to wait over one hour. The first two battles both were won by our side, 3:0 and 3:1. With me doing a range of different activities, attack, defense, rack up kills in the middle of the battlefield, and I even captured the flag twice.

Not that I'm an expert in PvP fighting, or that our side was well organized, but the enemy was even less well organized. My flag capturing worked because the defenders had not stationed a guard in the tunnel leading to the flag room, so I was able to grab the speed boost icon in the niche in that tunnel, run in, grab the flag, and run out. With my pet and other players from my side keeping the enemy busy. On one occasion nobody was following me, and on another occasion only one defender followed me, and was stopped in the middle of the battle by somebody from my side.

The third battle was a dud. Right after we entered we received a message that there weren't enough players on the battlefield, and that the battle would end automatically in 5 minutes. Funnily in these 5 minutes I still managed to run to the enemy base, capture the flag, and bring in back to our base less than 30 seconds before we got ejected. So it still counted as a "win" for us. And I found out that against expectation you get 1000 xp for *each* win, not only for the first one.

I also learned a bit more about the honor system. Up to now I had only looked at the "honorable kills", but I found out that they have not much to do with your progression in PvP ranks. What counts is the honor points, but those you only see the next day. Whether you just deal 1 point of damage, or all the damage needed to kill an enemy, you get 1 honorable kill. But the amount of honor points you get depends on how much of the damage you (or your group) did, and on the relative levels. And honor points you can also earn in other ways, for example each full win on the capture the flag battleground got me 120 bonus honor points, while the short battle with just one flag captured still got me 48. That is 288 honor points total for the two-and-a-half battles I did. And my total for that day was 340 honor points, so the battleground bonus rewards are significantly higher than what I got from killing enemies. That is important, because it means that battlegrounds are a lot more "profitable" for honor points than random PvP in the rest of the world. On my "normal" servers, the PvP activity outside of battlegrounds has much diminished. I can only hope there is also less ganking now on the PvP servers.

The honor points are not the end of the story. At the end of the week the honor points are calculated into your contribution points. Contribution points means that all the honor points of all the players on your side is pooled, and it is calculated what your percental contribution to that was. Then contribution points are given out according to everybody's part in the greater war. Which means that if you know you have 1000 honor points, you still don't know how many contribution points you get. The more the other players on your side racked up in honor points, the less contribution points you get.

It gets even more wicked. Because your rank is calculated by taking your contribution points of last week, adding those of this week, and dividing the total by two. So if you make 100 contribution points every week, the first week your rank is calculated from (0+100)/2 = 50, second week (50+100)/2 = 75, third week (75+100)/2 = 83, and so on, slowly the rank you'd get with 100 points. At constant effort you get diminished returns. And if in week 4 you don't do any PvP at all, your new rank is based on (83+0)/2 = 42, halving with each week you don't PvP. Increasing in rank thus gets harder and harder, and you need a lot of effort just to keep your rank up after a while.

Some more thoughts on honor points: If you are alone, your honor points are solely calculated on the base of the damage you do. Meaning that damage-dealing classes like rogues, hunters, or mages have an inbuilt advantage here. If you are an ungrouped healer, all your healing and rezzing on the battlefield will get you exactly nothing. In a group the honor points for each PvP kill are divided based on levels, just like the xp for a killed monster are.

Fortunately I'm not very much interested in achieving some high PvP rank. My main, the warrior isn't much suited for gaining lots of honor points, unless he is grouped. But I got a good amount of rewards from the battlegrounds anyway. First the Frostwolf Ambassador standing in front of the Ogrimmar bank sent me on a quest for which I only had to speak to a guy in front of the Alterac Valley battleground. Bing, 6600 xp just for talking to him. Then that guy sent me in the battleground, but no to kill other players, but to get a flag from a cave full of gnolls. Another bundle of xp and money. I was just half an hour in a three-man group, and only got 2 honorable kills, but with the quests done there and a night-elf head handed in, I ended up with over 500 honor points, more than the warlock got from 3 battlegrounds. Not sure if it was the quest rewards that earned me that much, or the fact that combat between higher level players gives much more honor points than combat between lower level players.

There are a lot more quests on that Alterac Valley battleground, and many of them don't involve PvP at all. Which I find rather silly. There can only be a maximum of 40 players from each side on the battlefield, so why should the game try to distract them by encouraging them to do non-PvP quests in that zone? I kind of liked the idea of players being able to do quests that end up helping their side, like collecting blood to unleash a huge elemental on the enemies. But me killing a cave full of gnolls helped nobody but myself, as far as I know.

My future PvP involve doing some more capture the flag battlegrounds because they are fun, and exploring the Alterac Valley battleground quests a bit more. But I won't do lots of PvP in the Alterac Valley, I still dislike the chaos and the lag there. And I July I'll be on holiday without computer for two weeks, which will in any case destroy my PvP rank, so there is no point in pursueing rank for me.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:34 AM Permanent Link