If they had somebody in charge of pvp, and they actually enjoyed and were avid pvpers, they would have seen TB and said "yeah this is fucking stupid."
The more I do Tol Barad, I'm not so sure its tha poorly designed. Sure, there's bitching that "you can't take it", but whenever horde is on defense, they fight outside the bases and lose the zone in 5 minutes. I've come to the conclusion that people have no idea what they are talking about.
Or, more likely, the horde on your realm are completely utterly incompetent.
Tol Barad is terribly imbalanced because you need to be REALLY REALLY bad to lose.
No one cares about a handful of anomalous servers. Offense needs to have a significant advantage in these "you get a loot lotto raid and zone bonuses when your side wins" zones. That was at least one thing they did right in WG. Tenacity/population issues of course fucked that all to hell on a lot of servers, but at least they got the fundamental concept of "defense will probably lose" right.
Also, the players on the losing side need to be given a better participation reward, so that there's still incentive to come and defend, even if you probably won't succeed. The winning bonus is already built in with the zone control bonuses.
Well, Wintergrasp (and battlegrounds when they still had marks) followed the pattern of 3 marks for a win and 1 for a loss. For some reason Tol Barad still gives the 3 for winning (along with honor and 250 rep), but losing gets you jack squat.
In other news, my server finally has enough 85s for some 50v50 size fights and let me tell you, it sucks to be one of the ten people in the second raid since you can't see where 80% of your team is and they're all coordinating in raid chat and not general chat.
Well, Wintergrasp (and battlegrounds when they still had marks) followed the pattern of 3 marks for a win and 1 for a loss. For some reason Tol Barad still gives the 3 for winning (along with honor and 250 rep), but losing gets you jack squat.
Yup, just another example of how Blizzard somehow managed to make TB worse than WG.
In other news, my server finally has enough 85s for some 50v50 size fights and let me tell you, it sucks to be one of the ten people in the second raid since you can't see where 80% of your team is and they're all coordinating in raid chat and not general chat.
Yeah, this was a huge problem in WG as well (back when Hellscream was still getting 40+ players on the horde side). These zones do not accommodate multiple raids well at all. Besides just the lack of coordination from not being in the same raid, you miss out on buffs, heals, etc. In WG, there was the added screw of not getting quests done because someone in another raid was getting the killing blow/destruction credit. Not so much a problem in TB since there aren't any quests, but it still sucks in general.
Well, Wintergrasp (and battlegrounds when they still had marks) followed the pattern of 3 marks for a win and 1 for a loss. For some reason Tol Barad still gives the 3 for winning (along with honor and 250 rep), but losing gets you jack squat.
In other news, my server finally has enough 85s for some 50v50 size fights and let me tell you, it sucks to be one of the ten people in the second raid since you can't see where 80% of your team is and they're all coordinating in raid chat and not general chat.
While not getting a mark is probably a bug, you do get bonus honor and I think rep, when you destroy the 3 towers.
I certainly saw it pop up for each tower, but off the top of my head, I doubt I could give you the numbers. I want to say something like 70ish honor for each tower (so that's 210 total; you get 240ish honor for winning the place).
TB isn't a place to go to get a good return on honor. Or fun.
I am surprised though, that some kind of hotfix hasn't been added that breaks the place so that it's stupidly hard to defend.
I must say that TB is this weird zone that is terrible and awesome.
As a daily hub, I enjoy it. The quest aren't too shitty, they allow everyone to get tokens for stuff and the rep/money is nice. I will say that the southern quests are a bit insane due to spawn rates, but nothing terrible.
The actual battleground is terribly balanced, but I do like how the nodes force people to spread out. Fewer games that end with a mass of people that either kills your framerate or makes you feel insignificant.
The rewards make no sense. Where's the resilience? Why are they offering seemingly PvE-oriented items in the PvP zone? Were the other five factions not offering enough PvE loot?
Why are they still unlocking PvE as a reward? Can you imagine killing Kazzak and your reward is that he queues you up for arena or a BG? Don't get me started on the fucking idiotic loot table they give these bosses.
Yes, I was a little surprised to see that there wasn't any pvp gear on the vendor. I assumed it was something that would be added once the pvp season had started.
The rewards make no sense. Where's the resilience? Why are they offering seemingly PvE-oriented items in the PvP zone? Were the other five factions not offering enough PvE loot?
True, but there are like a million resilience trinkets from the standard pvp vendor.
DisruptorX2 on
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GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
edited December 2010
They could just let you buy honor (or even conquest) points with TB tokens.
I haven't done much PvP yet, because my guildies mostly have PvP chars that they haven't levelled. Almost noone PvPs on their main. Next week should be 10vs10 though, so I'll try to get a rated BG together before Christmas.
I certainly saw it pop up for each tower, but off the top of my head, I doubt I could give you the numbers. I want to say something like 70ish honor for each tower (so that's 210 total; you get 240ish honor for winning the place).
TB isn't a place to go to get a good return on honor. Or fun.
I am surprised though, that some kind of hotfix hasn't been added that breaks the place so that it's stupidly hard to defend.
I was on early one day (working from home for the win) so I killed a tower, solo, despite a damned druid trying to stop me.
You get 12 honor per tower kill.
150 for winning + 3 commendations and 90 honor and no commendation for losing. We should get one for losing since we lose out on all those sweet dailies imo (and to incentivize people to play, otherwise just check if we won, otherwise, continue on your day).
What's also retarded is not getting a commendation for killing the Pit Lord. 250 rep, YAY, I want a g-d commendation. I was very disappointed in that.
71 more commendations for the drake, 165 after that for the wolf, and then even more for the other fluff stuff. Ugh.
I actually like the actual fighting since it keeps people moving and you win some / lose some, but the advantage the defender has is demoralizing.
honestly, the honor from TB's plenty enough to get PvP loot from the main PvP vendor. The PvE stuff for the faction is just icing on the cake.
More like shit icing on a cake made of nails.
forty on
Officially the unluckiest CCG player ever.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
The aforementioned 'pvp guy' would also have to look at the pve roadmap for gear and talents and say "yeah, none of this stuff is going to work if you want good pvp". He would then be escorted out to the parking lot with a cardboard box full of his belongings.
IMO the only thing that would really have made wow a good pvp game and proven that pvp wasn't an afterthought. Would have been rather than having two (or 3 if you include rp) "server types" you had two seperate games entirely. WoW-PVE where the game would pretty much be what it is today, and then when you chose WoW-PVP as your server you got an actual pvp server, where pvp was the chosen method to progress your character, in a real and meaningful way.
Wow just doesn't lend itself to pvp progression. In pve you have multiple levels and things to do to progress your character, questing, dungeons, heroics, raids, heroic raids. Every one of those things gives you a different level of progressively "better" gear.
If PVE had the current PVP 'progression' roadmap it would have you getting no gear at all from questing, or dungeons, or heroic dungeons. Raiding in 'normal' mode would give you access to lesser quality armor (no weapons) and then you would have to complete the current hardest level raid in heroic mode just to obtain a weapon and some epic armor. All this with the same difficulty level as the current pve content (read: getting wiped hundreds of times a day just to get through the content with no hope of obtaining the gear you need to complete it).
I agree with your general statements, but I don't see why WoW's PvE progression precludes PvP progression. First of all, we need to draw a line in the sand between 1-84 and 85, because no one can deny they're different games. Right now we have 1-84 gear progression as follows:
The first thng to realize is that no one is going to get the low level honor rewards, because the scaling of PvE leveling and honor gain, vs PvP leveling and honor cost means that anyone who farms for PvP items is either twinking (which is irrelevant to a conversation about progression) or a goddamn idiot.
I think we can simplify leveling into two categories: questing - XP primary, gear secondary; dungeons - gear primary, XP secondary. Then map those back onto PvP progression: battlegrounds - gear primary, XP secondary; open-world - XP primary, gear secondary.
So battlegrounds need massively increased honor/gear rewards, both for victory and defeat, because even in a perfect world you will only win 50% of BG matches, while even a mildly retarded group can beat most (all?) normal dungeons. This could just be far more plentiful honor, or a combination of honor and one-off or repeatable quests. The important thing is that you earn just for participating (say 5 losses = armor piece) while partial accomplishments (WSG flag caps/high scores in AB) earn more, and winning even more. All rewards should be team-based, except maybe one-off quests. The gear should be approximately blue level, so it matches the rewards you get out of dungeons.
As far as 1-84 is concerned I think that's the biggest concession you have to make to PvPers. The other thing I would do is implement large rewards for small-scale open world PvP kills. I would say one solo kill = 1/3 of a level appropriate quest, as well as a decent chunk (maybe 1/20 of an armor piece) of honor. You'd have to scale down pretty heavily for repeated kills of the same player in a short chunk of time, kills of lower level players, and group kills, but that's the basic idea.
Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
You know, they could probably improve 1-84 PvP leveling quite a bit by simply making relatively easy to obtain PvP Heirlooms. Something geared specifically towards PvP that scales with level and that can actually be obtained by leveling players in some way (i.e. pvp quests or dailies or something - maybe something along the lines of what they tried to do in Grizzly Hills?). It would even the odds with twinks quite a bit.
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
You could do that... but heirlooms eliminate gear progression altogether, so once you have a full set XP is the only thing left. Then you have to figure out how to make PvP viable for XP gain compared to questing.
Which I really don't think you want to do. WoW is fundamentally an open-world questing game as far as XP gain is concerned, and it should stay that way (just roll PvP rewards into the kind of fights you'll get into while questing.) But gear progression has far more variety (quests, dungeons, professions, auction house) and there's no reason PvP can't be part of that.
Also, dungeons give pretty significant XP now, and leveling up entirely with dungeons is actually pretty effective (albeit repetitive) if you have fast queue times. So there's no reason BGs couldn't work similarly.
forty on
Officially the unluckiest CCG player ever.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
I didn't know if that was true or not, so yeah give BGs XP gain approximately equal to dungeon XP (minus the first-run quest spike).
High XP and honor rewards for open-world kills could also make the useless open-world things in the Outlands actually mildly interesting.
Weekend battle ground leveling is INSANELY PRODUCTIVE if you are on the second half of the tier, have heirlooms, and most importantly, is Arathi Basin.
WSG would work if you had a group of people doing this, but AB is good for soling.
You will level insanely fast. I think my record was one and a half full levels for a single battle.
In case people were not aware, there was a bug in Arena games, whereby if you left before the scoresheet popped up at the end, you'd not go down in rating if you had lost the game.
It didn't take long for people to realise and thus exploit this, hence you've got alot of people being alot higher than they should be (some were at 3k rating already this week).
So blizz has reset anyone's rating above 1.5k rating, to 1.5k rating (you hit the cap after 4 games if below 1.5k), which means that the conquest point cap that would have normally gone up, has remained the same.
And they've done some stuff to items you required a rating to (think weapons that you need a rating for, require you to be level 86).
People don't seem to be happy (but when are they?).
Reading about people complaining over the Tol Barad Reputation giving PvE items kinda makes me laugh.
Sure Tol Barad is a PvP zone, but when that's not happening? All PvE, it's the main place to do your dailies other than Twilight Highlands/Deepholme so the fact that they offer PvE items doesn't surprise me.
Heck it's nice to have the option of getting nice weapons from a reputation for once, and not something that's throwaway.
Reading about people complaining over the Tol Barad Reputation giving PvE items kinda makes me laugh.
Sure Tol Barad is a PvP zone, but when that's not happening? All PvE, it's the main place to do your dailies other than Twilight Highlands/Deepholme so the fact that they offer PvE items doesn't surprise me.
Heck it's nice to have the option of getting nice weapons from a reputation for once, and not something that's throwaway.
Man, the PVE items (weapons and armor) available from Tol Barad aren't really worth the hassle of those quests. The only reason I'm bothering with doing them myself is because I can get two mounts (the wind drake, the spectral wolf, and the seagull pet).
Once I get those, I'm never stepping foot in there again. It just sucks that I need somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 marks.
Reading about people complaining over the Tol Barad Reputation giving PvE items kinda makes me laugh.
Sure Tol Barad is a PvP zone, but when that's not happening? All PvE, it's the main place to do your dailies other than Twilight Highlands/Deepholme so the fact that they offer PvE items doesn't surprise me.
Heck it's nice to have the option of getting nice weapons from a reputation for once, and not something that's throwaway.
Man, the PVE items (weapons and armor) available from Tol Barad aren't really worth the hassle of those quests. The only reason I'm bothering with doing them myself is because I can get two mounts (the wind drake, the spectral wolf, and the seagull pet).
Once I get those, I'm never stepping foot in there again. It just sucks that I need somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 marks.
The quests didn't seem so bad at all once I realized I wouldn't be Roflingstomping things left and right like in WotLK.
Reading about people complaining over the Tol Barad Reputation giving PvE items kinda makes me laugh.
Sure Tol Barad is a PvP zone, but when that's not happening? All PvE, it's the main place to do your dailies other than Twilight Highlands/Deepholme so the fact that they offer PvE items doesn't surprise me.
Heck it's nice to have the option of getting nice weapons from a reputation for once, and not something that's throwaway.
Man, the PVE items (weapons and armor) available from Tol Barad aren't really worth the hassle of those quests. The only reason I'm bothering with doing them myself is because I can get two mounts (the wind drake, the spectral wolf, and the seagull pet).
Once I get those, I'm never stepping foot in there again. It just sucks that I need somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 marks.
The quests didn't seem so bad at all once I realized I wouldn't be Roflingstomping things left and right like in WotLK.
Eh, I don't mind the not roflstomping part, and honestly the quests wouldn't be so bad if respawn rates weren't so damn fast in certain areas (graveyard, keep, and the dungeons in the pvp controlled section).
Well, and the stupid escort quest guy had half a brain.
Reading about people complaining over the Tol Barad Reputation giving PvE items kinda makes me laugh.
Sure Tol Barad is a PvP zone, but when that's not happening? All PvE, it's the main place to do your dailies other than Twilight Highlands/Deepholme so the fact that they offer PvE items doesn't surprise me.
Heck it's nice to have the option of getting nice weapons from a reputation for once, and not something that's throwaway.
Man, the PVE items (weapons and armor) available from Tol Barad aren't really worth the hassle of those quests. The only reason I'm bothering with doing them myself is because I can get two mounts (the wind drake, the spectral wolf, and the seagull pet).
Once I get those, I'm never stepping foot in there again. It just sucks that I need somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 marks.
The quests didn't seem so bad at all once I realized I wouldn't be Roflingstomping things left and right like in WotLK.
Eh, I don't mind the not roflstomping part, and honestly the quests wouldn't be so bad if respawn rates weren't so damn fast in certain areas (graveyard, keep, and the dungeons in the pvp controlled section).
Well, and the stupid escort quest guy had half a brain.
Derp maybe the exit is over in this random ass fucking room and not the big doorway right in front of me derp.
Derp maybe the exit is over in this random ass fucking room and not the big doorway right in front of me derp.
That is the worst escort. Seriously, after all the shit Blizzard has been saying about how much escorts suck to the point of actively making fun of them in Uldum (Brann's "Oh, my leg is broken so I can't move very fast" joke), they put that in? I swear, half the time I feel like letting the dude die for being such a fucking moron.
jackalFuck Yes. That is an orderly anal warehouse.Registered Userregular
edited December 2010
While leveling I've been doing BGs as a protection paladin. Should I take the lack of PvP gear at max level as:
A) Tanking PvP should use PvE gear since it already has survivability built in. Tanking PvP should use DPS PvP gear.
C) Don't do PvP with a tanking spec, wtf is wrong with you?
While he's a moron he can kill the mobs by himself (at least the horde druid can) so the only dangers with the escort is other players killing you and him bugging out and running outside at high speed and then back inside and repeating that 3 times before he finally finds the right spot to walk outside slowly and get a horse.
Also the high respawn rates are from the automatic respawn rate upper. If you're doing the dungeon quests right after winning TB it's going to have near instant respawns, but if you wait 30 minutes or so it'll have calmed down enough to make it possible to solo.
And really the only penninsula quests I don't like are the spider ones since for some reason Allies love to gank anyone doing those. All the named mob kills are easy to get to without touching a normal mob, the other collection quests are easy, and most of the other "kill X" quests are easily done. And this is from someone who was doing them in level 80 gear at first due to levelling up to 85 via Arch.
While he's a moron he can kill the mobs by himself (at least the horde druid can) so the only dangers with the escort is other players killing you and him bugging out and running outside at high speed and then back inside and repeating that 3 times before he finally finds the right spot to walk outside slowly and get a horse.
Also the high respawn rates are from the automatic respawn rate upper. If you're doing the dungeon quests right after winning TB it's going to have near instant respawns, but if you wait 30 minutes or so it'll have calmed down enough to make it possible to solo.
And really the only penninsula quests I don't like are the spider ones since for some reason Allies love to gank anyone doing those. All the named mob kills are easy to get to without touching a normal mob, the other collection quests are easy, and most of the other "kill X" quests are easily done. And this is from someone who was doing them in level 80 gear at first due to levelling up to 85 via Arch.
The big danger with the escort is when he walks to the room with the beds and pulls 3 mobs in the process.
Then a further two mobs when he actually does step outside the gates.
I'm not certain how you are avoiding all of those mobs unless somebody went through before you and cleared a path. Most of them have an incredible aggro radius.
You just let him tank the mobs and pick them off one at a time, at least for horde. He's got 200k HP, he's a bear, and he can solo down one dude by himself. Even if he aggros 4 dudes if you pull one or two off of him he'll be fine and since he's an NPC once out of battle he goes back to full health.
Of course the alliance's gnome might be some sort of pansy who can't handle mobs like our guy can, so I can see complaining if that's the case.
You just let him tank the mobs and pick them off one at a time, at least for horde. He's got 200k HP, he's a bear, and he can solo down one dude by himself. Even if he aggros 4 dudes if you pull one or two off of him he'll be fine and since he's an NPC once out of battle he goes back to full health.
Of course the alliance's gnome might be some sort of pansy who can't handle mobs like our guy can, so I can see complaining if that's the case.
Eh, I'm a pally tank, I just pull them off him and grind them down slowly
It's just a major annoyance because when you come up from the dungeon the exit is right there.
Is there still no way to see who controls TB without (someone) actually being in the zone? Christ, yet another thing shitty-ass Wintergrasp managed to do right.
If professions were done by the janitor this time around, PvP must have been designed by the office hamster.
Also the high respawn rates are from the automatic respawn rate upper. If you're doing the dungeon quests right after winning TB it's going to have near instant respawns, but if you wait 30 minutes or so it'll have calmed down enough to make it possible to solo.
And really the only penninsula quests I don't like are the spider ones since for some reason Allies love to gank anyone doing those. All the named mob kills are easy to get to without touching a normal mob, the other collection quests are easy, and most of the other "kill X" quests are easily done. And this is from someone who was doing them in level 80 gear at first due to levelling up to 85 via Arch.
Not in my experience. The respawn rate is always insanely high. The human prisoner cell block might as well be a fucking 5 man dungeon with how fast that shit respawns. Before you kill one pair of guards, the last pair you just killed respawns right on top of you. And then the random mage pops up to.
The quests aren't bad (although the "kill 14 of this mob" are fucking stupid) but it's more the general issue of 85 mobs hitting like trucks and some classes having lost good healing abilities.
Is there still no way to see who controls TB without (someone) actually being in the zone? Christ, yet another thing shitty-ass Wintergrasp managed to do right.
If professions were done by the janitor this time around, PvP must have been designed by the office hamster.
Posts
Or, more likely, the horde on your realm are completely utterly incompetent.
Tol Barad is terribly imbalanced because you need to be REALLY REALLY bad to lose.
That's the thing. Nothing they can do to the zone will ever make the horde win it, short of removing the 1:1 ratio, because they are fucking awful.
edit: Been doing too much TB clearly, I have rations on the mind.
Also, the players on the losing side need to be given a better participation reward, so that there's still incentive to come and defend, even if you probably won't succeed. The winning bonus is already built in with the zone control bonuses.
In other news, my server finally has enough 85s for some 50v50 size fights and let me tell you, it sucks to be one of the ten people in the second raid since you can't see where 80% of your team is and they're all coordinating in raid chat and not general chat.
Yeah, this was a huge problem in WG as well (back when Hellscream was still getting 40+ players on the horde side). These zones do not accommodate multiple raids well at all. Besides just the lack of coordination from not being in the same raid, you miss out on buffs, heals, etc. In WG, there was the added screw of not getting quests done because someone in another raid was getting the killing blow/destruction credit. Not so much a problem in TB since there aren't any quests, but it still sucks in general.
While not getting a mark is probably a bug, you do get bonus honor and I think rep, when you destroy the 3 towers.
I certainly saw it pop up for each tower, but off the top of my head, I doubt I could give you the numbers. I want to say something like 70ish honor for each tower (so that's 210 total; you get 240ish honor for winning the place).
TB isn't a place to go to get a good return on honor. Or fun.
I am surprised though, that some kind of hotfix hasn't been added that breaks the place so that it's stupidly hard to defend.
As a daily hub, I enjoy it. The quest aren't too shitty, they allow everyone to get tokens for stuff and the rep/money is nice. I will say that the southern quests are a bit insane due to spawn rates, but nothing terrible.
The actual battleground is terribly balanced, but I do like how the nodes force people to spread out. Fewer games that end with a mass of people that either kills your framerate or makes you feel insignificant.
The rewards make no sense. Where's the resilience? Why are they offering seemingly PvE-oriented items in the PvP zone? Were the other five factions not offering enough PvE loot?
Why are they still unlocking PvE as a reward? Can you imagine killing Kazzak and your reward is that he queues you up for arena or a BG? Don't get me started on the fucking idiotic loot table they give these bosses.
So yeah, mixed feelings.
True, but there are like a million resilience trinkets from the standard pvp vendor.
I haven't done much PvP yet, because my guildies mostly have PvP chars that they haven't levelled. Almost noone PvPs on their main. Next week should be 10vs10 though, so I'll try to get a rated BG together before Christmas.
I was on early one day (working from home for the win) so I killed a tower, solo, despite a damned druid trying to stop me.
You get 12 honor per tower kill.
150 for winning + 3 commendations and 90 honor and no commendation for losing. We should get one for losing since we lose out on all those sweet dailies imo (and to incentivize people to play, otherwise just check if we won, otherwise, continue on your day).
What's also retarded is not getting a commendation for killing the Pit Lord. 250 rep, YAY, I want a g-d commendation. I was very disappointed in that.
71 more commendations for the drake, 165 after that for the wolf, and then even more for the other fluff stuff. Ugh.
I actually like the actual fighting since it keeps people moving and you win some / lose some, but the advantage the defender has is demoralizing.
This is a fantastic idea.
I saw you could buy Tol Barad rep with commendations and literally LOL'd and eyerolled.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I agree with your general statements, but I don't see why WoW's PvE progression precludes PvP progression. First of all, we need to draw a line in the sand between 1-84 and 85, because no one can deny they're different games. Right now we have 1-84 gear progression as follows:
PvE: quests, dungeons, random drops/auction house, professions.
PvP: honor rewards (sort of)
The first thng to realize is that no one is going to get the low level honor rewards, because the scaling of PvE leveling and honor gain, vs PvP leveling and honor cost means that anyone who farms for PvP items is either twinking (which is irrelevant to a conversation about progression) or a goddamn idiot.
I think we can simplify leveling into two categories: questing - XP primary, gear secondary; dungeons - gear primary, XP secondary. Then map those back onto PvP progression: battlegrounds - gear primary, XP secondary; open-world - XP primary, gear secondary.
So battlegrounds need massively increased honor/gear rewards, both for victory and defeat, because even in a perfect world you will only win 50% of BG matches, while even a mildly retarded group can beat most (all?) normal dungeons. This could just be far more plentiful honor, or a combination of honor and one-off or repeatable quests. The important thing is that you earn just for participating (say 5 losses = armor piece) while partial accomplishments (WSG flag caps/high scores in AB) earn more, and winning even more. All rewards should be team-based, except maybe one-off quests. The gear should be approximately blue level, so it matches the rewards you get out of dungeons.
As far as 1-84 is concerned I think that's the biggest concession you have to make to PvPers. The other thing I would do is implement large rewards for small-scale open world PvP kills. I would say one solo kill = 1/3 of a level appropriate quest, as well as a decent chunk (maybe 1/20 of an armor piece) of honor. You'd have to scale down pretty heavily for repeated kills of the same player in a short chunk of time, kills of lower level players, and group kills, but that's the basic idea.
Level 85 is a whole 'nother monster.
Which I really don't think you want to do. WoW is fundamentally an open-world questing game as far as XP gain is concerned, and it should stay that way (just roll PvP rewards into the kind of fights you'll get into while questing.) But gear progression has far more variety (quests, dungeons, professions, auction house) and there's no reason PvP can't be part of that.
Also, dungeons give pretty significant XP now, and leveling up entirely with dungeons is actually pretty effective (albeit repetitive) if you have fast queue times. So there's no reason BGs couldn't work similarly.
High XP and honor rewards for open-world kills could also make the useless open-world things in the Outlands actually mildly interesting.
WSG would work if you had a group of people doing this, but AB is good for soling.
You will level insanely fast. I think my record was one and a half full levels for a single battle.
10, 20, etc. would be your main "set" meaning the shoulders, helm and so on.
Then 15, 25 etc would be your "off" pieces meaning the bracers, rings and so forth.
I do like the idea of bags for random BGs.
In case people were not aware, there was a bug in Arena games, whereby if you left before the scoresheet popped up at the end, you'd not go down in rating if you had lost the game.
It didn't take long for people to realise and thus exploit this, hence you've got alot of people being alot higher than they should be (some were at 3k rating already this week).
So blizz has reset anyone's rating above 1.5k rating, to 1.5k rating (you hit the cap after 4 games if below 1.5k), which means that the conquest point cap that would have normally gone up, has remained the same.
And they've done some stuff to items you required a rating to (think weapons that you need a rating for, require you to be level 86).
People don't seem to be happy (but when are they?).
Pretty brutal.
Sure Tol Barad is a PvP zone, but when that's not happening? All PvE, it's the main place to do your dailies other than Twilight Highlands/Deepholme so the fact that they offer PvE items doesn't surprise me.
Heck it's nice to have the option of getting nice weapons from a reputation for once, and not something that's throwaway.
Man, the PVE items (weapons and armor) available from Tol Barad aren't really worth the hassle of those quests. The only reason I'm bothering with doing them myself is because I can get two mounts (the wind drake, the spectral wolf, and the seagull pet).
Once I get those, I'm never stepping foot in there again. It just sucks that I need somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 marks.
The quests didn't seem so bad at all once I realized I wouldn't be Roflingstomping things left and right like in WotLK.
Eh, I don't mind the not roflstomping part, and honestly the quests wouldn't be so bad if respawn rates weren't so damn fast in certain areas (graveyard, keep, and the dungeons in the pvp controlled section).
Well, and the stupid escort quest guy had half a brain.
Derp maybe the exit is over in this random ass fucking room and not the big doorway right in front of me derp.
That is the worst escort. Seriously, after all the shit Blizzard has been saying about how much escorts suck to the point of actively making fun of them in Uldum (Brann's "Oh, my leg is broken so I can't move very fast" joke), they put that in? I swear, half the time I feel like letting the dude die for being such a fucking moron.
A) Tanking PvP should use PvE gear since it already has survivability built in.
C) Don't do PvP with a tanking spec, wtf is wrong with you?
Also the high respawn rates are from the automatic respawn rate upper. If you're doing the dungeon quests right after winning TB it's going to have near instant respawns, but if you wait 30 minutes or so it'll have calmed down enough to make it possible to solo.
And really the only penninsula quests I don't like are the spider ones since for some reason Allies love to gank anyone doing those. All the named mob kills are easy to get to without touching a normal mob, the other collection quests are easy, and most of the other "kill X" quests are easily done. And this is from someone who was doing them in level 80 gear at first due to levelling up to 85 via Arch.
The big danger with the escort is when he walks to the room with the beds and pulls 3 mobs in the process.
Then a further two mobs when he actually does step outside the gates.
I'm not certain how you are avoiding all of those mobs unless somebody went through before you and cleared a path. Most of them have an incredible aggro radius.
Of course the alliance's gnome might be some sort of pansy who can't handle mobs like our guy can, so I can see complaining if that's the case.
Eh, I'm a pally tank, I just pull them off him and grind them down slowly
It's just a major annoyance because when you come up from the dungeon the exit is right there.
If professions were done by the janitor this time around, PvP must have been designed by the office hamster.
Well son of a bitch there it is, thanks.
Not in my experience. The respawn rate is always insanely high. The human prisoner cell block might as well be a fucking 5 man dungeon with how fast that shit respawns. Before you kill one pair of guards, the last pair you just killed respawns right on top of you. And then the random mage pops up to.
The quests aren't bad (although the "kill 14 of this mob" are fucking stupid) but it's more the general issue of 85 mobs hitting like trucks and some classes having lost good healing abilities.
Um, on your map. Just like WG.