For those of you who participate in battlegrounds, or maybe just the occasional Wintergrasp, many changes are coming:
- Marks of Honor are going away.
- Holiday weekends will now be denoted as “Call to Arms” and award tiered system of honor for participation. The tier is based on you winning or losing the battleground, and if you’ve won or lost before.
- Honor kills reward 100% more honor, Wintergrasp weekly quests give 50% less honor, and XP rewarded from honor kills are reduced by 50%.
- Implementation of the Random Battleground Finder — much like the current Random Dungeon Finder. There are further honor rewards, which are similar to the ones provided by the Call to Arms.
The first one has me puzzled. There are SEVERAL items that are only able to be purchased using Marks of Honor. The most elusive being the mounts. I’ve never been able to amass 30 Marks of Honor from every battleground, so I’ve never been able to purchase the mounts. This means one of two things: One, the mounts are going away, and after this change drops you will not be able to get them; or two, mounts will now be able to be purchased with raw Honor Points. I personally hope it’s the latter, but I’m tempted to go ahead and farm as many mounts as possible before the change drops in case it’s the former.
The third bullet has me both concerned and overjoyed. One of the primary sources of Epic Gems in the free market is most likely from honor point purchases. You can EASILY run Wintergrasp a couple times a week and earn 5-6 Epic Gems a week with honor points. However, those honor points come in large part from the Weekly Quests. One full completion of the Weekly Quests (there are 5), plus the battleground honor kills you have to run to do them, can easily net you in excess of 20,000 honor points (or 2 Epic Gems) usually more. People often find themselves “Honor Capped” at 75,000 honor and in order to earn any more, you have to spend it down. The most profitable way to do that is to purchase 7 Epic Gems. They then shove them on the AH and because they were essentially “free” to them, they don’t mind undercutting everyone else. That drives the overall price down. As an Alchemist that can Transmute one Epic gem a day, that kinda sucks. However, I also run the battlegrounds, so I buy lots of Epics for my personal use and to sell. So, on the one hand, it’ll be MUCH harder to farm for Epics in the BGs. On the other hand, that’ll drive the price of Epic gems up, and I’ll make more from the ones I transmute.
I’m both happy and sad.