September News/Discussion

[Bolty]

So don't go crying about being unfair that honor/gold/whatever isn't getting wiped, okay?:)

Hey guys, write this down, I'm agreeing with Artega on something. :)

When Blizzard first announced the honor and token wipe, my reaction was "ah dangit, but I guess it's necessary." Since Season 2 started, my main character has always maxed out her honor in preparation for the next season. It's extremely convenient to be able to buy all the honor-based PvP pieces you need on the first day of a new season, spending almost all of the honor you had built up, and then take the next 6 months (if needed) to build that honor back up at a leisurely pace. There's no feeling of having to play just one more game to get that one particular PvP piece; you have it on day one and can get back to the cap whenever.

The new arena requirements on the gear just means it may take a day or two to get up to 1700 for those honor-based pieces now; same difference.

The main reason for the honor and token wipe (have to wipe tokens, since tokens can be turned in for honor) is that the epic PvP gear is also pretty nice for PvE. Right now, the easiest and fastest way to gear up an alt solo is to run battlegrounds a lot and score itemlevel 140+ epics. Going right from quest greens to this gear is just sick, but if you didn't allow it then there would be no way for a new 70 to even begin to compete in arenas.

At level 80, the situation could wind up being the same: you level up to 80 and immediately blow your 75,000 honor and 400 tokens to buy some awesome epics that can have immediate PvE impact. Why run instances for blues? So Blizzard put in arena requirements for *all* level 80 honor-based epics to help offset this, and wiped honor to make it a bit more time-consuming. I understood the viewpoint and accepted that I'd lose the efforts of many weekends of time to build my current honor to 75,000.

But then I started seeing the other viewpoint. As Artega was saying, honor = time. It doesn't take skill to gain honor. You can show up and lose forever and cap your honor, no problem. Honor just means time spent, much like 95% of this game. Gold = time spent, level = time spent, honor = time spent. I spent a considerable amount of hours gathering that honor, and if Blizzard had just said at the start of Season 4 that they expected to wipe honor for the expansion, I'd have no issues with that. But they didn't - in fact, early blue posts indicated that this was not planned at all.

So now they're doing the best compromise. Much like the gold you earn now will have use, but not as much use at level 80 (because you can earn more faster then, and prices will be higher), and the gear you obtain will have use, but not as much as if you had just waited and spent the time to get level 80 gear more, the honor you have now will have use, but not as much at level 80 as it does at level 70. Hopefully it keeps everybody happy.

-Bolty