Don’t ask me what I was expecting, or when I was expecting 3.3, but I just wasn’t expecting it this morning.
I was expecting to log on at 5.55 and take a shot at the chest in Gurubashi Arena, but the servers weren’t up.
Then they were, so I logged in, chest was there, I jumped on it, I was 90% of the way through opening it and…
The servers weren’t there… well I DC’d anyway.
After about 10 attempts to log on, where the arena would appear but either I or the chest wouldn’t, I finally appeared.
Dead.. a ghost in the graveyard.
Ohh well… PvP happens, even if I am not there at the time.
Changes
A quick rez and a port later I was back in Dalaran.
As usual the 1st stop was for fan mail.
Nope, no fan mail, just some rubbish about Emblem vendors having their annual convention in Dalaran… talk about dumbing down the game. As if it wasn’t easy enough to earn the Emblems, now you don’t even have to quest to find their vendors.
Someone stole my Daily Battleground Quest
I know it was a pain when you would get the Oculus of battlegrounds (we all have at least one), but I did like knowing what trouble I was going to get into before signing up.. do I take a mate, 9 mates, lose on my own…
Now it’s down to the luck of the gods.
At least the standard battleground interface is still there, random fun is one thing, planned assassination is another!
What to do with all those marks?
My next concern was my marks.
This is what knocked me about 3.3 arriving today… I didn’t expect it and I wanted to hand them in for the greater honor of Concerted efforts rather than Commendations
185 honor isn’t bad for handing in just one battleground mark. I dare say I am not the only one with a mailbox overflowing with Alterac Valley marks (Which makes me wonder why the commendations only stack in 10′s?)
However the old system, which works out at 248 honor per mark (assuming you have the 6 to hand in) is much sweeter.
The good news
The good news is that the Concerted Efforts option still remains (well it did when the server came up, it better when I get home tonight).
The requirements are the same, so all is still good in the world.
WTB T10, haz MarksOfHonor
So I guess now I just need to find something to spend the honor on. I dare say that like people that enjoy random heroics, there comes a time when you look at the overflowing pile of tokens and just wonder why…
Don’t get me wrong, I love my Battlegrounds and my Arena team has formed, if not fought (we got a little carried away in the BGs), but there are only so many gems I want to buy… I don’t PvP to drive my AH business, but I do PvP too much and can’t afford any of the Frost Emblem items… NOT EVEN THE PVP GEAR that I can’t buy with HONOR (serious suck that!)
Ahhh well… looks like a hour of enduring the Chooo Chooo! sound as I hand in my BG marks is coming.
Enjoy your random BG
Enjoy handing in the BG Mark scraps
Enjoy!
Gnomer and Out!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
I need to see how they will handle the PvP mounts now that the marks are gone. How can you buy them now? Just loads of honor?
Lemme guess: 74,999 honor points each.
Naah, 75,001…
50k honor will get you a new mount.
Strangely the mounts were cheaper (though possibly less accessible if you hated or lost BGs) before.
One painful thing I have seen on Twitter… The 10 stack is a 10 stack of any type of badge – max.
So you can hand them in in 10′s, but then have to spend the time cashing those 10 before getting more… With a 2 second cooldown between each one!
I just blow my extra honor on red gems, brought 10 in the last 2-3 weeks. But before shutdown I did know enough to hand in 8 Concerted efforts which reduced my IoC to zero and meant i could clean out 8 more av marks from my mail.
I thought the mail message was totally weird too. Like… I’ve been spending emblems for over a year – and you’ll now telling me where to find the vendors?
Haven’t checked out the Frozen Orb trader yet but I’m keen to get my new carpet!
I assumed they had dragged the other vendors in from the cold. Hoped they have brought the honor vendors into the new world etc.
But in the 5 minutes I ran around grabbing screenshots, I didn’t notice anything.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one baffled by this letter. It was like, uh, are there really *that* many unspent Emblems? And what does this have to do with honor?
Weird.
Hey Gnome…..
Damm yet another patch i have missed. When thermaltake fix my PSU i’ll be back and further behind than ever.
Been loving COD MW2 on PS3 in the mean time. Hopefully this taste for PVP might get me revved to come fart in the general direction of the horde with you
Fear not Mr. Tree. Your 3v3 spot is reserved, I made sure Deady knew that.
We are all hanging for you to get off your fat xbox and get your PC going again.
You joining us via net for the LAN?
You know, I really like these Life-In-The-Day-of-A-Gnome posts. It covers very nicely what you have to do to turn in those Marks.
The most helpful tip I’ve gotten was to put the commendation in your action bar. That way you can keep the vendor window open and just spam the commendations, both coming and going.
Time to get started on the alts for me!
The action bar tip is a great one… nothing worse than right clicking while the vendor window is open to find you have sold them back!
I’m glad you like the Life-In-The-Day-of-A-Gnome… he has so many days, and thankfully WoW gives him many lives too!
I’m actually very pleased with the new random BG system and the extra honor. It’s only recently that I’ve jumped on the PvP BG bandwagon and I’m pleased with the extra honor since well…I have tons of PvP gear to buy. I still think it’s extremely hard to get decent PvE gear though, because well if you’re not raiding you only get 2 Emblems of Frost a day. Which sucks beyond belief. You can buy PvP gear for Emblems, why can’t you buy decent PvE gear for honor points? Puzzling.
Took me a while to figure out what to do with my marks of honor though. The crowded mess in Halls of Legends in Ogrimmar showed me the way to go (they were all gathering for the vendor dude to trade their marks of honor).
The new system is great.
Don’t worry about the gear so much.. it will be yours before you know it.
If you do the WG quests + BGs it will be just silly, you will have all the gear before you know it.
I did EotS tonight, admittedly as a random, but I came out with 5.5k honor.
I wasn’t chasing honor kills, I was doing the right thing and protecting a node – boring, but it helps win the game.
An EotS win used to be worth more like 600-900 honor.
It will be like LFD.. one day you don’t have T9 or T10, next you have 1 piece T10 and 3 piece T9.
PS, yeah the high end gear is like high end raiding… you don’t get it unless you are doing the high end activities.
It sucks, but that’s life.
Ironically, I’m in a position where my PvP gear is good… but what I need is PvE gear to take it to the next level… if you want to hear sensible rants about that, go read CriticalQQ