World of Warcraft Classic's PvP ruleset looks to be getting a revamp to make it easier (and healthier, as Blizzard notes) to earn Honor in the MMORPG.
World of Warcraft Classic's PvP is a grindy affair, with players who want to farm player kills to earn the highest ranks in the MMO being almost required to grind nonstop. The highest ranks in WoW are required if you're looking to unlock the best weapons and armor in the MMO, and many who seek to gain these feel they need to grind or lose their spot in their rank bracket.
Blizzard took to the WoW forums to address this, breaking down reasons why they felt the change to PvP in Classic was required, specifically addressing that one of the major reasons for doing this was to make Classic Era PvP "healthier" to participate in.
As such, according to the posted patch notes for the WoW Classic 1.14.4 PTR, the changes are meant to remove that pressure to grind nonstop and eliminate some of the metagaming that was going on before in terms of bracket fixing.
The new system eliminates ranking points entirely, and instead of players being required to compete against each other for ranks, the new system requires a player to hit a certain Honor milestone to rank up.
"Competing against your own faction for standing is interesting in principle, but in execution has a lot of problems based on the points listed above. The system is easily meta-gamed and encourages many weeks or months of high levels of play. Our goal for the new system is to grant ranks based on whether players hit specific Honor milestones with an increasing level of participation and challenge needed to maintain their progress as the weeks go by and the player moves through the ranks."
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Part of this new system is removing the old system where you would see yourself de-ranked if you didn't keep up the grind. While it looks like Decay is still intact, Blizzard is making changes that should encourage players to take the time off that they need to without worrying about losing progress.
"Decay is still something we wanted to maintain, but de-ranking down to a lower rank is especially punishing at higher ranks when you need to maintain a constant and high level of play to keep up. The need to take time off could greatly hinder the progress of someone ranking, and in some brackets taking even a few days or a week off could cost the player multiple weeks of progress."
Other major changes see players earn their Honor and Honor Points at the time of the kill rather than at the end of the day. This will allow World of Warcraft Classic PvPers to monitor those changes in real-time instead of waiting to see how many points they earned that day.
You can check out the full World of Warcraft Classic PTR 1.14.4 notes on the Classic forums. In other WoW Classic news, Hardcore is officially coming to World of Warcraft Classic, with those realms set to launch sometime this summer. Check out our interview with the dev team from last month talking about WoW's upcoming Hardcore realms.
