/Dance your way to double honor in AB

[Ginchy]

First of all, lets establish what's new in 3.2 with regards to Battleground honor. There are 2 key changes:

1) Honor is now shared across ANY distance in a battleground wherein the two players in question can actually see each other. This is a pretty huge range, somewhere probably in excess of 500 yards. To put it in perspective, a player at the Smith in AB gets credit for kills taking place at ANY of the 5 flags in the battleground. In fact, a player at the smith gets honor for kills happening pretty much everywhere on the map but the two starting areas. This has obvious, very dumb, consequences which I'll discuss later.

2) Eye of the Storm, Arathi Basin, and Isle of Conquest offer 50% bonus honor to people "defending" flags by being within ~40 yards of said flag.

Take a moment to consider how those 2 changes might interact to lead to stupidity. Read on for a sampling of exactly how stupid it can be.

The +50% honor bonus was meant to rewards players who don't zerg. Previously players who zerged got more honor because they were present for more kills. This was not a smart behavior and so Blizzard did not want to encourage it over defense. Thus the +50% bonus -- the problem is that when combined with the honor-gain range increase, the person defending is now GETTING the honor that the zerging player earns thus already eliminating that encouragement -- but on top of that, he also receives an additional +50% making offense of any sort a bad idea, at least on small maps like and EoTS.

That's not so bad, but it gets worse.

It also means that some nodes are better than others. If I can defend smith, I get credit for every kill on the map. If I defend any other node, I'll be missing some of the kills. Farm kills won't share with stables players and vice versa, Mill wont' share with mine, etc. So you aren't encouraged to "defend" per se, at least not on AB, you're simply encouraged to go to smith and stay there all game long. Literally, leaving smith significantly cuts down your honor gain.

Now you're thinking, "Oh, you're exaggerating. This is no big deal. Defenders deserve something extra. Learn to play."

But that's just not it, it's not just a little bit more honor. Nope. It's a LOT more honor. I've personally tested the "stay at smith all game long" strategy and the amount of extra honor you receive is *ridiculous*. Getting honor for every kill on the map and +50% more on each one of them adds up fast.

Check out these screenshots:

Screenshot #1
Horde loses. My warlock gets 1705 honor. Only one alliance player gets more honor. Second highest horde player is at 634 honor less than me. I'm at nearly DOUBLE what the average horde player in this game got, honorwise -- and the rogue that was second highest was only second highest cause he was at smith with me for half of the game:
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/299...0909011310.jpg

Screenshot #2
Horde wins. My warlock and priest friend spend all game at smith. We have 4 killing blows between us, and literally spend 90% of the game doing /dance. We end up with 964 honor more than the second highest horde. This ends up being a little less than double what the average player earned. We have 2079 Honor each, next highest is at 1195 honor. 2079 honor? This wasn't even bonus weekend.
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/545...0709044908.jpg

Screenshot #3
Eye of the Storm. Stand at any node, then move as close as you can towards the middle of the map without losing the +50% honor buff. Stay there. All. Game. Long. Get more honor than everyone else because you "earned" it.
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/388...0809051643.jpg

Of course the silliness doesn't stop there. Nope. In WSG, the players who a) die the least and b) stay in the middle all game long get the most honor. Why? The middle is in range of both sides and gets honor from both flags. Being at either flag, and thus actually being USEFUL to your team, causes you to get less honor.

In Isle of Conquest (A.K.A. "Capture the Hangar"), if you're defending your base, as you should if you failed to Capture the Hangar, you are out of range of the flag buff if you're on the outside of the gate or on a canon. So if you want max honor, don't go get one one of the canons and, you know, help out. Let 6 other schmucks do it for you and get 50% more honor for their kills than they do.

In Alterac Valley, lower level players get extra honor. So the most "useful" players are those level 71 guys who you thought were a waste of space. Go figure.

In short, almost without exception, these 2 changes combine to create utter stupidity. They don't simply fail to reward good play -- they quite literally encourage *bad* play. Zerg the middle, stay off the canons, and be lower level than everyone else. That's, apparently, what blizzard thinks makes a player "good" in BG's.

[lilsluger4837]

This seems great

[Thelovefool]

i know this but +rep for the effort

[krennim]

excellent discernment on bg tactics, Blizzard does troll here, now they know, well done for putting a rocket up there collective asses. same results for me, +rep

[BlackPhynix]

woah .. usefull wall of text inc... nice + rep

[saff10]

+ Rep Very well done mate

[Cryde]

BlackPhynis is right its a huuuuge wall ginchy but nevertheless its usefull gonna try it could need some hatefull items

[SomoN]

this is... awesome.
This could be done in AV as well.
Just stay with the group, and try not to die
I actually got to the first spot with this

[Undeadspikey]

pooor fax monkey....hasnt been liking this expansion one bit

[LOL!!]

I never got the memo for any of this information. Thank you very much for posting this up.

[Kudu]

Very nice! Thanks for the info.

[phreec]

Tested, and confirmed. Awesome post 3x+Rep

[VII]

I can only say ists gona be LEGENDARY +Rep thy

[Dastin]

Awesome post. It will change the way I BG. +Repx2

[phreec]

Almost Contributor now mate