Smart use for Guild Battle Standards

[Virox]

Welcome to my first guide, this guide is about the smart use of Battle Standards. I realize that many people might consider this common sense, even I do so, but let's face the facts, common sense is not really that common among WoW-players...

As a player in a decent level guild that got the achievements for each of them I bought all of them fairly early, and have been using them to my liking ever since. It was yesterday however, when doing the Tol Barad weekly, that I had guildies ask me how I got so much honor from the quest, as they got less. I was astonished by the lack of knowledge of these Standards.



1. What standards is this about?

There are 3 Battle Standards to be used for this, and those are

Banner of Cooperation
Binds when picked up
Requires Guild Reputation - Friendly
Use: Place a Guild Battle Standard that increases the experience, honor and reputation gain of all guild members that stay within 0 yards of the Battle Standard by 5%. Lasts 2 min. (10 Min Cooldown)

Standard of Unity
Binds when picked up
Requires Guild Reputation - Friendly
Use: Place a Guild Battle Standard that increases the experience, honor and reputation gain of all guild members that stay within 0 yards of the Battle Standard by 10%. Lasts 2 min. (10 Min Cooldown)


Battle Standard of Coordination
Binds when picked up
Requires Guild Reputation - Friendly
Use: Place a Guild Battle Standard that increases the experience, honor and reputation gain of all guild members that stay within 0 yards of the Battle Standard by 15%. Lasts 2 min. (10 Min Cooldown)


These banners are rewards from respectively:

-Working as a Team
Obtain 525 skill points in all professions and secondary professions.

-Guild Cataclysm Dungeon Hero
Complete the heroic Cataclysm dungeon achievements listed below while in a guild group.

-A Daily Routine
Complete 15,000 daily quests.


Now as you can read, each of them requires friendly reputation which is easy achievable to there should be no problems obtaining them once they are sold by the guildvendor


2. How do they work.

These Standards will increase any gain in the mentioned stats, be it Honor, reputation, experience or multiple at the same time. The smart use in these, is when to actually use them.

As far as I know, and throughout all intensive testing, I found that these effects do NOT stack with any other increase in stats. For example Honor gain will not get another 15% from the 10% you get as a guildperk, neither will experience gain more from the heirlooms that your character may wear. I have no idea how this works on RAF-accounts though as I haven't got the chance to test this on any recruited account.


3. Honor

First the way that my guild actually discovered I used those Standards, and which started this guide, the TB-honor.

In Tol barad you get a huge amount of honor for each win, and in lesser extent for a loss + there is also the 200 honor weekly quest for winning a battle. My view on the battles is not to pop any Standard while inside Tol Barad, till the very end.
Pop your 15% Standard right before your faction wins, and you will gain a 15% bonus on all honor, which I can admit is a massive amount seeing how getting honor can be tricky these days.
There is no risk in popping it a little early, as it will last 2 minutes which gives you plenty time to cap the 3d base, do remember not to leave the flag tho as it has a max range.

If your faction miraculously failed in capturing the third base however, do not panic, the 10% will still do the trick later on, even tho you will gain less honor. It has never happened to me before though that I missed using a 15%-Standard on a win.

After winning, never turn in the quest instantly, it's better to keep the quest for 10 minutes, pop the battle standard again, turn it in, and make 200 honor into 250 due to 30 from the standard and 20 from your guildperk.


Same tactic goes in bg's, be ready to pop your battlestandard right before the end, when you cap a last flag or when you're about to kill the other faction's leader, or even about to hit the right amount of needed resources.


4. Experience

Now this is another part that most people will find really handy, but most people don't use it. Whenever you do a massive turn-in of a big amount of quests, or even better, when you get boosted and the booster has rounded up all the mobs around you, ready to take them down, pop this Standard.
This nifty feature will make sure you only have to level 86% of the amount you normally should. Please note that this number is a variable as you will also get exp from discovering areas and such, for which you cannot pop a battle standard.


5. Reputation

Now the one that I personally find most useful, as I am honorcapped and gearcapped in all specs on my main and I don't really level alts: reputation.
Please note this will NOT work on rep gained from quest-turnins!

This Standard allows you to speed up your rep-farms quite a bit, there are tons of ways of doing this but I will give a few examples:

-When farming lowlevel pirates for steemwheedle rep: pop your 15% upon arrival, killing all, and your 10% and 5% afterwards, as there will be less mobs to actually get rep off. After 6 minutes, all standards expired, and I usually wait 4 minutes for all mobs to spawn back and to use my 15% Standard again


-When killing major bosses that grant you rep, always pop the standard aswell, as again, an increase in stats is never a bad thing!





Thanks for reading this, nothing in this guide was copied or stolen, all was written on the spot. Thanks to my guild and friends for helping me test stuff and being silly

[Urx]

Have you acutally tested this on reputation gains from quests? As far as my own testing goes, it does NOT affect reputation gains from quests.

[Virox]

Just tried it with some new decks, and apparantly it's been either changed or the people helping me were blind... :s Gotta go off for a bit now but i'll edit it later tonight!

[youngbloodsev]

Just tried it with some new decks, and apparantly it's been either changed or the people helping me were blind... :s Gotta go off for a bit now but i'll edit it later tonight!

so, as Urx said, the standards do NOT work for rep gains from quest turn-ins correct?

[Virox]

I just got a deck off a friend and will go turn it in to check it out for myself to have actual proof of this, i'll edit this post in a few minutes with the resulsts

Edit: The reputation gain does NOT work on quest turnins. I only got the few points extra from the guildperk!

[Rosulm]

I'm a little confused on this guide, i'm not quite getting the point of it.

[Sklug]

I'm a little confused on this guide, i'm not quite getting the point of it.

It's simple, first he gives a tutorial on how it works, and then he gives a few tips on WHEN to place it, as it has a 10 min CD... For example, he says you should place it right before a BG game ends, as you get extra honor, or right before you kill a dungeon boss... those are the best times. Not too hard to understand lol

[Goldennose90]

I'm actually pretty impressed. I had completely forgotten these things even existed. +rep

[Virox]

Aye, most of my guildies and friends had the same thing. It's far from an exploit, and reading the tooltip will make you realise what it can do, but most people don't think about using them.