Recently World of Warcraft has introduced the ‘honor system’ for player vs player combat. Up until now, there was no real incentive to fight other players- it was mainly for fun. I enjoyed playing on a PvP server because it gave a sense of danger- you not only had to look out for monsters, but also from enemy players- rogues that could pop up out of nowhere and sap you in the back of the head, mages who could blast you into oblivion with spells, priests who could mind control you and make your character hurl itself off cliffs/into lava/etc, and so on.
The honor system tracks ‘honor kills’. An honor kill is classified as a kill you made against an opponent within 10 levels of your own level. Any lower, and you don’t get an honor kill. If you kill NPC civilians, you get a ‘dishonorable kill’. Right now this stat itself doesn’t do anything; it is just a way to keep track of your kills. If you are in a party or raid, everybody gets credit for every kill any member made.
The true aspect of the honor system is contribution points. These are accumulated through damaging other players. At the end of the day/week, the number of contribution points is tallied up, and each player is ‘ranked’ based on their contribution points compared to their faction population. Thus, someone ranked 3rd has the 3rd highest contribution points, and so on. When you get up to a particular ranking, you gain access to special sets of PvP armor (which is supposed to give stat/ability bonuses geared toward fighting in PvP, though some players may disagree) and PvP trinkets, which are awesome because they nullify some of the most annoying PvP spells (polymorph, stuns, and fear).
What I like about the system:
-People are actually trying to PvP in an organized fasion. It is cool to see Braveheart-type battles in Hillsbrad as one group brazenly charges another and sends it into disarray. Even if you are a relatively low level, you can usually get invited into a raid and get (some) contribution points.
-The PvP rewards can be pretty good. As a Paladin, my character has a lot of limitations (few ranged abilities, random burst damage, overall low DPS) but the PvP trinket the Paladin can get, for example, would help out a lot.
What I don’t like about the system:
-Contribution points seem based on just damage. I find this very flawed, because it blatantly favors classes that can unload a lot of damage. Mages and rogues are going to have a field day, because both classes can frontload damage very quickly. It means that lower DPS classes, like Druids and Paladins, are at a big disadvantage, particularly since the PvP rewards are based on ranking.
-There is a strong level bias. I have a level 36 character, but I am almost always the lowest leveled player in a raid. Often during mass PvP I am pitted against a crowd of level 60’s, which means I can’t really do much damage (ergo little contribution points gained). Not enough lowbies have much enthusiasm for PvP, which is a shame because sometimes the battles get so epic it makes it hard to do much of anything else in that zone (Hillsbrad in particular).
I look forward to battlegrounds, since it will be an environment of similarly-leveled players, and there will be more than just ‘kill the other guy’, which will let other support/hybrid classes shine.
