4.01 PTR Heirloom Prices Increased 5x

A week ago, I took a look at the test server pricing on existing items, in order to determine whether players who current have emblems, stone keeper shards, etc should buy now.  These prices apparently were not final.  In particular, heirlooms are now going to be much more expensive, and PVD advises readers to buy their heirlooms ASAP. 

The Changes 

Justice Point costs for existing PVE heirlooms have increased by five-fold.  JP costs on other items have remained mostly constant, suggesting that this particular change was deliberate, and not merely some across the board tweak to the exchange rate.  We should have seen this change coming, because level 85 dungeons will award the same Justice Point currency that we will get for our old emblems in the patch.  The current prices are more in line with what level 85 dungeon rewards cost in JP - the intent is presumably that heirlooms will be as easy to get at level 85 as they initially were at level 80 when Wrath launched. 

The Wintergrasp side is even worse; prices on these heirlooms increased by 6.79-fold.  This appears to have been part of a broader sanity check pass on new honor point pricing, so further changes may happen.  Level 60 and 70 PVP gear prices have decreased dramatically, probably to account for the fact that new honor points are more valuable, and therefore will be awarded in drastically smaller numbers.  The old PVP mounts have also had their prices slashed 4-fold, and now seem more reasonable compared to the other items we can see.

The good news is that Argent Tournament heirloom prices have not changed.  Though this could change in the future, my gut says that it might not.  The tournament uses a separate currency that is only available through the current (level 80) quests (and one heroic dungeon).  An item that costs 60 seals will still require you to complete 60 daily quests, because there won't be level 85 daily quests that award 3 seals.  Also, unlocking the vendor to spend these seals requires completion of a lengthy daily quest-gated rep grind, and there's no reason for Blizzard to discourage players from signing up for this if they really want to.     

Buy now?
Prices could change again, but my advice to readers is now to buy any and all heirlooms you can afford if you have any interest in using them.  The worst thing that can happen if you do this is for you to end up with a full arsenal of heirlooms.  The alternative is a real risk that these items will be harder to obtain in the future. 

I've got several hundred emblems on my mage right now, which will net me either half a dozen heirlooms or a single piece of patch 4.0 level 85 dungeon gear.  The heirlooms will stay with my account indefinitely, while the gear will presumably be trashed in patch 4.1.  Frequent dungeon runners will still end up with heirlooms because of the hard cap on Justice Points, but these players have even less of a need to have a piece of gear waiting for them as a reward for past efforts. 

Finally, anyone looking to cash out Stone Keeper Shards should bear in mind that these can only redeemed when your faction controls Wintergrasp.  Don't wait til the last minute if your faction loses the majority of Wintergrasp battles. 

The Latest Wintergrasp Revision

Above are the stats for Wintergrasp battles on my server, Hyjal US. Each side must by definition possess the same number of captures plus or minus one, since the zone cannot fall into NPC control (i.e. you don't get to take it again until the enemy has first taken it from you). So, the only meaningful number is the number of times defenders are able to fight off captures. In our case, the numbers show a massive advantage to the Horde, which has held the keep in over seven times as many defensive battles.

In part iterations of Wintergrasp, the Alliance on my server often showed up in superior numbers, granting the Horde massive tenacity buffs. Today, it is not uncommon for a prime time battle to turn into a rout, in which my normally squishy mage is running around with 20 stacks of tenacity and 90K hit points, demolishing enemies in 2-3 hits. While this is strangely addictive (I've gotten 50-100 honor per kill in some of those situations, thanks to the tenacity honor buff), it is very unlikely result in capturing the keep. What happened to shift the balance?

The latest rules
Since the last time I addressed Wintergrasp, a year ago, Blizzard has completely redone the zone yet again. The current model requires players to either travel to the zone or two a battlemaster in major cities to queue up for the battle. This can be done no more than 15 minutes prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and was intended to reduce overcrowding. There is apparently an upper limit on how many people will be brought into the battle, and, in Blizzard's defense, I haven't seen much lag in the zone.

On the opposite side of the coin, though, the balancing of the factions is left purely to the tenacity buff. We can have a battle in which there are seven Alliance in a /who for the zone and a decent sized raid group of Horde. Unfortunately, Tenacity does not do enough to enhance the performance of vehicles - a 100K HP siege tank is actually pretty squishy compared to a 15-million HP raid boss. Without vehicles, the attackers cannot win the battle. You can stick around to farm honor points and watch insanely large crit numbers, but that will only stay entertaining for so long.

It's certainly possible that the population balance of the server has changed over the last year in ways that make the Horde suddenly outnumber the Alliance, where the situation was once reversed. The bigger issue, though, is the one that always hits games with non-instanced (or, in this case, non-size-balanced) PVP; the outnumbered side starts losing and becomes less fun to play, and even fewer people show up, starting a vicious cycle.

Consequences of the NEXT revamp
Blizzard's plan for the expansion (to be tested in Wintergrasp and finalized in the expansion's new version of Wintergrasp) is to limit both sides to relatively equal number of players (with a minimum cap to ensure that one side cannot deny the other victory by refusing to show up and leaving the cap at some number that's too low to complete the objectives).

Like the last half a dozen iterations of Wintergrasp, this one has some problems. Off the top of my head, the more popular side may quickly realize that they are less likely to get in off of the queue due to their numbers and level alts on the opposing faction to enter the battle just to raise the population cap for their real comrades. With Blizzard's new account-wide chat feature, they can even be relaying intel about enemy movements through in-game whispers. There's no stopping players from using third party chat to accomplish this, but it hasn't been conveniently and officially in game before now.

The bigger issue, though, will remain how to keep this kind of PVP - in which one side, and often the same side, will lose more often than not - interesting enough for the losers to choose to continue. This is where Warhammer fans have always claimed that the game went wrong by not emulating DAOC's three-faction model; you might be outnumbered, but there's always the chance of the two smaller teams joining forces against the big guys.

In the absence of changing the system to make sure that victory is always somehow in reach, Blizzard has attempted to use incentives to keep the losing side happy. In Wintergrasp's case losers can snag maybe 1-2K honor and a token (good in quantities of 25 or 40 for a second-tier PVP item, and only redeemable if your side owns the keep), with additional points for any of the weekly quests you are able to complete. Apparently, in an era where all the other forms of gear have also seen massive inflation, those rewards aren't cutting it.

Earning Gear Offline

Age of Conan recently made headlines with a change that offers players free levels simply for having an active subscription. Not to be outdone, Blizzard handed me four major gear upgrades, just for signing back into the game.

Technically, the upgrades in question were more of a correct bet on the pace of gear inflation than a literal handout. Due to my Wintergrasp habit, I wrapped up the patch 3.2 era with 90 marks and 67K honor. Rather than spend them on items that offered minor upgrades, I opted to save them for the following arena season. Now I have cashed in these currencies for the ilvl 264 PVP bracers, ilvl 251 shoulders, and ilvl 245 neck and cloak - I had ilvl 200 or 213 items in these slots previously, so even the PVE->PVP swaps were major upgrades. The hardest part of this transaction was waiting for the apparently dispirited Hyjal Alliance to capture Wintergrasp for access to the vendor.

The irony is that I was actually willing to run a few dungeons for some gear. Prior to my shopping spree, there were a relatively large number of items in the ICC 5-mans that represented substantial upgrades. Also, the gear threshold on Heroic Halls of Reflection appears to have been increased since I beat it twice in random pugs on the week it came out - my gear was suddenly no longer good enough to guarantee an easy clear of the place until I cashed in those upgrades, and I otherwise might have had to grind out some upgrades to regain access to the game's toughest 5-man.

Looking ahead
Strangely, the previews for Cataclysm say that Blizzard is keeping this old system, in which players will be allowed to bank currencies that will be usable to purchase better items in subsequent "seasons". Moreover, the system is expanding from PVP (where it makes some sense - your opponents may be wearing the good stuff) to PVE content. The Wrath era has seen several rounds of emblem quality inflation for the same 5-man dungeons (which have gotten comparatively easier as players become more and more overgeared), but those changes have never been retroactive to currency earned in the PREVIOUS season in the way that PVP honor points are.

At the end of the day, I suppose the moral of the story is that players should do whatever they enjoy most and rest increasingly assured that Blizzard will somehow manage to award them with raid quality loot for doing it. Perhaps banking currency for the future is even necessary as a way to encourage players not to call it quits as the end of a season approaches if they don't have anything left to purchase. Even so, it just seems odd that, in this timesink heavy genre, the trend would move towards allowing players to skip a timesink by banking currencies for future tiers.