How does the skill system work?
Characters have access to a huge variety of both class-specific skills (class skills) and general-use skills, called professions. Class skills are determined by your character class and are an integral part of your character. For example, a warrior's sword skill, axe skill, and mace skill are all considered class skills. There are also a wide variety of professions available to all players regardless of class, allowing players to customize their skill set. Examples of professions include alchemy, blacksmithing, and herbalism, to name a few.
Can you tell us more about professions?
Professions are learned from various trainers around the world. Some professions will be rare and hard to find trainers for, while others will be much more common, with trainers located in multiple cities. Professions can be broken into two tiers: primary professions and secondary professions. Players can learn a maximum of two primary professions. In order to learn a new primary profession, a player must unlearn one of his or her existing primary professions first. Secondary professions are less versatile and robust than primary professions, but there is no limit to the number of secondary professions you can learn.
How do you improve your skills and professions?
Players improve their class skills through a combination of usage and leveling. Class skills related to a character's class abilities, such as a mage's frost skill, which improves his frost spells, automatically increase when a character levels. However, weapon and defense skills only improve through usage. Thus, in order to improve your ability with swords, you must equip and fight with a sword. Professions operate similarly. In order to increase your skill level in a profession, you must use it. For class skills, even those that you increase manually, your character level dictates the maximum skill level you can have in a particular skill. For professions, your profession rank - apprentice, journeyman, expert, and artisan - determines your maximum skill level.
Is there a way to retrain talent or skill points?
Yes. If you unlearn a profession, you can return to a trainer and relearn it. However, your skill level will be rest to zero and you must increase it yourself.
Do skills atrophy if they aren't used?
No. Once you learn a skill, it's yours for life unless you decide to unlearn it.
Is a Hunter who trains in bows and rifles better than say a Warrior who also trains to the same level in said weapons?
Both classes have the bow and rifle skills; however, the Hunter has unique class abilities that improve or enhance his attacks with bows and rifles. These additional abilities are what ultimately make Hunters more powerful with ranged weapons than Warriors.
Can players create their own items using trade skills?
World of Warcraft features a wide variety of professions that let players gather resources from the world to create numerous unique items. Players can make bags, bandages, weapons, armor, potions, and many other things.
What kinds of fish can you catch with the fishing profession? Are there special items, treasure chests, or S.O.S. bottles that you can catch while fishing?
In addition to a wide variety of different fishes, players can also catch things like lockboxes, crates of engineering supplies, unique armor, and weapons. However, the chances of this happening are exceedingly rare.
How many professions can a player master on an individual character?
A player will be limited to two primary professions. You can have as many secondary professions as you want.
Honor Decay
Once I gain Honor, do I keep it indefinitely, or do I have to keep earning it?
The Honor System is created so that players have to continue killing the enemy in order to keep their ranks. If a player does not fight or does not earn as many points from week to week, his or her standing will fluctuate. Over time Honor points will "decay". If a player goes down in ranks, any items or titles he has earned will be taken away until the rank is earned back.
What do you mean my Honor points will decay?
There is only a percentage correction between the current honor rating and the new rating. This is because honor points behave more like a rating system than a leveling system.
Does it always correct at the same rate, or do the player's rank/duration away affect it?
Rank changes as a percentage of the difference between a player's current honor rating and his or her current week's honor rating. However, in order to give players a cushion for "off weeks", the correction is substantially faster when a player is increasing their honor rating than it is going down.
Does it decay to zero, or is there some nominal rank it stops at?
Players would typically have to be inactive in PvP for a very long time (months) before they lose all rank.
Penalties
What sort of penalties are there for dishonorable behavior?
We have recently implemented the first steps toward a Dishonor system. Trivial civilian NPCs such as quest givers and vendors give Dishonorable Kills to players who kill them, or who are part of a party that kills them.
Are there any places where we can fight that will cause a negative honor gain if you kill the opposing faction? An example would be an Argent Dawn camp?
Not at this time. However, there will be times at which players will be worth no honor. For example, when a player loads into the world by crossing an instance line or logging in, or immediately after landing from a flight, that player will be worth no honor for a short time.
Are there any safe guards in place to prevent players from killing each other to climb up the ranks? For example, "you let me kill you and I will let you kill me" over and over again? That seems like it would be the fastest way to reach the top ranks of the Honor System.
Killing the same player repeatedly will have diminishing returns, so it will not be worthwhile for either player. In addition to that, any players caught participating in behavior described above will be guilty of exploiting the game and will be dealt with accordingly. The system we have in place can track unusual patterns to help expose this behavior.
What if guilds coordinate with each other to "trade" players to kill so they are not always fighting the same player?
Any guilds caught participating in this activity will also be considered exploiting the game and will be penalized accordingly.
If I gain the 5th rank, and I purchase the Bracers as listed in the chart above, what happens if I drop down to the 4th rank. Will I still be able to wear the bracers?
Characters are able to equip gear obtained from honor rewards based on the highest rank that the character has attained in their lifetime.
Battlegrounds
How does the Honor System fit in with the Battlegrounds?
In the Battlegrounds players will be fighting primarily against other players which will net honor. There will also be other methods of earning honor in the Battlegrounds besides player-vs-player battles. Battlegrounds are instances geared towards promoting player-vs-player combat, so players who complete objectives in Battlegrounds will receive honor.
How does the PvP system that is being implemented affect the world outside Battlegrounds. In other words, in contested zones will I be able to control graveyards and other key points?
While we are looking to have player-vs-player combat affect the outside world in ways that are interesting and most of all fun to players, this will not be a feature that is included in the initial Honor System or Battleground patches.
Will killing players in the Battlegrounds automatically result in me getting more honor than if I kill someone on the other parts of the realm?
No. However players participating in Battlegrounds can earn honor in other ways besides killing players.
Misc.
Will one class have an advantage over the others? Some classes seem to be better equipped for gaining honor than others; was that taken into consideration?
During our testing we did not come across any one class that had a distinct advantage over the others. Each class has an equal chance of rising through the ranks depending on how it is played. Keep in mind that the number of honorable kills that a player makes does not determine the rate at which ranks are gained, only that a fair kill was made. That should help alleviate some of the fears about certain classes being better than others. The more a player participates in player-vs-player battles, the higher the rank will be.
Currently the realm crashes if there are too many people in one place, like Tarren Mill. How did you prepare the realms to deal with the added amount of stress that is going to be added with more frequent large scale PvP battles?
For the time being the lag generated will be greater than normal. This should not last very long, as Battlegrounds will be released in the next patch! The Honor System has been anticipated for some time now, and now that it is released everyone is eager to jump in and try it out! Once the Battlegrounds go live they will draw players away from towns like Crossroads and Tarren Mill and into the instanced environments designed to support large scale player-vs-player battles.
It seems that some realms have way more Alliance than Horde members. How will this affect the Honor System ?
Contrary to popular belief, the numbers of Horde and Alliance are very similar on player-vs-player realms. Also, most players will be fighting for honor in Battlegrounds once they are released. The Battlegrounds will have a controlled number on both sides, so the overall realm balance should not affect either faction's ability to gain Honor.
How am I supposed to play the game when every where I go someone is waiting to gank me? The graveyard is nice, but I want to see the rest of the world too!
Once Battlegrounds are released the amount of player-vs-player conflicts found around the world will most likely decrease significantly. The same goes for ganking found in the contested zones around Azeroth. Fighting in the Battlegrounds will yeild far more honor than fighting anywhere else. With that said, players who chose to create characters on a PvP realm are supposed to feel a sense of danger where ever they go, that is why we offer player-vs-player realms!
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