PVP Honor levels to become account-wide, open-ended in Battle for Azeroth

One of the questions a lot of players have had regarding the upcoming Battle for Azeroth expansion is how exactly the PVP system would work moving forward. Legion revamped PVP in a major way, allowing for players to earn Honor ranks (up to Rank 50) and Prestige ranks for every 50 Honor ranks earned. While this system has work fairly well, one of the major areas of concern has been regarding Honor ranks and alts. Thankfully, Battle for Azeroth is going to change that.

In an open Q&A with several media outlets, Ion Hazzikostas described the upcoming PVP system:

We’re pulling out the concept of Prestige and just leading with Honor levels that are something that will increase in an open-ended way. If you’re familiar with how leveling works in Overwatch, I think that is something very similar. It is, that your Honor level in World of Warcraft is an account-wide level for the first time, not character specific, and it just reflects how much PVP you’ve done – all the rewards that were available through the Prestige system in Legion will be available going forward, just through playing the game, participating in PVP, leveling up.

Honor talents on the other hand, aren’t gonna be tied to Honor level anymore. Instead, they’ll be tied to just player level. So that any max-level player has access to all of the Honor talents and can pick among them to be as effective as they want from the very start when they jump into PVP for the first time. You’ll earn them as you level up from level 1 to 120, just as you earn your regular talents. Again, this is largely in response to feedback in Legion that once the game was developed, once people were established in PVP, getting started felt like you were at a huge disadvantage for your first couple weeks until you had all your Honor talents unlocked. And it doesn’t really feel like satisfying progression when you’re just trying to catch up to everybody around you in a competitive mode.

In principle, this is similar to the way Honor grinding works now. You farm Honor, rank up, and earn rewards. But this new system being account-bound means that your dedication to PVP will show no matter which character you’re on. Plus, any unlocks tied to PVP rank — like the Artifact appearances were in Legion — won’t have to be earned twice.

The addition of Honor abilities/talents to the base leveling experience will also hopefully help add an extra layer to leveling. And even if not, it’s a nice way to modify the Honor talent system that’s been present in Legion.

Be sure to check out our full summary of all the big announcements from the WoW Media Day.