WoW Forever: the old PvP ladder stays, the sitting goes

Blizzard has explained how player-versus-player progression works in WoW Forever, and it runs on 2 separate things. Honor is a currency, earned by killing other players, finishing battlegrounds and completing the PvP quests, and a battleground singled out for a holiday week pays more of it. Rank points are what move a character up the ranks of the original game, and how many of them a character can earn is capped each week.

That cap is the whole point of the redesign. In the original game ranks were held by anyone willing to play more hours than everyone else, week after week; a weekly ceiling means the ladder is climbed by turning up rather than by not sleeping. Blizzard says the ranks themselves are the ones players remember, ending at Grand Marshal for the Alliance and High Warlord for the Horde.

Honor buys the gear, in 2 tiers. The blue set is bought outright; each epic piece needs the matching blue piece plus an Emboldened Seal, and buying seals has a rank requirement of its own, so the epic set is gated by standing rather than by time alone. Along the way rank 2 pays a PvP trinket, rank 8 epic bracers or a belt upgrade token, rank 11 mounts and rank 14 epic weapons.

Each season also carries weekly tasks that hand out honor, rank points and sometimes legacy points, and those tasks stay available afterwards through the legacy system rather than expiring with the season. Blizzard adds that honor now comes at the same rate whatever the map, which in the original game it did not: one battleground paid far better per hour than the others, and that is what people played. The next one to arrive is the Darkspear Islands.

What Blizzard has not given is numbers: there is no figure for the weekly cap, no honor cost on any item and no date for the first season. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever opens at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.