Agreed, i've yet to buy a single item besides the 2.8k honor PVP trinket (WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND GETTING FIRST). I'm up to 8.5k honor now, i'm not sure how many hours in AV I logged, but I have 60 marks from there. Probably i spent 40 hours there. Anyway, people, epics are neither cheap nor easy. There are 4 routes to end-game epics:

AH: Don't laugh, you can get some decent T4 calabar stuff here, but be prepared to blow 1k or 2k per item. If you can farm 100 gold per hour, that's about 10 hours of work per item.

BG: Using AV, its likely you'll get 500-1000 honor per hour, say average 500. That means 128 hours to get the above mentioned lock set.

Arena: These items are incredible, with the hunter items from season 2 averaging 50 +sta per item, plus all the other goodies you expect. Since these are socketable, can be easily socketed with +hit gear for substitute early kara gear. I did it for two weeks (with a 2-18 record) and have 600 arena points. Realistically, i'll need another two weeks of work to get an item.


Heroics/Kara. It depends on how many people are in your class. For me, there are usually 3 hunters on our kara team. Means that I have not much of a chance of getting kara gear. The T4 tokens? We have 2 mages usually and a lock. So I expect to down curator 20 times before I can have a good likelyhood of getting those glove tokens. That's 20 weeks of work folks, and don't forget you are blowing serious gold on Kara attempts in repair costs (since its not on farm for us yet). Realistically i blow easily 100g per week on kara, probably more like 200 or 300.

I'm not geared enough for heroics (despite being #1 in damage on kara team), so I can't get in there yet. If I did, i would probalby say these are my best upgrade bets for PvE.

So, for semicasual players (or really, hardcore kara raiders who do non-kara stuff on the side), if you are getting an upgrade a week (30+ hours of play) you are doing great. More likely 1 upgrade a month is par for the course. Now you see why end-game is such a time sink/PITA?

Rob, I think you need to find a new guild. For one, if you're in even a semi-competent guild, you shouldn't have to even consider buying the epics on the AH. Also, I don't know how it's possible to play 40 hours of AV and get only 8.5k honor. I'm Alliance; let's say, for example, I do nothing but lose AV (which is mainly true, being Alliance on Retaliation). If I average 200 honor per game, and each games lasts 20 minutes, I'm getting 600 honor per hour from bonus honor alone, not including HKs. That means 6000 honor in 10 hours of play, and that's a WORST case scenario. In reality, you'll win some games, have some quick games (and of course a few longer ones too), and end u w/ a whole lot more honor in 10 hours.

Now, an actual tip for PVP that people haven't mentioned yet: Find a good PVP guild. In my guild, we run AB premades quite a bit. We typically get about 2k honor per hour. This means that in about 7 hours of play, I've got enough honor for the S1 legs or chest. After being in a PVP guild for only a couple of months, the idea of pugging AB, EotS, or WSG is a laughable waste of time. I know that immediately joining a PVP guild is not an option for everyone, but trust me: one of the fastest ways to the "top" in PVP is to get in good with people who are serious about PVP, and not trying to go it alone.