Blizzard's guide to conquest points
by Matthew Rossi 
Feb 3rd 2011 at 6:00PM
Blizzard's official blog has answered the confusion about conquest points. If you're wondering how to get them, where to spend them, and what your weekly cap is, worry no more! Well, you can worry if you want to, but they've answered the questions, so it would be slightly silly.
Things to keep in mind for your conquest point acquisition:
Things to keep in mind for your conquest point acquisition:
- There is a weekly cap on how many conquest points you can gain that scales with your personal rating. Everyone starts out at 0 with a weekly cap of 1,342 conquest points.
- There is no overall cap to conquest or valor points. Conquest points convert into honor at the point where the next tier of items becomes available, so there's no reason to hoard them.
- In order to increase your weekly cap on conquest points, you need to raise your personal rating over 1,500. At 1,800 personal rating, your cap increases to 1,940 conquest points a week, and it continues from there to a personal rating of 3,000, allowing for 3,000 conquest points a week.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.Filed under: News items, PvP, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Pyromelter Feb 3rd 2011 6:49PM
This is a completely newbie question, but does personal rating refer to "either/or" arena and battleground rating? Or does it just refer to arena?
Hangk Feb 3rd 2011 7:05PM
You have one for each sized bracket of competition. So if you do both 2s and 3s in Arena, you'll have a rating for 2v2 as well as an entirely separate rating for 3v3. If you go do rated BG's as well, you'll get a rating for 10v10 and 15v15, which will be separate from each other and separate from your Arena ratings as well.
The best rating you have in whatever bracket determines your conquest point cap for the next week.
Pyromelter Feb 3rd 2011 7:43PM
"The best rating you have in whatever bracket determines your conquest point cap for the next week."
Hangk, thank you. This is what was unclear to me, as it never seemed to be explained anywhere. BG's for life, arena can go DIAF.
Hangk Feb 3rd 2011 9:41PM
Honestly if you only ever tried Arena in TBC it's worth another shot.
* They fixed the rating system so that if you are a noob, you fight other noobs and not fully Arena-geared Gladiators boosting their friends' alts.
* While ten classes with unique abilities can never be 100% balanced against each other, most people are saying that the current PvP scene is closer to 'balance' than has ever been seen before. It's nothing like TBC Arenas where if you weren't one of a few favored classes you didn't have a shot.
* The slow pace of PvP in Cataclysm makes Arena a lot less like a FPS-esque contest of who can twitch faster and more like a battle of wits.
* Finally, you get just as many Conquest points for doing Arenas as you do rated BG's, and logistically it's just a whole lot easier to round up one, two, or four other teammates than it is nine or fourteen.
Darkdust Feb 4th 2011 12:26AM
Understood on the logistical issues, but there's a lot more fun for many of us in achieving some tactical goal (CTF, taking nodes, whatever) than just "make the other guyz ded first".
I love the idea of rated BGs but keep hoping we'll see some improvements, like not alternating brackets every weekend.
Pyromelter Feb 4th 2011 7:57AM
Hangk, you make some good points, but for me it's a matter of taste, so as a friendly rebuttal, I'd like to submit this:
I only started playing around the launch of wrath of the lich king, so I never had the crazy imbalance of TBC. The rating system never bothered me much. The reason for this is that I never played an underpowered class. While I'm dyed-in the wool as a fire mage, for pvp it's frost all the way in any smaller BG. I'll stay with fire for things like IOC and AV, for example, but I've never felt underpowered as a mage. (I was the only non-shaman I ever knew that could solo a resto druid during wrath... did that as a fire mage.) But here is the big point:
* The slow pace of PvP in Cataclysm makes Arena a lot less like a FPS-esque contest of who can twitch faster and more like a battle of wits.
My experience is that arena is almost always slow. Very slow. And slow in a not fun way. It's pole humping hide and seek. I always like to say that there is more pole humping in one arena match than there is in an entire week at a strip club. It is annoying as hell, and I hate it, how much LoS plays into arena. Some people call that skill. I would agree with that, but it's one very specific skill that isn't very fun. While there is LoS in a BG, a healer cannot perpetually run around a box or a column for 10 minutes straight.
You make the comparison to an FPS. I agree, except in an FPS, you have 2 ways to overcome LoS:
1. Blow up the environment (not always possible, but at least the potential is there)
and, more importantly
2. Splash damage around corners, or weapons that travel through walls. Granted, I'm not aware of any weapons that travel through walls. The bigger thing would be RPGs and Grenades. If i could toss a grenade that would take 80% of a healer's life to flush them out behind LoS, that would make it more palatable. But there is no penalty for hugging walls and columns in wow arena, and no way to flush them. Sure you can CC them in some way, but you can't flush them out - when your cc breaks you'll still be playing duck duck goose around a pillar or something.
LoS in battlegrounds is much, much more fluid. Also, BG maps are of course way bigger than the Yugo-sized arena maps.
What I really hate about arena is that you are pigeonholed into being forced to play ring around the rosie around LoS. If you don't master that skill, or don't care to, you will never have any kind of decent ranking. I'm not saying I would never use LoS, I just like the strategy of using it in spots, as opposed to having that be my entire strategy to win a skirmish.
quick final note:
"* Finally, you get just as many Conquest points for doing Arenas as you do rated BG's, and logistically it's just a whole lot easier to round up one, two, or four other teammates than it is nine or fourteen."
If the arena matches take longer than they did before, then for me, it would be faster to do bg's. 20 minute+ 2v2 was something i experienced even in the burst of wrath. I shudder to think how long it would take now. No thanks, I'll take my guaranteed 20-30 minute bg with superior gameplay and fun over the strip club that blizzard calls wow arena.
konach Feb 4th 2011 7:50AM
Another noob question here, does anyone know why it's possible to get what I would assume is classed as starter pvp armor with honor points, but there are no weapons, I've never pvp'd in wow before this xpac so I'm still working on improving my performance, as such Arena's and rated BG's are a little ways off for me. Thanks
Shade Feb 4th 2011 8:28AM
Until the end of Wrath, it was completely impossible to get weapons without having a high Arena rating. They removed the rating requirements from the lower tier of weapons in order to close the gap between players who are learning/returning to PvP and players who have invested weeks of playtime to arenas/rated BGs.
At this point, I would say that weapons remain a conquest item only so that players at least venture into arena or rated BGs a few times, since 25 conquest/day means over three months of playing every day to accrue enough points for a weapon. They really could have made it any of the other slots. Weapon just creates the highest incentive because the lack of a substitute means the change to resilience is much higher.
konach Feb 4th 2011 7:57AM
Another noob question here, does anyone know why it's possible to get what I would assume is classed as starter pvp armor with honor points, but there are no weapons, I've never pvp'd in wow before this xpac so I'm still working on improving my performance, as such Arena's and rated BG's are a little ways off for me. Thanks
konach Feb 4th 2011 8:03AM
Gah, dbl post, please downvote into oblivion.
Axolotl Feb 4th 2011 8:13AM
That is because at this time there is no equivalent PVE-weapon available and Blizzard doesn't want to force people to PVP in order to min/max their PVE game.
konach Feb 4th 2011 8:20AM
Thanks for the reply Axolotl, I've held off from going into any dungeons this time around so I wasn't aware of that.
Tahu Feb 4th 2011 9:57AM
WOW that picture of the man in shining armor is great.
Mike Mar 14th 2011 11:42PM
There is now a pretty accurate conquest points cap calculator that can be found here:
http://elitepcbuilding.com/wow-conquest-calculator