Completely new to Ascension - QUESTIONS re PvP

Heretopvp

Hey guys!

I love and hate WoW, but I've come to accept that I can't walk away from the game.
All I enjoy doing is battlegrounds and world pvp - no PvE, no campaigns, not rated arena.

While Dragonflight might be a step in the right direction (not counting on it), I'm curious about Ascension, and have the following questions:

How populated is the PvP community (EU) on the server that lets you freely choose your skills?
Can I sell DP for gold, and use gold to get BiS gear for PvP? If so, roughly how much for a BiS set?
Are battlegrounds well populated? I was watching someone play and the BG was running for 10 minutes before it started filling properly

Vulpinenin

@Heretopvp said in Completely new to Ascension - QUESTIONS re PvP:

How populated is the PvP community (EU) on the server that lets you freely choose your skills?

Can I sell DP for gold, and use gold to get BiS gear for PvP? If so, roughly how much for a BiS set?

Are battlegrounds well populated? I was watching someone play and the BG was running for 10 minutes before it started filling properly

Yes, Area 52 (the freepick realm) is pretty damn well populated. You'll have no problems finding ques for bg's and arenas most of the time. Also you'll love the world pvp, because there are many high-risk events taking place that promote it.
High-risk is a PvP mode that lets people drop items from their gear and inventory on death. You can protect your equipped gear though and drop gold instead (you drop about 100-200g per death with all items protected). It's pretty thrilling. The events include motherlodes (huge mining or herbing nodes that require 3 gatherers in high risk to get), crow's caches every 3 hours that spawns a chest in outland with VERY good bloodforged loot, high-risk dailies to kill mobs etc.
Yes you can sell DP for gold, but unfortunately you can't buy BiS gear with it. You can buy close to BiS though - any item in the game can be "bloodforged" to remove its soulbound tag, including pvp gear, however this reduces its resilience and pvp power roughly by half. The rest of thd stats are still good though and honor is farmed very fast from BG dailies and arenas (dailies and arena frenzy caches), so you can "upgrade" to the non-bloodforged versions of your items. You can also buy items that are normally PvE items, cuz bloodforging thsm gives them resilience and pvp power, although not as much as soulbound pvp pieces. On the draft realm (Al'ar) there is a system for upgrading bloodforged gear to make it BiS-viable, but it's still not implemented in Area-52, although it should be at some point. Also the real BiS pvp gear (last season) requires arena points and rating unfortunately, although you can get about half the pieces (up to legs I think) with 1v1 arena rating. 1v1 arenas are fun as heck.
I can't give estimates on how much a set of good pvp gear will cost, because that depends heavily on your spec and prices in AH vary, but one DP costs 33 cents (a dollar gives you 3), and each dp sells usually for upwards of 100-110 gold, with that number rising from the inflation going on around the world lol. A month ago the normal price was 80g per DP point.
I pretty much answered this in thd first point, but yeah BG's usually start with 5-10 ppl per team and fill up to 20 per team towards the end.

P.S. sorry for the massive wall of text and welcome to Ascension! ️

Heretopvp

@Vulpinenin thank you for all of that!

Fantastic answers love to hear it

Furthermore, is the random draft server more populated, and is it noticeably so?

Also, how much stronger is rated arena gear than bloodied AH gear? What kind of % are we talking?

I understand that giving an estimate for real life money to gear is hard, but would £100 do it for BiS set?

Vulpinenin

@Heretopvp
Here is a preview of the current best (arena points - top) vs honor gear. The difference is not that much honestly, because it's season 2.5 vs season 2.

I haven't played much on Al'Ar (the draft realm), but I'd say it's just as populated as Area-52, if not even more.

About the buying gear thing, actually I think you'll do fine with even 20 dollars that would convert into 60 DP = 6k gold for starter bloodforged gear from the AH, with which you can start farming honor and buy your enchants and stuff. If you do your dailies, you'll have your full honor set in about a week at most. About actual BiS pieces you can buy with gold (better than the honor gear, even with unupgraded bloodforged), they go for about 2-4k gold depending on the slot - trinkets like the Tsunami Talisman and rings/amulets/capes and weapons from raids are usually the most expensive.

Also another gold expense to be aware of is Quality of Life - there is a LOT of it on this server - from portable training books for spells and professions to portable mystic altars (the thing you configure your mystic enchants with, that your build relies on), to additional specs and enchantment presets, to fast flying training and mounts, to cosmetics and hearthstones to pretty much anywhere you can imagine, it's all bought with DP (or gold if you pay someone to buy it for you, basically how you "sell" DP for gold on here). You can do without all of these things, but they sure make life easier if you have them.

Svennin

Just a few additional thoughts relevant to the topic-

I haven't found a time of day that I don't get in a battleground in less than a few minutes. Ques are usually almost instant on Area 52, so don't worry about it.
I can typically buy a full set of low tier bloodforged epics with the amount of gold I get from just leveling up. 500-700g is usually plenty for the cheapest epics of relevant stats. You're going to replace it very soon anyway. There are a few expensive items that I use rather than honor gear though.
You can open dual-spec for 68k honor. If you're going to spend gold or DP on anything, I'd recommend opening up spec 3 and 4 too. Experimenting and refining your builds can be a VERY significant aspect BG progression. It was for me.
Always build around your legendary mystic enchant, and epic supports. Have fun!

Hachiman77

@Vulpinenin said in Completely new to Ascension - QUESTIONS re PvP:

@Heretopvp said in Completely new to Ascension - QUESTIONS re PvP:

How populated is the PvP community (EU) on the server that lets you freely choose your skills?

Can I sell DP for gold, and use gold to get BiS gear for PvP? If so, roughly how much for a BiS set?

Are battlegrounds well populated? I was watching someone play and the BG was running for 10 minutes before it started filling properly

Yes, Area 52 (the freepick realm) is pretty damn well populated. You'll have no problems finding ques for bg's and arenas most of the time. Also you'll love the world pvp, because there are many high-risk events taking place that promote it.
High-risk is a PvP mode that lets people drop items from their gear and inventory on death. You can protect your equipped gear though and drop gold instead (you drop about 100-200g per death with all items protected). It's pretty thrilling. The events include motherlodes (huge mining or herbing nodes that require 3 gatherers in high risk to get), crow's caches every 3 hours that spawns a chest in outland with VERY good bloodforged loot, high-risk dailies to kill mobs etc.

Yes you can sell DP for gold, but unfortunately you can't buy BiS gear with it. You can buy close to BiS though - any item in the game can be "bloodforged" to remove its soulbound tag, including pvp gear, however this reduces its resilience and pvp power roughly by half. The rest of thd stats are still good though and honor is farmed very fast from BG dailies and arenas (dailies and arena frenzy caches), so you can "upgrade" to the non-bloodforged versions of your items. You can also buy items that are normally PvE items, cuz bloodforging thsm gives them resilience and pvp power, although not as much as soulbound pvp pieces. On the draft realm (Al'ar) there is a system for upgrading bloodforged gear to make it BiS-viable, but it's still not implemented in Area-52, although it should be at some point. Also the real BiS pvp gear (last season) requires arena points and rating unfortunately, although you can get about half the pieces (up to legs I think) with 1v1 arena rating. 1v1 arenas are fun as heck.
I can't give estimates on how much a set of good pvp gear will cost, because that depends heavily on your spec and prices in AH vary, but one DP costs 33 cents (a dollar gives you 3), and each dp sells usually for upwards of 100-110 gold, with that number rising from the inflation going on around the world lol. A month ago the normal price was 80g per DP point.

I pretty much answered this in thd first point, but yeah BG's usually start with 5-10 ppl per team and fill up to 20 per team towards the end.

P.S. sorry for the massive wall of text and welcome to Ascension! ️