Welfare Epics

I hear the term "welfare epics" thrown around alot. I myself am guilty of using this term to describe my own gear on Longbow. This was a term introduced by the blues themselves to refer to the season one arena gear that became available for purchase with honor in 2.3.

Longbow grew up as an alt, and as such spent most of his time power grinding his way to level cap with no time spent in the BG's or instances prior to 70. In hindsight, this was a very poor decision which resulted in me not knowing how to play my class (to put it nicely). I would really urge anyone leveling alts to take the time to run instances with their new characters and hit a few BG's before entering the 70 BG's, arenas, Kara, Gruul's, etc. as a green 70 (no pun intended for my green-skinned friends or those characters still wearing greens) because you will quickly find just how undeveloped your group skills and pvp skills are.

Anyways, back to my point. When I hit 70 with Longbow I had two choices to gear him up. Having the new found luxury of being in a larger guild that runs Mt. Hyjal and Black Temple (thanks to a friend of mine that actually put in the raiding time to get me invited as a "friends and family" member), I could ride the coat tails of my guild and have them drag me along kara/gruul's/za runs with them carrying my weight. Or...wait for it...I could roll up my sleaves and actually put forth some effort myself to get geared. Now, this was prior to the patch that allowed you to buy the pvp-friendly blue rep gear. So, after a little thought, I decided to hit the BG's for hours each night for over a month instead of being a welfare case for my guild.

The BG grind was just that...a grind. Now I love PvP, but a person can only take so many hours of playing with the mentally challenged before you start to develop a nervous tick. My favorite BG has always been Alterac Valley. In reality, I think this stems from the fact that you don't "have" to put forth maximum individual effort to achieve wins. Unlike WSG where one AFKer can put the nail in the coffin for close matches. Don't get me wrong, I'm competative and love to win, but there are some nights where my heart is just not into it and I just want to grind out some honor with moderate effort. Unfortunately, in Shadowburn battlegroup before the changes to AV during the infamous "boycott" days, AV = 0 bonus honor for the alliance EVERY match. Even though we lost every match, I still enjoyed it, but I had gear to get which meant I need honor and I needed other marks...so once I had all my AV marks, I said goodbye to AV and grinded out the rest of my honor 120-150 honor at a time in Eye of the Storm. Yes, it was painfull but it was the only BG that we consistantly won.

After more than a month of grinding out several pieces of season 1 arena gear, I decided that I would join my guild to enjoy some of the "end game" content that they had on farm that I never got to see being in smaller casual guilds (za, kara, gruul's, etc).

The first night I decide to run with my guild, we hit ZA...a nice purple chest piece drops and I get it. Two days later, I join them for the second half of a kara run. We get to the chess event...I'm a dumb ass so I can't figure out how to move my chess piece that I am controlling. Someone had mentioned something about a pet bar...so I'm looking all over for a pet bar not realizing that my normal action bar has been replaced with new spells. We hit shade...they explain the fight and I still can't manage to stay out of the blizzard. We hit Netherspite...I can't tank the beam because despite their best attempts at explaining how to take over the beam and not get the debuff, I have no idea what they are talking about so the real hunter in our group ends up taking that responsibility. We get to Prince, one minute into the fight, I get feeble debuff...don't run out of AOE range and die. They kill Prince with absolutely no help from me and the sunfury bow and the tier 4 helm drops. Thankfully the real hunter in the group that was trapping his butt off won the roll on the bow and I won the roll on the helm (our guild just rolls for loot in instances they have on farm).

All that to say that I got a tier 4 helm and a ZA epic chest piece for less than 4 hours of running around in an instance.

So let's recount:

Season 1 Gladiator helm
14,500 honor and 30 AV marks

For better or for worse I averaged about 120 honor every 20-25 minutes in Eye of the Storm which seemed to be the only battleground in Shadowburn (as alliance) that I could consitently get a decent amount of honor from (AB wasn't too bad...but I ended up getting alot more honor from EotS). Obviously this isn't exact but I would conservatively estimate that I ended up making somewhere around 350 honor per hour. Now, our beloved helm requires AV marks which I had to aquire one at a time due to not-so-smart tactics on behalf of the alliance. Thank goodness the horde were good at steam-rolling us and it only took 20-25 minutes for most AV's then.

All total, it took about 40 hours to get the honor and 10 hours to get the marks

That's 50+ hours in the BG's for one "welfare epic"

That's 100+ hours to get one helm and one chest piece, compared to 4-5 hours total on my first run in two instances to get the PvE equivilents.

You tell me...which ones are the "welfare epics"?