The well-known streamer and YouTuber Xaryu is currently battling through perhaps the toughest grind that World of Warcraft has offered since its launch. For one day, he has set himself a particularly exhausting interim goal.
What kind of grind is this? It’s about the Honor System from Vanilla WoW or WoW Classic, where players farm honor in the open world as well as in battlegrounds to climb ranks. In the original version, the Honor System worked as follows:
- Every week, at the ID change, a player’s earned honor was compared with the accumulated honor of other heroes of their faction. Depending on how well and actively you played during the week, you would rise or fall in the rankings, which could lead to promotions or demotions.
- The higher you climbed in rank, the more challenging it became to work your way up to the next rank. Those aiming for the highest ranks and the associated rewards often had to play nearly around the clock for several weeks.
- The very highest rank, rank 14, was open only to a minimal percentage of participating players. Without any agreements, it could happen that ambitious players with similarly significant time investments and a regular group would block each other for weeks.
- To collect as much honor as possible in a day, many regular groups resorted to farming randomly assembled teams. They often avoided potentially very long matches against other regular groups. For example, in Vanilla WoW, it was common to just sit down and quickly surrender in such cases.
- At that time, it was an open secret that various Grand Marshals and High Warlords could only obtain their rank 14 in Vanilla WoW through account sharing, as the time investment over such a long period was just too exhausting.
With patch 1.14.4, Blizzard slightly toned down the Honor System of WoW Classic in November 2023 (so that, for example, you could no longer be demoted due to insufficient activity), but the path to rank 14 is still one of the toughest grinds that can be achieved in World of Warcraft.
On the anniversary servers of WoW Classic, you can currently work your way up to rank 14 again:
400,000 honor in one day … that’s taxing
What drives Xaryu? The well-known PvP veteran, YouTuber (328,000 subscribers on the main channel via YouTube) and streamer (708,861 followers on Twitch) is currently climbing the ranks of the Honor System in WoW Classic, having set himself a particularly arduous goal a few days ago.
To make as much progress in the Honor System as possible during the current ID, he planned on Thursday to complete 500,000 honor within the next 24 hours (via YouTube). This would likely allow him to rise from rank 10 to rank 12 in the next evaluation.
As of that time, his honor account for the week stood at 130,032. Xaryu wanted to add about 370,000 honor on top of that. For comparison: In the entire previous week, a total of “only” 176,785 honor was accumulated. The task was made more difficult because the PvP streamer only signed up solo for the battlegrounds to keep the waiting times as short as possible.
Did the streamer reach his goal? From Thursday afternoon until late at night, Xaryu was able to raise the honor counter to 332,099 through PvP in the open world and battlegrounds. On Friday, things continued (via YouTube), and in fact, the streamer broke through the threshold of 500,000 honor after many hours, thanks to a few Horde sacrifices in the Molten Core.
This way, the player secured his rise to rank 12 as well as access to the first epic pieces of PvP armor (gloves, pants, and shoes). When a viewer then suggested that Xaryu could achieve rank 13 with a similar effort in the upcoming ID, the streamer responded:
“I’m not doing that again next week. No way. I would go crazy.”
Xaryu further explained that the grind without a regular group is just too harsh. When you sign up solo for battlegrounds, you never know what teammates you will get and what stupid actions they will literally cause headaches for the veteran. By the way, there is one player who has managed to achieve rank 14 multiple times: Rank 14 from WoW Classic is an absurdly hard grind – This crazy person has done it 3 times
