I'll be the first to say I like the return of valor, it makes content long forgotten worth repeating, such as dungeons or LFR, but I am not exactly sure the way they are adding valor back is the right way to go. Firstly there is no valor gear. So collecting valor to upgrade gear is still RNG based. Sure you can get the valor in a set way, but having something worth upgrading still depends completely 100% on RNG, which is a failed design to begin with.
But lets put the glaringly obvious fact that blizzard has completely screwed up the addition of valor without adding valor gear and look at the even larger glaring issue that pertains to something they did add, and not something they didn't.
Valor will be attained in the following ways:
Your first random heroic dungeon per day.
Each mythic dungeon completed once per week.
Each raid finder wing completely once per week.
Completing the weekly bonus event quests. (except for the pet battle one)
At face value everything here seem perfectly logical. They are all well thought out and reasonable ways to gain valor. Some people are complaining that the pet battle bonus event does not offer valor when all the other bonus events do but even if I do sympathize with their reasoning that because all other events do grant valor as a reward, the pet battle event should as well but I am going to have to side with blizzard here on this one, which if i am doing that must mean there is a good reason as I do not often agree with blizzard it sometimes seems, and say that the pet battle bonus even should not offer valor.
There are 2 solid reasons why the pet battle event should not offer valor and I will gladly share them, even if the blues have only shared one of the two reasons themselves.
1) The pet battle weekly is account wide. This means I can pick it up on my hunter, do it on my hunter, and turn it in on my mage, for example. It is not a quest for my hunter. It is a quest for me, as the player, not me as the character I am playing. As such, I can only do it once no matter how many characters I have. So which one of my characters should I get the valor on? What if I want it on all of them? No can do, you can only turn it in on one character, as it is an account wide quest. It is one and done no matter how many characters you have. So I agree with blizzard, and this is the reason blizzard has given. A very solid reason if you ask me.
2) This one blizzard has not said, but it is another very solid reason. And there is also a reason why blizzard has not said this one, as you will find out shortly after I finish explaining it. That reason is that pet battles are not PvE content. Pet battles have noting to do with PvE, nothing to do with PvP, heck nothing to do with lore or quests or reputations or anything else in the game. It is it's own stand alone mini game. With that said, it makes no sense for a bonus event that honestly has nothing to do with PvE to award a currency that has uses for PvE purposes, and more importantly, only PvE purposes. Like it or not, that is a very reasonable explanation for why a non PvE bonus even does not offer a PvE based reward. Because it shouldn't.
Now, being we just explained why the pet battles are not offering valor, for two extremely valid reasons in my opinion, we need to look into what another bonus event does offer valor. The battleground event precisely.
Why does PvP offer a PvE reward?
It is a very solid question, one I would love to see blizzard answer without just throwing their standard lines at us. Give us a real and honest reason why someone should have to PvP to increase their PvE power. Did they not learn anything from mists with their legendary quest line fiasco? Horde hated the 45 minute to an hour wait times, alliance hated the losing 39 times to get the wins they needed. Win or lose, most people that were a solely PvE focused player liked it.
It seems that blizzard did not learn anything from their past mistakes. They once again dangle the carrot telling PvE players, "hey, if you want to make the most out of your PvE gear the fastest you can, you have to PvP." While it is true no one will be "forced" to do it and it most definitely is not "mandatory" the majorly of player who like to feel that they are doing all they can to better their gear will feel "forced" to do it and in their mind it will feel "mandatory". So just because it isn't mandatory doesn't mean it will not feel mandatory for a great many people.
Just like I have two completely fair reasons why the pet battle bonus event should not offer valor I feel it would only be best if I do the same for why I believe the PvP bonus event should not offer valor as a reward either.
1) Just like pet battles, PvP has nothing to do with PvE. While there might be a mild connection, such that you can PvP in PvE gear and you can PvE in PvP gear, they are two separate parts of the game. Even blizzard has acknowledged that by the announcements for legion where they are splitting the two further apart than they have ever been. So they can not play ignorant to the fact. Unless they plan to start giving PvE players conquest points as a reward for finishing the weekly dungeon bonus events and killing raid bosses, they should not be giving PvP players valor for completing their battleground events. It is as simple as that.
2) Just like valor does nothing for the pet battler, because it is not like you can level pets or increase their rarity with valor, it does nothing for the PvP player. It is a completely useless currency in PvP. You can not buy PvP gear with valor, you can not upgrade PvP gear for valor, you can not use valor to get enchants for your PvP gear even. Bottom line is, valor is 100% useless to the PvP player.
All that said, if you do both normally, kudos to you, you can benefit from it. But for everyone else, it makes no sense what so ever. But there is something that makes even less sense than a PvP quest offering a reward that can only be used in PvE and that is the general focus of the entire game in PvE, raiding, not offering a reward that is used for PvE power.
Why doesn't raiding offer valor?
Sure, you can say looking for raid offers valor, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about organized raiding, not random group raiding.
Lets look at what valor is intended to do this time around. It is intended to boost the power of PvE gear a tiny bit to help people feel like they are getting stronger as the expansion goes along. This is something all MMOs require. As soon as people stop feeling as if they are advancing, they stop playing, in large amounts it seems. To keep people playing you have to keep them feeling like they are moving forward, getting stronger, even if it is only 10 item levels at a time on one single piece of gear.
So even if all you are doing is farming content and not pushing it, having a little boost to your gear allows you to go from doing 88K on that farm boss to 90K on that farm boss. It makes you feel as if you are still growing stronger as time goes on even if you are not pushing any new content for yourself, be it moving on to heroic or mythic. You still will get to see your character grow stronger week by week, and people like that, they really really like that.
See, that is what the valor is being added for, to make people feel as if they are growing stronger. But in some cases, and for a great many guilds out there, that feeling of getting stronger is not just about feeling stronger, it is about getting stronger.
If you are that normal mode guild stuck on archie, having the entire guild being able to add 10 item levels could help push you through. If you are that heroic guild just starting progression and hitting the gorefiend wall that seems to effect a great many guilds when they first got to it, those 10 item levels for everyone can actually mean the difference between downing it or continuing to wipe. And then there are guilds like mine, with only 15 or 16 decent players, at best, that will never get to see a mythic. Maybe, just maybe, we might be able to get a couple of bosses down if those 16 all had 10 extra item levels so we can carry a few slots with people doing heroic numbers in a mythic. Or perhaps you are a group that have been working mythic but each boss becomes a new challenge, those 10 item levels for everyone can make that new challenge a hell of a lot more bearable in the dull drums of a late expansion when people start getting bored and wiping tends to tire people out more causing them to quit by turning and 50 wipe first kill into a 25 wipe first kill thanks to having a higher item level.
You see, the item level boost, while nice for everyone, is actually required for raiders. And not just high end raiders, raiders of all skill levels from normal to mythic. Allowing a normal guild to get their first archie kill, allowing a struggling guild to get past gorefiend on heroic, allowing guilds like mine who thought mythic was out of the question to think, once again, we might actually have a prayer of seeing a few bosses if we were higher geared so we could carry a few lesser players, and of course, the better guilds working through their first progression on mythic will have a more enjoyable time with it, or even the best guilds that already have everything on farm by making their farming go much smoother and faster.
So those valor upgrades will effect raiders, actual raiders, more than any other players in the game. Yet for some reason, one that completely escapes me, you can not get valor from raiding. Why? If you can get valor from PvP and PvP gear can not even be upgraded, why can you not get valor from raiding when those people not only can upgrade their gear but very well might be the people that need to do so the most.
Now with my piece said, I would like to end by adding, why no valor from our first of each challenge mode each week too? It could breath more life into it and isn't that what valor is supposed to be meant to do, at least this incarnation of it.
So my question is this blizzard...
Why can we get valor from PvP when we can not upgrade PvP gear but we can not get valor from raiding when we can upgrade raiding gear?
I do not see the logic behind this at all.