Originally Posted by Sagus

I personally would love for bosses to have their same loot table, but also drop multiple badges for that tier. A Badge of Kara, A badge of T5-goodness, etc. There are badge vendors with everything (except maybe stuff like warglaives, and obviously not have Alar's flying mount) a boss drops, purchasable with badges of the appropriate tier. Have some system for determining if you've killed a boss, and you may only buy the loot from bosses you have killed. Maybe it would be a quest for each boss, in a bring-me-Alar's-head style. I figure this leaves the random factor in, you may get your DST this kill if you're lucky, but if you don't, you at least got a few badges of T4-goodness toward buying it from the vendor. I figure if you kill a boss once, you can kill him again, so once you've killed that boss, if you feel like farming the easier bosses of that tier for easier badges, it's no big deal. Badges prices should obviously be very high, to prevent people from being entirely tiered out within a week, but not too high as to almost guarantee you'll get the item from it actually dropping beforehand.
I figure this lets your raid get loot from the instance from the very get go, and once it's on farm will fill in gear gaps quicker.