Originally Posted by ildon
I would contest that the real "gear dispensing mechanism" is going into Kara with a T6 geared prot paladin and a T6 geared healer and walking out in 2 hrs with 22 badges and potentially huge upgrades for a fresh 70. It's a hell of a smaller time investment than honor grinding at least, and also completely sidesteps the "5 man progression". The only difference between it and honor grinding is that you can only do it once a week instead of all week, so it's not as advantageous (relatively speaking) to people with a lot of free time as it is to people with a smaller amount of free time.
I got lucky with drops, but my fresh orc warrior now has almost every tank item from Kara in about 3-4 runs, in addition to the ilvl 141 badge chest for tanking. It took my gnome warrior months to reach that level of tank gear, and he still only had the Nightbane chest, not a T6-equivalent chest.
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Well, the level of gear attainable from badge doing the easiest available badge awarded content is really a different discussion altogheter, though some interviews indicate Blizzard has already seen the folly of that concept and we will most likely see tiered badges in WotlK to avoid that kind of situation. But there's still at least one important difference that can be touched upon based on your example:
The T6 geared paladin and the T6 geared healer chose to be there, with you. If they had gotten a full T6 group and cleared it as fast as possible, using the badges to buy gems and then selling them, they'd have aquired larger rewards in a shorter timeframe than having one - or more - members barely carrying their own weight. If a sufficiently large amount of those members are unable to carry their own weight (that'd be an euphemism for "failing miserably"), even with that kind of setup you might very well fail to kill something - moving during flame wreath being the first example that springs to mind - in which you will not recieve your badges, until you actually do. Success might be easy to attain, but success is nevertheless a
requirement for the reward.
The people who enter into Kara with you are there voluntarily, and any loss in speed/performance as a result of there presence is something they'll bear willingly. Battlegrounds do not function that way post-premade nerf. If you in Kara, as a result of your inadequacies in spec, ability or appropriate gear fail, you will not be rewarded. Battlegrounds do not function in this manner either; You will be rewarded for unsuccesful gameplay. Badge grinding, regardless of how easy, demands
success. It demands effort if you are to be rewarded. Battleground PvP does not.
If you separate PvP and PvE gear to a point where cross over becomes meaningless, you can allow a much greater degree of free catch up in PvP, based on the needs of PvP progression, while you could do the corresponding thing for PvE progression - where, in my personal opinion, catch up is much less of a factor because of stuff like assisting alts, bringing alts to farm runs, and the simple fact where you are in relation to where everyone else is just isn't as important in a PvE environment as it is in PvP.