They don't have to make all badges BoA immediately. They could start off 3.0 with BoA Badges of Justice so you can gear up your alts or new mains faster for the leveling process and keep the Naxx badges BoP. 1 or 2 patches later they can make these BoA as well while keeping the Whatever-raid-instance-is-next Badges BoA and so on.

They already did something similar in live by starting BoJ rewards at ILVL 110, then 128 and lastly 141 after a few patches to help people gear up.

Before people get all to excited about the prospect of BoA badges, please remember that they won't be physical items anymore, but a counter going up on your Token tab, or whatever it was called again. While granted, blizzard could make these token counters apply account wide in some cases, it seems highly doubtful they will.

I would be inclined to agree that tokenization of badges would force it to almost be character specific, were it not for money not having a "physical" presence, yet still being transferable. Badges strike me as the one thing they would want to make account bound. Blizzard seems keen on the concept of removing the barrier of entry for alts. Right now, a top end character has little use for badges outside of selling epic gems.

Before we go abusing the term "BoA", could we pause for a second and think about how unintuitive "Bind on Account" sounds? Perhaps "Account-bound" would be more appropriate, since the term relates to post-binding (like soulbound; does anyone use Bind on Soul? No, I thought not). Also, items could become account-bound on pickup, or on equip, using "BoA" negates that specificity.

Account wide badges may help a bit with helping the tank shortage too. For example if I could gear my Shaman alt (which although is geared for heroics isn't nearly as wanted for obvious reasons) by tanking heroics on my other alt warrior then I would be tanking everything in a flash.

Not sure if other tanks feel the same way.

Account-Bound on Pick-up and Account-Bound on Equip sounds right.

ABoE and ABoP.

Actually... it might be a bit early to go speculate on gearing alts. We dont know how readily available a starting tank set, dps set or healing set will be.

It appears to me they might have learned a lot from the badge system combined with the current sunmote turn-in system, which sees a lot less gear go to waste.

Actually, IIRC, you have the option to make 4 of the token types have a "physical" representation on your inventory and switch which 4 (or less) you want at any given time.

It is just a visual aid in a new mini-window at the bottom of your backpack from what I recall of playing about with it.

It seems mindflay is getting its coef raised 30% and is going to be able to crit, blue just posted..Very nice change in terms of scaling for SPs.

As well as considering a similar change to affliction too

Source.

I have a sincere question, how many gear checks do you believe there were in TBC? Obviously Brutallus, added only in a content patch that was not part of the originally conceived TBC.

Other than that? I'm struggling to come up with any to be honest. I mean Vashj P2 and Kael P3 are gear checks, but it's fairly likely most guilds getting there failed more on execution than gear so they are hardly Patchwerk-style gear checks. Our mostly-casual guild got in Hyjal/BT via the attunements, i.e. pre all the last badge loot and pre the free entry and I just don't remember a gear check. We got to Gorefiend the first time having heard big fancy things and downed him easily. We stacked healing on BB. We sucked at rune shields and deadens and spirit shocks on Reliquary.

Was there a true gear check in Hyjal/BT? Maybe I missed it.

I would say bloodboil, ros, and archimonde are the first gear checks. On bloodboil you need all of the following: decently geared tanks (he hits hard), enough HP on your cloth to survive fel rage if they get it, and well geared dps to shorten the length of the fight minimizing the raid healing needed and chances of people dieing to fel rage. For Archimonde he hits hard and the longer the fight the more chances you have of people dieing and wiping you, its also another fight where your raid having high HP helps. RoS is pretty much a straight dps gear check in all 3 phases.

Mother Shaz was in the truest sense of the phrase. Otherwise, nothing significant that I can think of. Certainly all of the fights could be 24 manned, even for progression content, if executed perfectly. Which was not the case for Brutallus

Naj'entus is a healing gear check. Kaz'rogal could be a dps gear check, he's a roadblock for a lot of the "jump straight in to Hyjal" guilds even today. What happened was it took virtually every guild so long to get past Kael/Vashj that guilds far out paced the T6 checks before ever hitting them. At all levels, gear checks were less of an issue pre-Sunwell because of attunement checks that were far more brutal. People didn't hop into SSC/TK in blues because of the attunement chains, and even after attunements were down it really wasn't until the iLvl 128 badge gear and Kara badges that casual groups and pugs started getting Lurker/VR and others down.

If they tone down the attunement system (which they have said they are), then gear checks step to the forefront again. I expect Patchwerk to again be the roadblock he once was. The biggest difference between 10 man and 25 man is it will be easier to outgear the 10 man content faster. As such, expect a slow scale of non-raiding epics in the beginning, as we saw in BC.

I don't agree with this. Pretty much anything in T6 could be made vastly easier by gear, sure. But barring a few things like having 8500 HP for Naj'entus and SR for mother, skillful play could more than make up for any gear deficiencies. If your DPS sucks and are all pulling 800 DPS on Kaz'rogal, then yeah, decking them out in ilvl 141 badge loot will make a huge difference. But if they all specced properly, used comsumables, knew the best damage rotation, etc. then top-of-the-line gear isn't necessary. A gear check is a fight where you need a certain level of gear or you are just going to fail, and almost nothing in T6 is designed like that. Particularly not Archimonde...he is probably the single worst example in fact. The DPS requirement is something like 8000 RDPS; and if people are decursing and staying out of fires, there isn't a huge amount of stress on the healers either.

Consumables do nothing other than compensate for having a lower level of gear. Kaz'rogal may not be a very tight gear check since he has a soft enrage, but there's no real "skillful play" to him other than maybe putting some healers in SR. At a certain point you're not going to be able to heal through it (though my guild does have a kill at 35 marks). Everything else in Hyjal is certainly an execution check though Azgalor takes an at least somewhat well geared tank (as does Teron). Even Brutallus isn't just a gear check, you also have to execute properly.

If the question is "are there any encounters where a guild who hit it at the typical level were stuck until they farmed more gear" as the definition of the gear check, then the answer for BT/Hyjal is no. But I don't think any of the instances in all of BC were designed assuming months of farming the previous one, other than Sunwell. This was the biggest change from vanilla and the best improvement.

I would certainly hope so, otherwise the old content will be completely obsoleted, especially the 5 mans. Maybe at very least a system where the old badges can be combined into a higher one (5 for 1 or something). If people at the T8 level have no reason at all to run 5 mans, it will quickly be even worse than it is now, and we are at the end of the expansion cycle.


Edit for additional comments: They have stated with Legacy items they would be limited to specific items in certain situations, if the idea happens at all (personally I doubt it will). There will never be a case where you can go take your epiced out character through instances so you can get blues for an alt, it would introduce far too many issues, and defeat a large fundamental aspect of the entire game.

ninjaing would go through the frigging ROOF.

"Hey there fire mage, wtf are you doing rolling on that healing plate?!"

"Oh, I've got a pally alt that I need this for."

That works both ways though. Pug ninjaing is going to happen. PERIOD.

Imagine if you could gear people's alts with gear you'd otherwise shard, without then bring said crappy geared alts to the raid? As is for us, T6 belts are nearly on rot, but we aren't at the point where our DPS or healing are solid enough that we can 24.5 man it consistently (aka, drag said alt through). How many times have you seen items sharded and said to yourself, or had someone else say "Damn, i wish my alt were here to get that!".

I think BoA would be WAY better then BoP in virtually every respect other then PuG ninja factors.

I would be very suprised if they made BoE accountbound items. What would be the reason for that? So that people could buy a blue from AH, use it for a while and then send it to an alt? I can't imagine that to be a desired functionality for account binding items.

I think ABoP is the only logical case, and in my opinion, the term accountbound works excellently.

I think you need to make a distinction between fights where the boss hit hard and a gear check fight. There are lots of fights that you can't bring an under geared tank to, but it wouldn't even be worth using the term gear check if you called them all that simply based on the tank's gear. I think what most people mean by a gear check is something where all 25 people have to be geared a certain level. Where there is a hard limit that has to be reached on the amount of DPS put out and healing done/HPS and Mitigation/TPS/Stam/Etc tanking that needs to be done.

Curator was a gear check early on, but gear checks were mostly absent in tier5.