This is the point of view of the high end raider though.

As an officer of the guild that is now almost at the tier 6 content (hopefully Kael will be donwned this week, next one at the latest) I have much more mixed feelings about that. It will be basically a test of the morale in guilds like mine - if mayority of the people are focused on bosses/new content (from our point of view tier 6 raids are new content), then easy epics from badges will only help us gear up faster and move forward. If significant part of the players is lukewarm when it comes to wiping on certain bosses for a while or collecting SR gear, we will see people dropping from raiding.

Sorry I wasn't trying to start an argument, I was just showing how his statement can be easily reversed, my point is actually that the new situation is fairly balanced.

*deleted*

This is similar to a view that occurred when BC was first released. All the old PvPers who raided simply to get PvP gear stopped raiding as much due to the fact better PvP rewards could be obtained. Lotsa guilds lost players and started having trouble fielding raids and consequently people started complaining that PvP epics had "broken" their guilds.

In reality all it did was not force people into a certain playstyle to do what they wanted. The pure PvP players have already been split out of the group due to arena. The ones who remain presumably want gear to either a) Improve their characters b) see content. I can't really think of another reason to get shiny purples besides ego. Both Ego and point a) will tend to require the best in slot gear available, which does not come from badges. Point b) will continue to "require" raiding since that is where the content is.

Basically, just because T6 ilvl loot is available why would you stop raiding? What are you going to do with that new fancy gear?

Even if you did it just for ego and if it was best in slot (which sometimes it is because of some missing item in 25 instances) there's no better way to let your ego shine than on an fully debuffed raidboss :x

We are talking about people here, their decisions don't have to be logical.

One of the reasons for people leaving raiding might be a feeling that they have reached the end of game. Some of the players judge what is "the end" by gear, not by achievements. If they reach the point where their gear is not getting better for a long time (because they are using new tier 6 badge gear already and they are stuck at some boss in BT/MT), they might at that point give up.

Of course guild determination checks that were Vashj and Kael should help in weeding out such players, but I wonder how will it be with guilds that get into BT/MH without those.

Anyway, we are going off topic here.

If Retard Joe is wiping in Karazhan, he's getting about 20 badges per week, going flat out. The Retard Joes of this world play 3-4 days a week at most. They can do one Heroic in a night, or do a partial clear of Karazhan. ZA? Well they can kill the bear and maybe the Eagle, in about 3 hours. Retard Joe does not have hundreds of badges in the bank, he has a dozen at most.

Now, at 20 badges a week, how long will it take you to put together a full gear set? Item cost is 35-70 badges for the good stuff, so say an average of 40 if we're generous. 5 major item slots takes 10 weeks, a full 8 will take 16 weeks. So Retard Joe will have a "full" gear set (minus rings, neck, trinkets) about four months after patch 2.4 comes out - so about 6 months from today.


I don't have a problem with that.

No one knows the values of the possible badge reward items so its stupid to start throwing off values pointlessly.
You seem to know alot about 'Retard Joe' though, experience perhaps?

Just keep tight for a few days untill the armory opens and we find out the specifics before doing estimations.

It's too bad that the tournament style system Blizz is pushing in April isn't an almost-permanent feature to the game as it really would remove a lot of these PvP-PvE issues. (Well, if you consider 3v3 Arena the 'balanced' form of PvP)

I'll say that as for the badge loot, the +crit set is pretty desirable looking for PvP for sure, and I'd definitely use some of those pieces over arena gear in certain situations. (2s, rogue 3dps or 4dps 5s etc) It's always WAY more fun to fuck around in BGs with damage oriented gear than survivability stacked gear. ^^ These pieces are not quite as strong as the new options available via tailoring, JC, letherworking, and engineering when thinking PvE items with high relevancy in PvP. There's definitely going to be some subset of players who min-max enough to want to raid to pick up that stuff for arena, just as lots of PvPers are willing to drop 800-1200g per red gem for their arena gear. I'm not really sure if this badge stuff is a good compromise or not yet...It's also great for rerolls, which I think is becoming an increasing priority.

I can't imagine why anyone would care much about being able to trade t5/t6 tokens for reasonably outdated arena gear. At the end of the day, anyone mildly serious about PvP is going to get to 2k for their whole set, and the 'ego factor' is probably rating/rank/title more than gear. (Equivalent to speed of progression in PvE I guess) It would be mildly obnoxious if, in the future, you could spend PvE tokens to get current Arena gear and this was allowing you to suit up quicker than the competition, but this doesn't look like it will be the case, so really there's no point in anyone freaking about it.

Really really still hoping this patch removes the unique-equipped from the Honor gems so honor grinding becomes another avenue to picking up optimal offensive gems. I know some people don't love the idea of BG nubs running around in 20ap and 12dmg gems, but the overall downstream effects on the game and its economy are probably worth it. The new group queue AV with this would be neat too. =p

I haven't seen anyone mention the new collision detection mechanics in 2.4 btw -- they're quite frustrating. (no more vertical walljumping, very stick textures around objects etc)

Uhm, it is open as of last night. People know what is available.

Not that that is an excuse for pointless debate over who should be the haves and who should be the have nots.

The badge-stuff is intented for people in Tier5 or starting with T6 content. In SSC/TK my hit values seemed to drop. Every raw upgrade caused my hit to get lower and lower. Like the ring from Hydross vs. Violett Eye exalted or T4 vs. T5. These new items have a lot of hit on them, which is the stat any rogues usually stacks first. With these high hit values I will be able to use the new gear and still be able to maintain at the hit cap.

Its alright that Vindicator gear is available with Sunwell T6 tokens cause I doubt they will bring new items for that anymore, but in my opinion S3 should be left to be bought with T6 BT/hyjal tokens if there is gonna still be S4 later on.

Blizzard consciously deciding to be somewhat inefficient with this new gear may make some sense when comparing it to T6 gear, but the issue I have with it is that the previous round of badge gear (the T5 equivalent stuff) was often better optimized than T5. That means that people who are not in T6 raid content are moving from optimized ilevel 128 to unoptimized ilevel 141 gear, which makes for some really poor choices.

Compare:

[Unwavering Legguards] (ilevel 128)
[Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor] (ilevel 141)
[Sunguard Legplates] (ilevel 141)

Once you kit them out the new items they will have slightly less stamina. You are also trading a lot of block rating and block value for dodge rating, which is probably a bad choice for most people. Even after assuming the AC values on the new items are wrong, I can't help but think that as a prot paladin the [Unwavering Legguards] are better than [Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor] since that block value makes up for a lot of AC, and I care a lot more about filling 102.4% on the hit table than I do I about picking up an extra 37 +dmg. I think that [Sunguard Legplates] seems like a sidegrade at best.

Spending their item budget less efficiently than T6 seems like a reasonable thing, but spending it so much less efficiently than the last round of badge gear does not.

That could have been a valid argument pre-TBC. But with the changes to PvP to basically mean PvE gear is uselss, I don't really see what bearing other players getting PvE gear has on you. Sure the weapons may sub into PvP but its hardly a massive boost.

This is pretty much exactly the system I proposed in the thread: RNG Raiding System: Time for a change?

The gear isn't optimal as we've seen but what it does do is provide the base line level of gear to prevent any player falling too far behind due to bad luck streaks on RNG. The only negative impact I can see is that it devalues many of the items in T5 which can dent morale a bit (first boss kill, dissed loots etc...).

They've also thrown PvE raiders a bone in the form of turning in the spare tokens for arena sets. As somone said in the thread they are probably looking at what to do with the shoulders from S3 which is why T5 and T6 currently converts to S2. Hopefully that will be something they adopt permanantly in future expansions as its a good idea.

Please note that I was using the terminology of the person I was quoting. As should be abundantly clear from my post, I'm all in favour of casual players having access to higher level loot through the badge system.

There was a lot of discussion about how the new BoJ gear is worse than some of the T6 by the virtue of being badly itemized, however there is atleast 1 item that is clearly superior than a piece of T6. It isn't just a T6 level item either, it's a proper T6 tier item:

[Borderland Fortress Grips] vs [Onslaught Handguards].

Borderland gives you 64 Sta, 4.1% avoidance (block not included) and a Red and Yellow socket while T6 gives you 3.05% avoidance, 50 Sta, 38 more armor value, 1 red socket, 18 Str and some useless block rating.

So in terms of mitigation stats we are looking at:

+14 Stamina, +1.05% avoidance and +1 socket in favor of the BoJ gloves vs a whopping 38 armor value from T6. (Even if you include the two set bonus of 170 health more to CS they are worse.)

I mean, what is up with that? I don't care if people get to buy T6 level gear with badges but it makes no sense that a raider that already has T6 tier has to farm badges to get a better tanking piece (that even is 5 ilvl lower).

Apart from that, the new tanking pieces look good. And that is because they do not really compete with T6 gear but are equally useful. T6 has better mitigation stats via avoidance, health and armor while the new BoJ trades some of it (usually avoidance) for expertise which is great. You get to use them both depending on what you tank.

But BoJ gloves being better than T6 in every situation? Not that great.

EDIT:
What's up with the equal armor value on those pieces? I knew the AC was messed up on the Sunwell gear but it looks like the new BoJ gear is also affected by this.

After looking over the new heroic badge loot it really looks like blizzard is trying to allow people to experience the newer instances without having to start from the begining to do so, which is an over all good thing. I spent a lot of wow 1.0 wishing I could just get gear good enough to get into a better guild. The gear gap then was large and always getting bigger with each new zone. This will keep it in check to some extent in the same way having full season 1 arena gear gives you a foot in the door for competing in season 3. My only hope for this gear is that it one, looks different from t4/5/6 and that they stop nerfing old encounters. Allow to the encounters to become trivial via gear. Don't make them just trivial. It pisses me off to go back to an old fight and not even recognize it.

Your fast reaction and open apology are sign of the high quality of this forum.

Stopped reading.

Borderland drop in Sunwell off trash anyways.

Care to explain why? Crush immune sets are somewhat of a novelty and generally worse than your normal set for bosses anyway.

Block rating translates to threat through shield slam.

I was amazed for a second at the comparison between borderland gloves and t6 gloves but then again they are drops from Sunwell. I feel screwed with every single patch that's giving casuals more space but then again they must feel even worse when people was staring at them with their shiny T6 epics for months.

I honestly don't care anymore, I have accepted the fact that the raiders and the bleeding edge raiders aren't the base customers of this game. People who play 2 hours a day want epics, they get epics. And if some of the new level 70's are good and hardcore enough to farm all of that stuff from our so called and loved "Heroic Mechanar" they deserve a spot in higher and more succesful raiding guilds anyway.I enjoy progressing in this game and I enjoy the rivalry between guilds and the cheers on vent when we down a new boss before them.I have high hopes about 2.4 patch and I think some of you are just seeing the negative sides of it.

When will I burst and slash my wrists? Probably when there's no more raiding content and those so called casual people get the same loot for WotLK leveling with me and Sunwell iLVL loot from badges.That'd be the time I go emo.But until then, when there's a new and so far pretty promising raiding content incoming, I think badges are a welcome change for people who hopefully will never ever beat or see the latest content.