[Quenchiest]

Source: Erja How is this a problem?

It really isn't. Only the people who raid for the sake of gear and nothing else have a problem with it. If those people want to quit and come back to get "welfare" emblem gear they can go ahead, but those are obviously the people that don't enjoy raiding to begin with.

[Kamani]

Source: Kazeyonoma Ricovega, so then you save yourself a few bucks, you don't play a game you're supposed to enjoy, and you get back into the game 2 months later with some out of date gear. and no raiding experience. I'm sorry but if you play this game for ONLY the gear, then I think you're playing it for all the wrong reasons. Gear is fun to get, but the experience of raiding, playing with friends, getting achievements or progression fights down, and earning your keep. To me, that's what this game is about, not whether I get the same gear as someone who runs heroics. Do you care right now really that some pug tank has t 8 chest/helm? I don't, cuz I am getting t9+. Just like when t10 comes out, I won't care who gets t9.

lol, well first sorry Kaz, I usually skip most posts that I don't know of the poster, so I tend to pick on you in my posts a lot =)

Well, devils advocate here, but gear upgrades are a benchmark for achievement and progress. Having a 232 ilvl average is a quantifiable number relating to, generally, how good you are. Certainly not linearly, but the correlation does definitely exist.

For example, the craze for fantasy football is focused on the same human need for a tangible scoring basis to rate and label everything. People want that numerical value expressing status.

It's everywhere, and regardless if it is looked down on in general, it certainly does exist.

I'm quite open about it myself. I'm a huge fan of qualifying everything based on a scoring system; I'm a numbers person. Quite frankly, Xav's(if he has it) 271 cloak from (whatever drops the 271 cloak) is an expressible, concrete way of labeling his superiority.

And I absolutely hate the "you are a loot whore, you should just enjoy the game, have fun and be social" movement. I find my entertainment and satisfaction, in WoW and in life in general, by self improvement(amongst other things.) A month ago I was 10% body fat, last night I was 7%. Great to look in the mirror and see my obliques. Quite similarly, last month my Warrior was 4200 gearscore, now hes 4600. Great to look on my char tab and see 36,000 health. Satisfaction in increasing a tangible asset. Criticizing others for not finding entertainment in the same avenue as yourself is just .. bleh.

[Baervar]

Source: Kamani And I absolutely hate the "you are a loot whore, you should just enjoy the game, have fun and be social" movement. I find my entertainment and satisfaction, in WoW and in life in general, by self improvement(amongst other things.) A month ago I was 10% body fat, last night I was 7%. Great to look in the mirror and see my obliques. Quite similarly, last month my Warrior was 4200 gearscore, now hes 4600. Great to look on my char tab and see 36,000 health. Satisfaction in increasing a tangible asset. Criticizing others for not finding entertainment in the same avenue as yourself is just .. bleh.

Would you feel worse about yourself if suddenly everyone in the world who had 10% fat got 8% overnight? Anyway i don't think that's the best example to illustrate a resemblance to this situation :P

As long as you raid you have better gear than people who stick to dungeons. Always has been like that and always will be. Of course blizzard wants to give people who do only dungeons to do start raiding as well - the fact that it's more time-consuming and gets you more into the game is prolly one of the reasons, heh. Plus i doubt they want to severly limit people who don't raid like that, specially since you may not be able to perform that well on the new dungeons with conquest badge gear.

This will prolly make it harder to distinguish more experienced players (or alts) from newer players who don't really know what they're doing, but as long as they don't make the normal dungeons any harder it shouldn't be a problem.
Plus i doubt i'll be doing the first dungeons with anyone but my guildies, at least in the first few days/weeks.


P.S. I heard new dungeon items are ilevel 239 and they're bringing T10. C/D? :P

[swelt]

You know what they need to do?

They need to start changing the colour of item tooltips when each new tier is released. When TOC came out, every ilvl 200 epic should have been recoloured green and everything up to 220 blue. When Icecrown comes out the ilvl 232 T9 set can be blue too.

Maybe, just maybe, if they did that people like the OP would come to realise that the strength of gear is relative, and that just because someone can spend 210 badges (how many hours in heroics?) to get a gear set that is 4 tiers behind what raiders are getting it doesn't devalue the game.

The whole deal with moving the baseline forward with each patch is a great aid to recruitment for raiding guilds. We've been recruiting recently and have been able to take on nice and eager guys that haven't had the benefit of being in a proper raiding guild but have at least been able to get entry level gear. In the past, we'd either have had to run them through old instances (boring for us) or they'd have been kept out of raiding altogether.

[sud]

Since 3.02 smart people will either use PUG Checker or check achievements instead of relying on T9 to judge players...

[Eravian]

While I agree that it doesn't give you access to the best loot, and that it definitely helps gear up faster, it is a little painful for more casual raiding guilds progressing through Ulduar or 10-man ToC normal to know that a good deal of the gear they just got will be quickly outmoded by Heroic dungeon loot (either from the badges or the new 5-mans that drop ToC equivalent loot). While it is handy, and doesn't affect the upper tier of raiders that much, to spend a lot of time raiding and than see peoples fresh-80 alts gear up to the same level as you right away can be discouraging.

Plus, with three new 5-mans all dropping new, shiny loot, I think the number of people in Ulduar and Naxx are going to drastically, drastically drop, since weapons will doubtless become available in those that are as good as drops in 10-man ToC.

So the change, like any, comes with both pros and cons... but when it happens we'll roll with it and keep going.

[Nighthorror]

Gear is great and all but just because you got Ilvl 245 gear doesn't mean its the best in slot for you and alot of people don't see that. I have seen countless people running around my server with a gear setup of all the new gear but they lack the soft caps on stats and generally know nothing about stats or how they are suppose to balance out.

[Synapse]

Source: squats I understand blizzard wanting the vast majority of players to be able to see normal-mode content, but making it possible to get a full set of T9.0 just by farming heroics is just a bit to far. It was bad enough that you could get 4 set T8.5 by doing heroics and Vault when 3.2 came out... seriously.

Uhh that's what they did with T8. So far wrath badge top gear is always "current tier -1" 10-man quality.

[dadricvertanis]

This is such a silly debate. I mean, who complains about non-raiders getting a slightly lower raid tier? Jealous tier people who worked for their tier gear. Don't get me wrong, I've worked for my gear forever... I've gotten full tier sets. The thing here is that it doesn't make a bad player good and it doesn't make a good player less valuable, as they will STILL have better gear.

What this does, very simply, is keep a stronger interest in the game by a larger pool of players. As a raid leader, I remember AQ40 / Naxx 1.0. I remember these instances and the gear requirements of them. With these gear requirements comes the need to somewhat frequently gear up new people which meant doing a lot of older (and very draining) content just to catch people up. I'm not talking about the new people earning their gear, I'm talking about raid groups finding someone worthwhile and having to waste 20+ people's time in order to gear 1 or 2 replacement players. Player turnover is a fact of life in 99% of raiding guilds, main switches / people burning out and quitting / etc, its a fact of life. This type of change enables a player to maintain their gear to a level in which its not a huge time investment for a guild to bring them up to the competitive raiding tier of gear.

What happened if a guild didn't invest tons of time to gear up replacements in the past? Guilds broke up unable to make progress, raiding guilds merged, and overall LESS people got to see the instance. It had nothing to do with the skill of those involved. There are many really skilled players who never saw Naxx 1.0, because we couldn't get enough geared people up to speed in time.

Call it welfare all you like, cling to your feeble idea that tier 9 is the privilege of being the elite in this game but in the end, the smart business move on Blizzards part is to enable people to enjoy the game, not to create a very tiny sect of players who played for the entire expansion cycle in order to maintain their gear so they can see the last boss of the last instance.

[Roana]

Source: Kamani For example, the craze for fantasy football is focused on the same human need for a tangible scoring basis to rate and label everything. People want that numerical value expressing status. It's everywhere, and regardless if it is looked down on in general, it certainly does exist.

"Everywhere" being mostly limited to the United States of America, actually. You don't generally see the same degree of obsession with quantitative stats in European sports. Note that I'm not saying that either is good or bad, just that the "human need for a tangible scoring basis to rate and label everything" is less universal than you claim.

[Arklay]

I wonder if women are pissed about other girls that buy cheaper cloths at the end of season.

[Bashal]

I'm going to have to agree with some of the posters that the sole point of raiding shouldn't be getting the best gear in the game and lording it over people who don't have it. I see too much of that; people who behave that way have more than a hint of a bully in them.

I can also understand though, that people who don't behave that way feel that their efforts have been cheapened somehow. I think in part this is why Blizz brought out the achievement system; you can't farm badges for an undying title, twilight vanquisher, a rusted protodrake, or even just the achieve that says you actually cleared the content. I'd also like to point out you got to see the content; that is a big reward too (or at least I consider it to be).

I didn't get to see about 1/2 of the content in BC before wrath. I cleared it after the fact at level 80, was glad I did wander in there eventually, but the whole time I was wishing I had managed to get in there at level 70, when it actually mattered. If anyone reading this thread did manage to clear all the content in BC, my hat's off to you.

Badge farmers can't take that away from you.

[Insahnity]

Source: Arklay I wonder if women are pissed about other girls that buy cheaper cloths at the end of season.

That's a good analogy. Because the rich fashionistas will sneer at them for being out of style, while those wanting to be rich who splurged all their money to get the clothes would be pissed. The rest of the world would likely be the ones buying the clothes on sale, or not caring what is cutting edge fashion, as long as they are dressed acceptably.

At heart, those "in style" will be decked out in top gear because they can "afford it" by virtue of having a good community to raid with and devoting the time to grind it. The fringe who get a few pieces in fractured / dysfunctional / small guilds through luck or PuGs will get a few, and the masses (casuals) just have to get by with welfare gear (and quite frankly don't know better or don't care).

Incidentally, I'm totally spending my triumph emblems on vendor bought T7 gear! Wewt!

[winterbourne]

i hate the term 'e-peen' but honestly.... it applies here. People are WAY too attached to their gear, and the effort it took them. This game survives and thrives on how it treats casuals. Let's face it, Blizzard doesn't have to cater to the hardcore players, so long as the new content is fresh, regular, challenging, and implemented well. Ulduar hit on all of these points.

Casuals have to be embraced, welcomed, and given a leg up or this will just be another MMO with a dwindling player-base that gets forgotten and shuttered. There have to be low resistances to gearing up and getting to a peer level that allows you to at least WITNESS end-game content. If a new player (who is capable and competent) doesn't get to see Naxx, Sarth, VoA and at least the Flame Levithan within 6-7 months of rolling her first level 1... Blizz will lose that gamer as a customer. They will not allow that.

Plus, no one likes an elitist bragging in /trade about their gear. We see your 258's and your raid acheivements, we know you are superior, so try to act like a superior. You know... dignity, grace, breeding, class. That impresses us all a lot more than bragging.

[InBeforeLock]

Raid Achievements (with their associated titles) and rare mounts seem a much better way to reward players for excellent play.

They do not get lost when the new content arrives.

I am on the bandwagon that even weapons should be available for Emblems (even if they are very very expensive i.e. 150 Emblems of Triumph for ilevel 245 weapon).

[felhoof]

With achievements being in the game I no longer see gear as the primary benchmark for experience and skill. That may have been (mostly) the case before (though there were plenty of guilds selling T6 and even selling Brut kills back in the day) but it's not the case any more.

The only difference between this and Sunwell is that you can get actual tier gear instead of really insanely good gear. The actual ilvl? Didn't change. I don't see why this would be a bad thing for anyone.

If you're having problems figuring out whether someone is good, don't look at their gear, look at their achievements. If you're still having problems, do a run or two with them. I can guarantee you that for every person that wants to raid and has tons of crappy gear, there's another player who wants to raid and knows their stuff, and would have otherwise been stuck farming instances for months to get remotely decent gear in a couple pieces.

This is going to be the future. It works for arena, and it's going to work for raiding. If you don't like it, sucks to be you.

[luv2tank]

meh, this is the same discussion when conquest badges came out. While it was kind of a slap in the face at the time(downed yogg first time the night prior), i do not see any harm not. My guild was mostly a 10man raiding guild, now we can and have been focused on 25man content. The gear upgrades have made our overall experience much better for a whole group and guild raiding. Yes, it sucks when we have been slaving over gear just to hear this, however I am hoping and assuming Icecrown will be much more difficult than ToC was/is.

Also, in my experience-gear does not help even the worst of players. It is not like getting 4/5 t9 pieces will help people get better at the game. They will still be the same player they were when they were farming badges in heroics instead of the ones that have had the gear weeks/months prior to the triumph change(if indeed this is true).

[Bashal]

Source: luv2tank Also, in my experience-gear does not help even the worst of players. It is not like getting 4/5 t9 pieces will help people get better at the game. They will still be the same player they were when they were farming badges in heroics instead of the ones that have had the gear weeks/months prior to the triumph change(if indeed this is true).

Exactly. You'll still see them blindly following gem socket colors, using the resilience shoulder and head enchants cause they didn't bother (or don't know) to farm the right rep, they'll have weird enchants on their gear (like armor to cloak when they are DPS), etc.

Spend 5 seconds looking at their gear and you'll see the same thing you always did. T9 doesn't make them somehow invisible.

[Genhawk21]

Source: Bashal Exactly. You'll still see them blindly following gem socket colors, using the resilience shoulder and head enchants cause they didn't bother (or don't know) to farm the right rep, they'll have weird enchants on their gear (like armor to cloak when they are DPS), etc. Spend 5 seconds looking at their gear and you'll see the same thing you always did. T9 doesn't make them somehow invisible.

This, plus - the key to getting a good raid group is *gasp* active management by guild/raid leaders. Gear has never really been a proxy for skill, even in the old days, since people frequently eBayed their toon when they tired of raiding.

Back in the "old days" of 40-man content, it fell to the guild/class/raid leaders to take new recruits on trial runs to evaluate their skills. You might laugh, but we used to evaluate MC applicants by taking them on a 10-man UBRS, with the class leader in the group watching everything they did to make sure they had a clue or at least were willing to learn.

I think that's still the real "hardmode" of WoW - matching leaders willing to actively manage to followers willing to be managed and make an independent effort. Gear has only ever been a very loose proxy for that dynamic.

[Alimea]

""Everywhere" being mostly limited to the United States of America, actually." good point, but that it is used for everything, from cars, sports to dating and being in a "relationship", there is an inherent (from what I have seen American) need to quantify things. Bad thing? I don't know, I try not to do it and I don't like it per say, but categorizing things makes life black and white... neat segregation into good and bad, right?

Good point about gearing up replacements, we had couple nights were we couldn't do progression content because one of the main healers/tanks/dps wasn't available (RL stuff). Having some form of replacement in gear that won't make them a dead weight is awesome.

I like my gear, I do enjoy getting a new piece, and min/max-ing from what I have, I love the fact that I worked very hard for it. Having it before other tanks around, is somewhat of a satisfaction (short lived). But just like with RL, there is more to it than iLvl. Interviews, resume (achievements), knowledge and the suits (ilvl) all important. How many people in your firm come to interviews tie-less?

Here is the important part: if you skipped most of this long post.
There are two stages to being the best Tank (realm, guild, faction...)
1. You are the best tank (.....).
2. You don't have to prove it anymore.

There is much to learn from other tanks, but how can you learn from them if they aren't allowed to eat at the same table cause they don't have a suit on?