As you’ve probably seen eleswhere, much is being made of Drysc’s little comment that Patch 2.4 would include “BT-quality badge loot”.
I’m… torn.
On the one hand, yay. It’s always nice to have more avenues to gear up – and this makes it easier for endgame-clearing guilds to gear up rerolls and new recruits. Not that I’m in an endgame-clearing guild, but I can see it’d be an issue.
On the other hand, there’s a couple of negatives, and the biggest for me is: Now it’s going to be even harder to ignore Karazhan and Zul’Aman. I am sick to death of Karazhan. I would be quite happy never to set foot in there again. But it’s the single best source of badges; four hours in Karazhan nets over a dozen badges – more if you’re clearing fast, with a well-geared team. There aren’t many other places where you can get more than three badges an hour – Heroic SH (if you have a tankadin handy) is the standout there.
If badge loot is going to be so very alluring, there really needs to be a 25-man route to get badges, because right now there’s a big conflict between the time demands of raiding (to see and beat the content) and the time demands of badge farming (to gear up). Feeling the pressure to cancel, say, Gruul or Void Reaver so we can send two or three Kara teams off to farm badges instead… well, that’s not a step forward.
Agreed, Im all for other people having avenues of improving their gear. But I hate that its easy for people in one fell swoop to catch up with me for several months of work by doing Kara!
Well, I think there will be a lot more prestige in T6 gear than equivalent badge loot, so the people clearing BT still get their ego boo; I don’t really see it as ‘catching up’, because there’s a lot of other benefits to the endgame raids beyond just pure boss drops. (Rep, rep rewards, trash-drop crafting mats, crafting patterns, actually getting to see the content, titles, etc.)
But I still don’t like it, simply because it means that for anyone who doesn’t have access to T6 raid loot, there’s no incentive to go beyond Kara – why “waste time” in SSC or TK when you can get _better_ loot by running Kara? That is not a good conclusion to force a raid group into. That’s why I think there should be alternative, 25-man-friendly, sources of badges if they’re going to make badge loot this good.
Maybe the BT equivalent loot should be bought with Elite Badges… Those that drop in tougher dungeons 25 mans/ maybe Zul Aman?