I wrote this as a reply to a thread on the PTR forums where the original poster was complaining that you could buy T6 loot with BoJ. I felt it’d fit here as a general statement of my opinion, too.

The only real problem with having high-level loot accessible via badges of justice was that it was going to be more appealing for guilds to farm Karazhan than to progress through Tier 5 content, which is obviously a bad thing. Now that 25-man bosses will drop badges of justice as well, some of that issue goes away (although Kara’s still the best rate of return timewise); that solves most of the issue.

Honestly, anyone QQing over the fact that pre-T6 raiders can buy 5-6 pieces of T6 loot (out of 17 gear slots) by spending 485 badges (ie 22 full Kara clears, or 7-heroics-a-week for 22 weeks)… needs a sense of perspective.

Everyone knows who the good progression guilds on their server are. If you’re in a casual raiding guild that’s in the middle of T5 content right now – like mine is – no-one’s going to ooh and aah over you when you get your phat T6 loot or when your guild uses the leg-up in gearing to finally hit MH and BT… because everyone who cares about that kind of content will have the same opportunities to do it. It ain’t going to be a status thing by then, and that’s fine. The ‘top’ guilds on the server will still get the respect they’re due for the dedication and ability they’ve displayed for their server firsts and their pre-nerf clears (minus any respect they loseWeight Exercise for being arrogant jerks about it)… and that’s not going to change either.

Making better loot available to those of us in the mid-levels of raiding does not mean that BT is suddenly going to be full of scrubs in greens with a handful T6-level badge epics — or if it is, they’re going to have an expensive and wipetacular night, and more power to them if they want to waste their gold like that.

It just means that those of us who started late, or who have reasons to stay in less-progressed guilds, still have a chance to see some of this pretty awesome endgame content before WotLK hits… and none of that is going to threaten the status of the serious achievers in PvE.

There’s a popular quote that says “the right to swing your fist ends where your neighbor’s nose begins”. Stop trying to ruin our fun – it’s not going to be impinging on yours.