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.