Leet Loot

Well, the much-anticipated new badge rewards have finally been released. Here's the list at MMO-Champion.

Now, there has been a lot of debate going on about these rewards, if it's right to offer T6-equivalents to players who just run Heroics umpteen million times, if it makes the T5-level raids completely irrelevant, and what have you. Now, I don't have any experience with high end raiding, but I'm willing to bet it takes a lot more than gear to be successful, and the T4/T5 content offers more than just loot. It offers the chance to get to know your raid group, strategies that could be applied to later bosses, and working as a team.

I think these badge rewards, as well as removing the attunement for the T6 raids, are a way to allow more people to see that content before the Lich King comes out. But anyone who has only run Kara and decides they are ready for Black Temple is going to be hugely mistaken.

Those badge rewards aren't really meant for people running Kara. Those badge rewards are for people running SSC/TK and wanting to move on to BT/Hyjal/Sunwell without spending weeks and weeks to gear everyone up. To that end, badges are also going to start dropping from all raid bosses.

I think a better solution would have been to add a different kind of badge to the 25-man content ([Badge of Uberleetness]), and use those badges to purchase these rewards. That might help to alleviate the whole "jump from Kara to BT" issue that people are all worked up about. But it doesn't really matter. Those who want the awesome gear will get it, it will help those that it's meant to be helping, and is just icing on the cake for the rest of us.

Personally, I'm going to be doing a little bit of number crunching to judge the size of an upgrade compared to the number of badges it takes to get it, and the time it would take me to earn all those badges. I'll probably be finishing out the old badge rewards I want ([Pauldrons of Tribal Fury], [Mask of Primal Power], and [Fetish of the Primal Gods]) before moving onto the new ones. But if we start progressing from Kara into ZA or 25-mans, I may decide to give myself a little boost. I guess only time will tell.