Smores over Felfire

The amount of nerd rage over the price of the T10 badge gear is… well… impressive. With daily dedication (and running the weekly raid quest twice), you average at about 24 badges a week. This doesn’t include badges you pick up in ICC itself, but at a minimum that gives a player enough badges for 1 piece of gear after 3 weeks (at least for the first 6 weeks). So, at this point in time, if you have two pieces of T10, that’s actually an impressive accomplishment. But, naturally, there are a number of casuals who are freaking out because they will, in all likelihood, only pick up 2 pieces of t10 before Cataclysm comes out because they don’t want to farm their 24 badges a week.

Let me make this perfectly clear: I’m not a huge fan of badge gear. I realize that it’s a necessary evil (especially for us 10-man raiders because the gear jump from 25 ToC to 10 ICC is only a skip while 10 ToC to 10 ICC is a leap) to bridge the gear gap. When it comes to gearing up a new raider, it is infinitely better to run them through 3 heroics instead of a wing in Naxx (as heroics give better gear and quicker badges). And the old days of “hey, we have a new tank we need to gear… let’s start at Kara and work up through BT for him/her” are functionally extinct with badge gear. I appreciate the ability to kit out a new progression raider with heroics (as we had to gear a priest recently), but I have to say that seeing casuals in t10… this makes me mildly irate. Am I being an elitist prick? Probably, but what does Mr. “I only run heroics, but I’m in t9 gear” going to do with all his late-ToC-early-ICC level stuff? Run CoS a little faster and with less heals?

Perhaps WoW wants to keep ICC tier gear “rare-ish,” so the prices are extravagantly high, but this is a temporary solution at best. With 24 badges a week, that’s roughly 100 badges a month (assuming 2 or 3 ICC boss kills that month) and, as Cataclysm will likely not come out until summer (I’m thinking June meself), that’s 4 or 5 months of badges, clocking in at roughly 500 badges, more than enough to pick up every single piece of T10 after farming Marrowgar and Marrowgar alone.

Basically what I’m saying is making T10 gear badge-buyable is fine… but inflating the number of badges simply to limit the casuals seems shortsighted. Why not drop the price of the gear and make the badges farmable from ICC alone? I’d happily save up 30 badges that only ICC bosses drop for a piece of Tier gear. Does this make t10 gear less likely to get in the hands of casuals? Yes, but I fail to see why it’s a problem that only RAIDERS get RAID gear.

You don’t see me crying that my Bejeweled score isn’t as high as my casual colleagues…