Originally posted by: BadRobot
I assume when lich comes out its gear will blow away the gear from outlands, just like outlands blew away the gear from the old world.
I don't think that the gear will be blown away and that you'll see a lot more linear upgrading. The problem is that the pre-BC blues and such were absolutely horrible gear with mostly stats and such. I mean, take a look at DS1 vs T1 and DS3 vs T4... you'll see that the differences between DS3 and T4 may not be that big but the differences between DS1 and T1 were huge. Old gear was mostly stats and maybe had some +damage or +healing on it. Because of this, Blizzard needed to help gear up the players that had this crappy gear so they could "normalize" the BC content. By normalize, I mean by boosting up the low-end they wouldn't have to make the content weaker, which would in turn make BC content so easy for people with T1-T3, that there'd be no challenge. But heck, there's already a large difference between going through with T1-T3 than normal BC gear. I remember taking out elites with ease on my Night Elf Rogue but not being able to do so on my Undead Rogue that just had BC gear.
Originally posted by: AntiFreze
I agree, this is just a gear race until Lich King comes out. But im not complaining. The badge gear combined with the nerfs will allow my guild to push through the rest of SSC and TK quicker and possibly see BT before the expansion comes out.
I do not think it's a gear race at all. One of the biggest complaints from "Vanilla" WoW is that some players never got to experience more than MC, BWL, AQ20 and ZG. They completely missed out on the upper-end of PVE and that includes the instance that Blizzard is most proud of: Naxxramas. Because of this, Blizzard is lifting restrictions and making it easier to get at the content so the not-so-Nihilums of the world will be able to at least step foot into these zones and get a boss or two.
Also, some of the gear being added as tokens is
not to necessarily help with these encounters!! The reason Blizzard is adding gear is because players are doing PVP to get gear for PVE. Blizzard is trying to segregate the two so players don't feel forced to PVP to get gear if they don't enjoy PVP. Although personally, PVP welfare epics vs PVE "welfare epics" will never be equivalent until they lower badge prices. Honor is not nearly as hard to obtain as finding a decent group to do Heroics/Karazhan with. Unless your guild does it, but still... I'm willing to bet that you can get PVP gear faster than you can get PVE gear.
Note that Blizzard did the opposite when Arenas came out. In "Vanilla" WoW, players wanting to PVP would flesh out the PVP gear with gear from raid instances or simply PVP using raid gear, as the stats vastly outweighed the higher HP from PVP gear (and some of the PVP gear just flat out sucked). When Arenas came out, Blizzard added resilience to try to stop people from using PVE gear in PVP or help stifle it at least.