02-14-2008, 06:55 PM
Quote: In particular, I'd like to see 'absolute best 5-man gear' be enough to begin the latest & greatest raid instance - mostly because I prefer 5-man play and still want a good character but also so that bleeding edge guilds can recruit without ripping key players from intermediate guilds. A friend of mine that still plays had his guild fall apart in SSC this way and he's no happier stuck in Kara than I was with nothing but 25's for further growth.
Badges drop in 5-mans, and are 1 tier behind T6 right now. Although it would take a special sort of dedication to get a whole set of T5 badge gear from heroics, and there are a couple of slots missing. But purely from a gear standpoint, I think most classes could get a gearset acceptable for starting T6 from a mix of Badge gear, a couple of high quality blues, some rep items, and maybe pvp weapons.
If I was a raid leader, I would probably strongly prefer somebody wearing raid gear because it's more likely they have raid skills.... things like showing up on time, bringing consumables, taking direction, sitting in one place for 4hr at a time - if you have 3-4 pieces of tier gear its a higher probability that you can do those things then if you have the mish mash, even if the gear is an imperceptible difference in actual performance.