07-19-2010, 02:15 PM
I pretty much agree with Crusader that it would be nice to see more variety than just "either it's an epic or you're a noob". I don't have a quick reference handy, but there was at least one quote from Blizzard in the past that they were looking to move toward having the greens (normal quests) -> blues (dungeon) -> epics (raids) progression in Cataclysm. However, they have also stated that they were happy with the way the badging system works other than the fact that they would like to only use two tiers of badges: The current raiding tier badges and all other tiers. Given that perspective on the badge system, I would expect that epics will be available for badges, at latest, after one tier of raiding has come and gone, downgrading the gear available for the first tier of raiding to be available with the non-progression badging system.
I would be very surprised if Blizzard took that "catch-up" progression path away. It has been highly successful in TBC and WotLK so I doubt they would remove it. That said, it's perfectly possible Blizzard could make blue items available for heroic points rather than epics (at least initially). It could actually be a kind of cool design to have blues available from heroic 5-man level content but epics from raiding, but make their ilvl the same. I doubt they would go to the trouble of changing epics to blues at a higher ilvl when downgrading previously progression-level badge gear to the non-progression tier, but it would be kind of a fun way to preserve the differences between 5-man and raiding.
(07-19-2010, 01:34 PM)Tal Wrote: I disagree. I recently decided to swap to my Paladin as my main in Cataclysm. As a result I was able to use heroic drops and badges to get her in raiding shape in surprisingly short order. It didn't feel as grindy as the swap from the paladin to the warrior in classic.
Add in dual spec and you need a full epic set for your secondary spec and it becomes even harder to gear up.
I would be very surprised if Blizzard took that "catch-up" progression path away. It has been highly successful in TBC and WotLK so I doubt they would remove it. That said, it's perfectly possible Blizzard could make blue items available for heroic points rather than epics (at least initially). It could actually be a kind of cool design to have blues available from heroic 5-man level content but epics from raiding, but make their ilvl the same. I doubt they would go to the trouble of changing epics to blues at a higher ilvl when downgrading previously progression-level badge gear to the non-progression tier, but it would be kind of a fun way to preserve the differences between 5-man and raiding.
-TheDragoon