Not all that Hardcore after all

I've been listening to a lot of complaints about two different upcoming changes in the 3.3 patch. First of all, they're changing the heroic system so that heroics drop emblems of Triumph instead of Conquest. Second, they're adding the ability to turn in 10 heavy borean leather for an arctic fur.

Certainly, blizzard is just handing out the epics for free now, right? Catering to the casuals? Right?

Wrong. If you had tried to gear up an alt in the game prior to patch 3.2, or if you had tried to raid at level 70 in the Burning Crusade, you might have a better appreciation for the new philosophy on heroic dungeon emblems. First of all, the gear you can buy with dungeon emblems is not bleeding-edge. In any given tier of content, there's the heroic-mode progression gear, the normal-mode progression gear, and then there's the heroic dungeon badge gear, and even then you can't get all of that gear. I can get 2t8 for my rogue with badges now, but not 4t8, and the offset gear that I can get with conquest emblems isn't as good as what I could get if I were running ulduar.

In the Burning Crusade days, you actually had to raid Karazhan to gear up for SSC and Magtheridon, and you had to farm that content to raid the t6 content, which needed to be pretty well farmed to make it in the sunwell. Not that I saw anywhere near all that stuff, of course. But heaven help you if you were late to the game - you'd have to find a guild that was raiding the content you could participate in, or if your guild lost some members it might have to downshift a tier for a while to get the new people up to speed.

This way, there's not only more demand for heroic dungeons (pugging that content was pretty hard in 3.1, since there were no rewards worth getting in heroics at that point for a well-geared character), there's also a clear path to getting into the top tier of content in a reasonable pace. You can't just start doing the top tier of progression the day after you hit 80, but you also don't have to spend months and months getting up to speed either. It's a good balance.

Just because you had to spend all your DKP on your t8, and I got two pieces because I pugged like crazy, doesn't make your t8 any less cool. You've had it for ages, odds are you probably already replaced it with some 245 level gear. Go you.

As for the leather thing - arctic fur is pretty hard to get. I get it in about 1 in 150 skins. But farming for arctic fur means that in most servers, regular borean leather sells for so cheap on the AH (due to the glut) that you can actually buy leather from the AH, make a leatherworking item, and vendor that item for a profit. That's pretty much the definition of glut. So this will stabilize the arctic fur and leather markets a little bit - fur will be a bit easier to get, but at costing 60 leathers per fur (10 heavy leather), it's still not simple.

I'm sure there are still people who will complain that a Scrub like myself has access to all that leet gear that they sweated over. But in the end, my having gear doesn't make your gear any less cool, unless you're the kind of elitist snob who only likes something that nobody else has. In which case, you've got bigger problems.