Two little unforeseen consequences of 3.3

So in 3.3, there's this new system in place for people to go to do random heroic dungeons. The random heroic dungeon system is going to make both Proof of Demise and Timear Foresees unachievable - those NPCs will be giving out weekly raid quests instead of daily dungeon quests, and the rewards from the daily dungeon quests will instead be just given to you as part of the random dungeon system - the first random dungeon you do each day rewards you two frost emblems, and every dungeon thereafter rewards you one or two bonus triumph badges.

Word is, the achievement will be transformed into a feat of strength, but if you're a completionist, it's time to start crunching on the daily dungeon quests. Good luck, since with twelve different bosses to choose from, good old' Archmage Land-o-Lakes might not even offer that one last quest you need by the time 3.3 comes out. Me, I don't mind too much - I like achievements (even more these days with Jill), but not so much that I get upset over things like that.

The other consequence is a funny secondary effect. According to all reports from the PTR, using the heroic random dungeon tool you could run heroics all day. That gives you a flow of something like, say, seven or eight triumph badges per hour if you've got a good group and chain-run the heroics. You can get kitted out in full t9 in something like 30 hours of chain heroics. That's a lot of running still, but you could start up the moment you turn 80, and be done with your gearup pretty quickly - a weekend of pizza, mountain dew, and a vacationing spouse for example.

Or could you? You know what most badge vendors don't sell? Weapons. You can get all this ridiculously shiny iLevel 232 gear for your new alt, but still be rockin' whatever you scored off of the Amphitheater of Anguish* quests at level 75. Everybody gets a pretty significant chunk of their productivity from their weapon - upgrading your weapon is usually the biggest per-item gain you can make, from DPS to casters to tanks. And as a starter, if you're lucky, you'll get an iLevel 200 purple weapon to go with your stuff. That's if you manage to get dropped into the one random heroic that drops the weapon you need, and if you see it dropped.

What are your other options? You could spend a whole lot of gold on a BoE epic. This is a pretty decent option, but a lot of the BoE epics are still iLevel 200. My death knight is still rocking that titansteel destroyer, because despite lots of farming in Naxx, he kept losing rolls on the weapon upgrades he wanted (and got retired before I was raiding in Ulduar). Titansteel bars still aren't cheap, given the cooldown on making them, the demand for titanium across the board, and the demand for titansteel in high-level armor crafting (the crusader / runed orb recipes).

You could run the tournament, but going from start to getting a tourney weapon (another iLevel 200 choice) takes a while - after three days of novice and five days of aspirant, you can get a total of 22 crusader emblems on your first day of being a champion (10 from the one-time quest, 3 from the black knight chain, 5 from dailies, and 3 from H-ToC, assuming anyone will take your noob self to H-ToC, and assuming your noob self can actually beat everybody in there).

You could run H-ToC. There are good weapon drops in there for every class, although not optimal - offhanding the Black Knight's Rondel is a real option, but it's relatively slow for most specs. I'm assuming, given the item level on the drops in the new 5-man content, there will be options from that instance as well. Those are real options (again assuming you can get into them and actually down them, which you probably can even with a lousy weapon if the rest of your gear is kitted out), but it's not really possible to farm them using the Random Dungeon tool (since.. it's random), and that's the only situation in which you'll be able to run multiple heroics of the same sort every day. And let me tell you, I've never even seen Aledar's Battlestar. So good luck with that. There are no weapons at all in the loot table for regular ToC.

If you're a DPS spec, the new quested epic weapon from the 5-man content is probably your best bet. Everybody and their sister will be wielding a Quel'delar, I guess. Plus, according to the mmo-champion data, there are decent iLevel 219 weapons in the 5-man, nonheroic dungeon, so that's farmable. At iLevel 219, this is a good bet for the interim, but you'll definitely want to get working on a better weapon as soon as you can, however you can.

*: Yeah, I know. Amphitheater has an h in it in a weird place. The achievement text even has a typo in it, even if the quest text doesn't.