T9 is the new black

While I can find very little to say which is anything but complimentary about the new random dungeon system (as the fact that it has consumed my life and that it seems to think I want to run HoS as a daily hardly count), I can still muster sufficient negativity to pen at least one lament in response to the new tool - which is to say that people really are overgeared these days.

Sure, it's great fun to get all that swag that just a few weeks ago was just out of reach for your main, but on the other side of that coin, characters who have not been played much recently and newly-80 characters are facing a gearing deficit which is reminiscent of the late vanilla days.

That said, as steep and severe as the difference in gear between the typical main and the average alt is now, there is at least one massive difference as compared to the days before BC dropped - accessibility is night and day. In vanilla, I knew I had no chance of catching up to the better-geared of my friends, at least in this era I can get up to par with a few weeks of random dungeons.

And the random dungeon system does do a good job of helping that fresh-faced toon through the gearing arc - anything that drops is almost certainly won uncontested on a need roll, since no one needs heroic drops anymore, and the matching system seems to do a fair job of mixing the people who can't quite cut it with those who can - though it has become all too common a sight for people to berate and taunt those who havn't quite caught up yet, which is just terrible considering that those who make the loudest noises about such things are dripping with badge gear themselves.

But above and beyond all of that, the place I'm really noticing the negative impact of the hot and cold running emblems of triumph is in aesthetics. Everyone looks even more homogenized than before, and they all looked pretty bog-standard before. Where once you would say that the lackluster pallete and general theme of LK gear made everyone more or less look the same, now they really do look exactly the same. Every warrior has the same shoulders, every Death Knight is running around with the same axe. Again, it's a repeat of the late vanilla era when the ubiquity of tier 0 and 0.5 gear made the average trip to ironforge akin to stepping into a hall of mirrors.

I can only hope that as the elites work their way through ICC that some degree of variety re-emerges as we at least find ourselves with a population divided into two gear sets, rather than just one. WoW's lack of outward appearance customization has long been a point of contention for some, and a point of indifference for most, but this blogger at least wishes we didn't all look exactly the same.