As we posted yesterday, it has been made very clear at this point that Emblems of Valor are the emblems that are going to drop in the 10-man version of Ulduar, while the 25-man version will drop the entirely new Emblems of Conquest. Nothing is being added to the EoV vendors aside from the relics that drop in Naxx-25.

In other words, 10-man raids are basically getting glossed over, and 25-man raiders are getting all the new shinies.

Where 25-man raiders get an entirely new quartermaster with access to gear on par with normal-mode Uld-25 drops (ilvl 226), as well as two of their tier 8.5 tokens, we get recycled EoV gear that was originally meant for Naxx-25 raiders. This is gear that is half a tier worse than the gear that drops in Uld-10 normal mode (ilvl 213 vs 219), and there is no way for us to buy our tier 8.0 gear with emblems, at all.

Add this to the fact that Val'anyr (the new legendary healer mace) is a 25-man exclusive, and I'm one annoyed raider. They have been saying all along that they want 10-man and 25-man to be separate progression paths. I'm starting to think it's no coincidence that they left out "but equal;" it's becoming more and more apparent that 10-man progression is meant to be significantly worse than 25-man progression.

The major argument that Blizz has been giving against putting T8.0 gear for purchase by EoVs is that they don't want 25-man guilds stockpiling hundreds of emblems in order to rush out and buy stuff on the 3.1 release - they want to depart from the Burning Crusade model of badge farming. That seems like a good idea to me, but the thing to do would have been to introduce a new kind of emblem just for Uld-10, with trading-down to EoVs. Let's call them Emblems of Awesome, or EoAs for short.

10-man raiders would then get their EoAs out of Uld-10, which they could use to buy T8.0 pieces, just like 25-man raiders buy their pieces with EoCs. Ideally there would also be some new pieces on the EoA vendor, with the appropriate ilvl, 219. And if Uld-10 raiders wanted to go buy some EoV stuff, they could trade their EoAs down to EoVs (and then again down to EoHs in case they needed heirlooms or something).

But no, they didn't do this. They recycled the EoV stuff, and decided that it was fine to make us rely on boss drops for tier gear, and to get gear 6 ilvls lower than our drops in exchange for our badges. I'm very disappointed. I was really hoping that in Wrath 10- and 25-mans would be on an equal footing, but once again it seems that only the largest groups are considered first-class raiders. Shame.

Tags: 10-man-raiding, 25-man-raiding, emblem-of-awesome, emblem-of-conquest, emblem-ofvalor, eoa, eoc, eov

Filed under: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding