Posts with tag badge-of-justice

Before The Burning Crusade, there simply wasn't any other way to get gear for your character but for it to drop past a certain point. Sometimes you could buy a BoE piece on the auction house - my first epic was a Brain Hacker my wife bought me on the AH. But in general, if you wanted a piece of gear, you farmed for it. You ran dungeons over and over again, hoping a piece would drop, and hoping you would win the roll - and if neither of those things happened, you just kept running. It was possible to run the same dungeon every day, over and over again, and never get that drop you wanted - one friend of mine never completed his dungeon set, even when he was working on raiding Ahn'Qiraj, because the shoulders simply would not drop.

But during BC the Badges of Justice were devised, and for the first time players had a way to get around the luck of the draw. Over the course of the expansion, new gear was placed on vendors, gear that could be purchased for Badges, and this meant that players kept running as much content that dropped those badges as possible. It's fair to say that the badge system kept Karazhan going as a desired raiding location - people would bring their geared mains, even, just to get the extra badges. When the Isle of Quel'Danas vendor opened, all of my friends and guildmates (who were raiding TK and SSC and moving up into Hyjal and the Black Temple) picked up gear from the IoQD vendor, because it was easily as good if not slightly better as the drops we already had. It filled weak spots (those pants or boots or belt that never dropped) or provided us with weapons absolutely as good as drops we hadn't even seen yet.

The badge system got ever more complex in Wrath, with each new raid tier also seeing the debut of a new type of badge and new gear that badge could be spent on. As a result, the two tiered point system (justice and valor points, honor and conquest points for PvP) was introduced in Cataclysm (technically, during the tail end of Wrath) to simplify everything. It worked, to a point. Now, in Mists of Pandaria, we've seen justice and valor points be superseded by the bonus roll mechanic, one that will be revamped in Warlords of Draenor. One could argue that the bonus roll system puts the emphasis back on whether or not an item drops as opposed to simply collecting points to buy an item - it removes the certainty of reaching enough points to make a purchase, as well.

When one considers how dungeons and heroic dungeons will work in Cataclysm, one of the first elements to consider is the way that dungeons have functioned since World of Warcraft's release. I find it illuminating to consider that one of the most complained-about aspects of dungeon running in Wrath of the Lich King seems to my eyes to be a consequence of a successful series of design changes.

We've all heard the complaints about groups treating the dungeons and heroics of the Wrath era as chores, five- to 15-minute frenzied runs through the place, annihilating everything in the path of five silent, grim harbingers of death. No nuance, no subtlety, and no strategy. Crowd control? Crowds are controlled by their own grim, horrible demises. When considered in this light, these dungeons seem less like adventures and more like unfortunate victims of beings who invade and despoil.

However, the reason for this is fairly simple. In Wrath, dungeons have been wildly successful at two very difficult tasks.

There are a lot of things in the patch 3.2 test realm notes that jumped out at me, but the changes to the Emblem system seem like an especially big deal. The developers made it quite clear that they wanted a tiered token system in Wrath of the Lich King, they didn't want players just farming Heroics all day and night to get the best possible gear. In patch 3.2, it looks like they're backing off on that pretty heavily, likely an attempt to reignite interest in running Heroics. If you haven't seen the patch notes, here are the points I'm referring to:

• Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
• Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders' Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph.
• The heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Triumph.
• The existing achievements to collect 1, 25, 50, etc. Emblems of Heroism, Valor, and Conquest have been converted to Feats of Strength since Heroism and Valor Emblems are no longer attainable.

Here's a nice and simple change that recently showed up in the official patch notes on the 3.1 PTR: Now, when someone loots a badge or emblem, everyone in the raid or party will automatically receive their proper emblem. This doesn't apply to people outside the raid instance though, so no twinking your lowbie second account character while they wait outside the instance, sorry.

It's a minor change, but still a welcome one, since it's sometimes easy to forget to check the corpse when you're not in charge of loot and would rather be focusing on getting ready for the next pull.

Speaking of nice instancing changes, this is something we've actually reported on before, but now it's officially in the patch notes and everything: Come 3.1, you will get a confirmation box when you're in danger of being saved to an instance so you know what you're getting yourself into. If you click no, you'll be teleported to the nearest graveyard. Hopefully that'll cut down on those annoying instances where one of your group members forgot he already cleared Sarth that week and got you all saved.

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Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

The image I used for yesterday's The Queue raised some eyebrows, with a lot of people wondering what it was or where it was from. It's just one of a series of paintings throughout Dalaran of the various player races. There are some hanging in the inns, some in the shops, et cetera. My plan was to cycle through them all over the next week or so, and random selection gave me the incredibusty human female first. It might be interesting to note that I'm pretty sure that painting is a nod to Tifa Lockhart of Final Fantasy 7. It could also just be a regular ol' human female wearing the level 1 Warrior starting gear. Who knows?

Today you get the Female Blood Elf, and now let's get the Q&A started.

Plaguenog said...

Any chance they'll let me use Badges of Justice to buy new badges? Or possibly a reduction in prices for lvl 7o badge gear? I'm basically looking for any reason NOT to use as many of my lvl 70 badges for gems to Auction off.

Wrath of the Lich King introduced not only new content, but an entirely new type of item. These items are called Heirloom items, or Bind to Account (BoA) items. They aren't tied to any one character and can be freely passed from alt to alt, but they're all tied to one account, the account that bought the item. No handing them over to your friends, no mailing them to other players, no mailing them to your second account. So far none of these items are drops, but rewards for more veteran players of the Wrath content. There are two different ways of earning these items, but they dovetail nicely.

Quite simply, you need to participate in Wrath's content. Items suited to PvE are acquired via Emblems of Heroism, and items suited for PvP are acquired via Stone Keeper's Shards.

So by now, you've probably heard of Tenris Mirkblood, the Blood Elven vampire boss in Karazhan who is surprisingly generous with his loot, dropping a Vampire Batling for everyone in the raid as well as a very sweet axe by both the musical and weaponry related terms -- Although only one of those, unfortunately.

Tigole answered a few questions about this boss in a recent post on the forums. Tenris will only be around for about 10 days, which is why he's so generous with the bat pets, and the axe is the only other item on his loot table, if you don't count the Badges of Justice.

So what this means, first of all, is that if you haven't managed to get a group to go beat him down, you'll want to do it soon or lose your chance at a pretty cool pet and a pretty cool -- if rather weak -- novelty trinket. In addition, if you weren't lucky enough to win the roll on the Arcanite Ripper on your first try, it looks like you'll only have one more chance at it. Sacrifices to the gods of dice and/or the Gods of Metal, whichever you subscribe to, are recommended.

With phase 4 of the zombie invasion going on we've now got a new boss in Karazhan to deal with: Tenris Mirkblood. He's tuned towards a 10-man group of Karazhan geared players, and can be pretty easily brute forced by a group of folks in Sunwell gear. We first heard about the possibility of Tenris earlier this week.

Let's take a look at how to get to him, his abilities, and some simple strategy to defeat him.

Before You Go

Get the quest "Chamber of Secrets" from an Argent Dawn Emissary. There's one in Light's Hope Chapel in Eastern Plague Lands, and there are a couple in the capital cities. This quest can be shared with other raid members. After you've defeated Tenris you can pick up the quest item from his room to complete quest. Return the quest to either Light's Hope Chapel or the NPC you picked it up from.

How To Reach Tenris Mirkblood

Go into Karazhan and clear up to Attumen. Go up the stairs in the back of Attumen's room, right around where the repair guy is. You'll have to clear several sets of mobs. If you are in T5 gear or below, take your time. Most mobs are grouped up in packs of three to five. There are also a few roaming packs that you'll need to watch out for.

At the top of the stairs you can go right or left. While both will eventually take you to Tenris, going right is the quickest. Clear the rest of the mobs until you come to Mirkblood's door. Be sure to clear any mobs around the area that might be patting back and forth.

Do not open it until you are buffed up and ready to face him.

Badges of Justice: I love them. It's brilliant that you can go to a raid, down a boss, and have everyone walk away with a piece of an epic (albeit a fairly small piece). It really cuts back on the angst of not having what you want drop, as well as giving Blizzard a way to provide for uncommon specs without too much loot table bloat. And with the relatively recent system that has all raid bosses dropping badges, and some pretty great new badge rewards, the system is now quite strong. However, in my view, they do have one defect: they're soulbound.

Now there's a strong argument to be put for the concept that if a character can't do a raid, they shouldn't get the reward. And I certainly agree that badges should not be salable on the AH. However, I do think we should be able to send them between alts. I have one character who needs very little in the way of badge gear, and correspondingly rakes in badges like nobody's business by tearing through Karazhan. My character that really needs the gear is typically not taken on raids, or not "A-group" raids anyway. It would be nice to be able to send all my badges over to that toon to get an undergeared character geared up, without being able to give them to just anybody on the AH.

The Brewfest is currently live for testing on the PTR, and one of the biggest changes is the addition of yet another holiday specific boss, Coren Direbrew. Coren himself isn't completely new. He was also present in the Grim Guzzler last year, when he would give you a quest to deliver brew to the Brewfest and get an offhand tankard in return. This year, however, it appears he's a bit more surly. Instead of simply completing a quest, this time you need to fight him.

Luckily, the loot he drops is more than worth the hassle. Most of it is clones of the trinkets available for badges from G'eras, but there's also a couple other drops that look like a lot of fun. Overall, the loot should draw a lot of people out to Blackrock Depths to beat him up.

A list of his loot is coming up after the break.

As we were promised, the latest Blizzcast episode talked some about the Badge of Justice system, and where they want to take it in Wrath of the Lich King. Specifically, Tigole said the following:

• Badges will definitely be back in Wrath, in some form.
• Like how it's ended up in BC, they want badges to appear in both Heroics and raids.
• However, they want to stratify it more, so it's not just one gigantic pool of items. (They also want to spread the vendors around the world, so it's not just "one dude in Shattrath and one dude out on the Isle of Quel'Danas"; this sounds like an annoyance to me, and at any rate will not make a real difference in how the system works.) Proposed stratification options include:
  • "A token from different levels of content" as well as badges that would need to be turned in for the different levels of items
  • Different kinds of badges

One of the biggest and most successful features of Burning Crusade has been the inclusion of Badges of Justice. Especially in 2.4, these badges have allowed even relatively casual players to get their hands on gear that comes close to the same stuff raiders are able to pull out of end game instances. While the system seems to have been mostly a success, there's still some question as to how it will evolve in WoTLK. The current 2.4 badge loot seems to have been created in part to allow a smoother gear transition between BC and WoTLK for both casuals and ubers, with badges dropping out of 10-man instances and the most powerful badge gear yet. But the question is, will this continue in WoTLK? Will we see badges off of Naxxramas' 10-man version (perhaps earning it the name Badgeramas)? Will we see loot purchasable from a Dalaran vendor that will be comparable to what raiders are pulling out of Icecrown Glacier? Or will they dial it back, or maybe not even include the badge loot system at all?

We ran Karazhan the other day and for the first time in a long time we didn't clear it in one run and took almost four hours only to call it at Prince. Only about half of our regular group could make it that day and we were forced to PuG the rest, even filling the last spot with a player who had never done Karazhan before. Our raid leader and tank grumbled throughout the entire run, sending me tells of wanting to kick people from the group. In the end, we conspired to end our misery by acceding to a couple of attempts at Prince but no more.

For the past weeks, we had been doing 2 1/2 hour Karazhan for badges, and for the most part we made sure that our raid members were equipped in Tier 4-5 or better. We'd turbo pull to bosses with a Paladin tank and Disenchanted nearly every drop because, really, no one needed anything from there. We ran it for badges and wanted to breeze through the instance as quickly as possible. We would wince if we brought someone who wasn't familiar with the strats or had more than a few blues.

Over the past week, particularly in the last few days, the crisp Internet air has been abuzz with news from the upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Fear you're out of the loop? Here's a quick round-up of all the information being released, along with analysis and opinion.

Don't forget to keep checking back, as this page will be updated as information becomes available:

Dungeons and raids

1. An analysis on Arthas as a ten-manned event, including its impact on the 25-man raiding structure, as well an exploration of its consistency with the lore.
2. Did you know that all expansion raids will have a 10-man setting, as well as a 25-man?
3. Read through some of our initial impressions on the 10-man raiding set-up.
4. We also wrote up a concise overview of the ins and outs of dungeons post-expansion, including a new token system, similar to [Badge of Justice].
5. The Nexus has been announced on the official site as one of the new dungeons.
6. The WoW Insider Show discusses 10-manning Arthas.

Zones, factions, and relevant lore

1. Alex has written an excellent overview of the Grizzly Hills, a soon-to-be zone for low to mid-seventies. With old factions reappearing, along with other surprises, it's definitely something to look forward to!
2. If news of the Dragonblight has intrigued you, you'll be pleased to know that more information has been made available.
3. While we're brushing up on our lore and learning about new areas and factions, Alex thought it fitting to illuminate the lore behind Azjol-Nerub, as the Nerubians will have their own role in the expansion.
4. Alex asks us about lore figures we'd like to see in the expansion.