No, you pay for the ability to gear up and see the endgame. Not for Blizzard to give you loots and see the endgame.

Contrary to popular belief Pzychotix, we pay for whatever Blizzard is willing to give us. If we like it we continue on and pay our subscription. If we don't like it we stop playing or don't do the new things they give us. Simple.

The great thing about it is you can continue to grind raids out for gear or do other tasks to get some decent stuff. There are these things called 'options' and 'free will.' Not sure if you have heard of them or not.

If your ego is so tied up in your gear that you feel threatened by someone else obtaining gear through alternate methods... then man you really need to quit WoW

Sure. I agree... I should pay for the amount of content that I see. I only see Karazhan and ZA. So, how about I go over to wowjutsu, count up all the guilds no farther than kara and za, and then we'll divide the cost of the development of those zones by the number of players.

Then we'll add up the number of players in BT/Hyjal/Sunwell, and divide the development costs accordingly. Since you're seeing more of the game than I am, you're okay with that, right?

The fact is that those "alternate methods" require nowhere near the amount of skill, dedication, coordination and gold required to achieve the same level of gear from raiding.

No, I don't think someone soloing a sunwell daily should be entitled to the same rewards as a group of 25 people that show up regularly, with consumables, with their gear gemmed and enchanted, who spend hours learning difficult encounters that require teamwork and communication.

nearlysober wins.

Gear is a means to an end, and not an end itself. If you're playing the game just so you can have more purples than anyone else, or for that extra +5dmg/heal, you need to rethink the amount of time you spend on the game.

You're getting reward enough in even seeing the inside of BT. 99.9% of the playerbase won't ever step foot in there.

I'm sorry, but as someone who does all those things you suggest, I support this change. You're overreacting horribly. If you do every single one of these new Sunwell Dailies and get ridiculously lucky, you'll have a new piece of gear in TWO MONTHS. That's for ONE piece of gear.

Meanwhile, 25 man bosses will be dropping badges. So you and I, who run 25 mans, will be getting badges every raid. If we run Kara and ZA every week and do just Tempest Keep and SSC, not even Hyjal and BT, we're looking at easily 65 badges a week if we clear them. That means what takes a casual two months to do, we can do in a little more than two weeks, AND we'll be getting loot in the meantime. Throw in Hyjal and BT and the badge count increases. Plus, if we really want to, we could do the daily heroic (since, frankly, we're overgeared for it) for another five badges a day.

Meanwhile, the dude who MIGHT get a badge for doing a daily quest is somehow devaluing your hard work? Frankly, if the fact that you get better gear faster than he ever can AND get to see the best raids in the game isn't enough, I have no idea what would be for you.

I think you're failing to see the point I was making - it's not about time, but the amount of effort required. Killing Kael'thas and Vashj is hard! Running a bombing daily is not.

Bayard,
I hope you remember this discussion the next time you go out to eat. I don't know what you do for a living, but I bet the waitress thinks you get paid lots of money for not working nearly as hard as she does. Tip accordingly.

-p-

Killing some bosses the first time is hard, true. But then they're on farm and it's easy. Free cake. Frankly, if raiders haven't had Illidan on farm for months already, maybe some of this gear will help them get there. gear > skill anyway in WoW.

I'd like to clarify with an analogy:

It's like you went up into the mountains on a long and difficult hike in order to catch a rare and very tasty fish. The hike was very tiring, and even once you got to the pond up in the mountains where the fish lives, it took you quite a while to catch it. But you did, and you took it back home and cooked it for dinner, and it tasted soooo good.

And then, the next day, you went to the supermarket and saw that they had just started carrying fish steaks of that rare fish you worked so hard to get. Sure, it costs an arm and a leg per pound, but even someone who pays that money for it won't have gone through all the work you had to to get your fish.

Wouldn't you be a bit depressed?

When I read that, I instantly thought about the old adage as to the effort being part of the reward in itself. you overcame, you mastered, that achievement must surely be the biggest part to me. if you just do it for the gear, I'd advise you to jump ship and simply do arenas.
gear is no longer a status symbol depicting your awesomenes, it is more like a means to do something else better/easier.
as posted above, be sure you separate means and the goal.
on the offhand, it is nice to see someone argue a bit more, instaed of just crying wellfare epix! :D