Forum Post of the Day: The heroic badge gear QQ&A
Romn, a warrior over in Europe, had this great idea to put a "QQ&A" on the official WoW forums over there, which debunks a lot of the mistaken assumptions people have about new gear purchasable with heroic badges in Patch 2.3. The format basically poses the "QQ" question ("QQ" is somehow shorthand for "Cry a lot"), followed by the no-nonsense answer showing the reasoning behind the way things are.
His basic premise is that the new heroic trade-ins are not at all the same T5 raiding gear. Instead, they're just different, and depending on what stats you need most, you'll probably find that the raiding gear from Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep is still better. He says the new heroic sets certainly don't break the game or make raiding useless -- they just open the door to pretty good gear for people who can't get into those raids. Other people in the thread go back and forth with him for a bit, noting that for certain classes and talent specs, the new gear actually is the best gear in the entire game. The posters in that thread take the discussion even farther, and they present their ideas well.
Certainly there's a lot to discuss on this topic, but what I love about this post is the "QQ&A" format. There are a lot of reasonable complaints people can make about game issues, of course, but more often than not, even these reasonable complaints can get blown way out of proportion. I'd love to see more QQ&As about other topics on the forums as a way of helping players to reestablish their understanding of what's really going on in the game, and not get distracted by those who use smoke and mirror arguments to make light drizzles seem like hurricanes. It's only when you take away the over-simplified and over-hyped "QQing" than you can discuss a problem with a practical understanding of what's going on.
