heroic-badges
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Wrath storage solutions
By now you have surely heard of the new Achievements system set up for Wrath of the Lich King. While this will finally give collectors an extra incentive and reward, players are a bit worried about their bag space. It was announced recently that non-combat pets and mounts would take up no bag space in Wrath, and instead, the item that currently houses the pet will serve to teach you a spell for summoning the pet, and then disappear. While this is a huge weight off of the shoulders of many players, when reading through the current list of Achievements, one begins to wonder where all of their tabards, battleground tokens, badges, holiday items, epics, trinkets, and the like are going to go. Although we don't have information regarding the storage of every item we'll soon be collecting, Tigole made the following statement:Your bags will be ok. I promise. Pets, Mounts, Heroic Badges, BG Tokens are all getting storage space.I wonder how badges and tokens are getting storage space. Surely, they cannot be turned into spells, and I don't have room for bags specifically dedicated to only one or the other, so I'm definitely interested to know what they have up their sleeves, and if any other collectible items will get similar treatment.
Badges of Justice topple the Black Temple
According to Drysc, the Sunwell Plateau will bring new badge loot to a vendor near you. Its too early to say what these items will be, but Drysc says the items are going to be Black Temple quality.This definitely has ups and downs. In my opinion, it really seems like the devs are eager to make their past dungeons obsolete. Dumping the old world raids with the launch of the Burning Crusade made a lot of sense, but rendering most of the pre-Sunwell content obsolete with badge gear within the same chapter of the game seems a little strange to me. Even if the vendor was in the raid zone itself, giving a wider selection of gear to those who have cleared Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, that would only lead to those with a plethora of badges paying for a raid ID for vendor access.Of course, this could be a very good thing for people sitting on many, many badges from Karazhan and are trying to gear up for Wrath of the Lich King levelling. Black Temple loot in exchange for a few Kara runs? Sure, I'll take that!
Phat Loot Phriday: Dory's Embrace
Cloak time! This fairly new cloak sits in a weird place in the endgame ecosystem-- it's a PvP cloak in a PvE world.Name: Dory's EmbraceType: Epic CloakArmor: 114Abilities: +34 Stamina Improves critical strike rating and resilience by 20, attack power by 46, and your attacks ignore 112 of your opponents' armor So it's a Rogue PvP cloak. But wait-- this cloak actually comes from, well, go read the "How to Get It" part below. Go ahead. I'll wait. Isn't that a little weird? To get one of the best PvP cloaks for rogues in the game, you have to do PvE. Blizzard doesn't think it's that weird-- they say that originally, they were keeping PvP gear only for PvPers and PvE gear only for those raiders. But later on, they decided that was a bad idea, and now we've got cloaks like this. Still, it's a pretty awesome (and nice looking) cloak. And your guess is as good as ours who "Dory" is. I thought it was that fish from Finding Nemo, and it turns out that it's actually a type of fish, but considering the flavor text is "approximately priceless," that doesn't seem right. How to Get It: To get this cloak, you've got to visit good old Gears G'eras in Shattrath, and turn in a whopping 60 Heroic Badges. Badges, as you probably already know, are available from Heroic instances, as well as from raid bosses in Karazhan and Zul'Aman. So this is a cloak that you can only get from doing PvE.If you jumped down to this section from the section above, you can go back now.This cloak was added in with the patch 2.3 gear, so if you haven't seen it there before, that's why. The good news is that even though 60 Badges is a lot, you can supposedly pick up 22 Badges in a full Karazhan run. So just run it three times and you're all set.Getting Rid of It: This cloak is disenchantable, and like all level 70 epic items, DEs into a Void Crystal. Sells back to a vendor for 60 Heroic badges. No, I'm just kidding, but wouldn't that be nice? Vendors won't buy it back at all-- apparently they have no need for your ratty old Epic gear.
Shifting Perspectives: Drops for Druids in Zul'Aman
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by David Bowers and Dan O'Halloran. Patch 2.3 has hit the PTR and the new itemization has some very interesting items for druids of every spec. The new equipment is coming from three sources: the new 10-man raid zone, Zul'Aman, the Arena Season 3 vendor and the new Badges of Justice rewards. Today I'm going to focus on the Zul'Aman drops. Here's a list by boss:Nalorakk the Bear Avatar(Cat) Bladeangel's Money Belt (Leather Waist) 227 AC, +25agi, +27sta, Blue Socket, +4atk socket bonus, +21 crit, +58 atk, 77 armor negation. A solid upgrade to the Girdle of Treachery from Karazhan, but not quite as good if you can get a Belt of Deep Shadow crafted. Arguably, one of the top 3 or 4 belts in the game. Be ready to /roll against rogues for this belt for your Cat Druid.
Heroic badges in Kara and Zul'Aman
Dan mentioned it in a quick note earlier this morning, but this is such a big piece of news, to my mind, that it deserves an even bigger mention: in patch 2.3, Heroic badges will drop from bosses in Karazhan and Zul'Aman.That's a gigantic change. We can only guess that it'll work the same way that Heroic instance bosses do now-- every member of the raid will get to grab their own Badge of Honor for each and every boss kill. And that is big-- currently, the badges are only available from bosses in Heroic mode dungeons, which means the only way to get them is to run Heroics.Of course, whether Heroics or Karazhan are harder for you depends on your experience and your raid, but my sense of the general consensus is that most guilds are already farming Karazhan, while Heroics are only being run by small groups of really experienced players just to get the badges. And when you don't need to get the badges from Heroics any more, what reason is there to go in there?
