Gearing up for PvE content has always been a struggle, and with the difficulty dial set firmly on Cataclysmic you want to make sure that you have the best gear you have access to before you start raiding. But what does having the best gear actually mean?
- Running heroics until you’re bored of them just to try to get a stupid item to drop. For mages there’s a big lack of iLevel 346 bracers (there’s two without Spirit, one dropping from an optional boss) and wands (again there’s two without Spirit).
- Running heroics to grind reputation with factions until you’re guaranteed some nice gear once you hit exalted. (Flamebloom Gloves and Desert Walker Sandals are examples)
- Running heroics to gather up the cloth and Chaos Orbs in order to tailor some epic items. Don’t expect any nice raiding gear from your profession as it’s pretty much only good for PvP starter sets.
All of these award Justice Points, which you think would help with balancing out your gear by plugging the gaps where your luck has let you down. Take the burden away from repeatedly grinding heroic instances so that you become bored of them before your first month of Cataclysm is up.
Wouldn’t that make sense? Wouldn’t that be logical?
Alas, it’s not to be. What we find available for Justice Points is largely just a variation of what’s either readily available in dungeons or easily accessible from reputation vendors at revered. All they have is a shuffling of stats, trading Crit for Mastery or Hit. They’ve even reused the same models, resulting in a forest of casters all wearing assorted pointy hats.
But what can be done about it? Make gearing up too easy and you churn people out in raid ready gear after only doing a few heroics. Make it too hard and people would do something – anything – than run another force-fed heroic in the hopes that the item they want will drop.
- How about setting bosses to drop location specific tokens, like a chestpiece token or an offhand token or similar. Maybe even part of a token, so that you had to get three or five of them to actually buy anything with them. While it’s an interesting idea, it would result in identikit characters all wearing the same gear with the same stats. There’d be no variation any more – you’d just buy whatever’s best in slot for your spec because that’s what you’re told to do.
- How about having more loot available so that bosses might drop two items a time instead of just one? At worst it would mean a big pile of Heavenly Shards landing on the Auction house (as if this isn’t happening already)
- How about making crafting professions useful again by allowing them to craft some heroic-grade gear? Maybe using a single Chaos Orb instead of the 20 that an epic belt would chew through might be a good idea. Of course, make it too easy and people would just skip heroics altogether.
There are so many ways to itemise in this game, yet I can’t help but feel that Blizzard have done a poor job at this bracket. And it’s not just the drought of items in some areas, but the duplication in others. Why have Belt of the Depths available as a tailoring craftable item for thousands of gold when most players will pick up Cord of the Raven Queen for 35g as soon as they hit exalted with the Guardians of Hyjal and reforge stats as needed.
As for Justice Points? Keep ‘em. You can’t buy Chaos Orbs with them, or rare patterns or gems. They are useless to me.
For mages they are useless. I’ve been using them to buy Heirlooms for my alts though.
Aye, Heirlooms are a great alternative if you don’t already have them. Unfortunately I’ve either bought them back in Wrath, or got the alt up to 80 so they wouldn’t benefit. We haven’t been able to unlock the guild heirlooms yet, which is annoying.
After transferring all of my heirlooms off to Terenas, I still could use a few – they’re useful for me (at the moment..). Didn’t even need to buy much, the instance drops were better for me :/
Aye, that’s the other thing! The justice point gear is all mastery heavy, which is great if you’re Arcane but pretty poor otherwise. The dungeons offer better loot, leaving me with this big bag of points and nothing to spend them on.
Gotta agree, unless you’re Arcane and like lots of mastery there are very few things that take my fancy from the JP vendors and I’m really at a lost as to what to do with the JPs sat in my currency tab.
To be honest I always kinda liked the vanilla way of gearing up (and this isn’t a ‘wasn’t vanilla awesome’ rant, I’m a TBC baby lol) where you got you blue dungeon sets from boss drops at the 58-60 instances and there were quests to upgrade them. I like the reputation gear you get to help you on your way but do we really need JPs as well that seem to favour certain classes/specs over overs?
Vanilla wasn’t a bed of roses back in the day. You used to have to class-raid Stratholme, Scholomance or Lower Backrock Spire (8 people), or 15-man Upper Blackrock Spire *if* you knew someone with the key. This was back in the day before the LFD tool, so groups would take an eternity to set up. It was a running joke that I managed to complete my arcanist set from Molten core before the dungeon set, just because the setup was so lousy.
I like the token mechanism for armour set pieces, but I find it a shame that we’ve moved away from dungeon armour sets in Wrath and beyond. I even think it’s a shame they went from 8-piece to 5-piece sets. And yep, the upgrade system was cool and still existed in Wrath (heroic token upgrades for example), but I think Blizz are now more in favour of giving people the next bracket of raidgear for JPs instead of upgrading what they have.
See, for me, I don’t think Justice Points are useless at all. I’ve actually been able to use the points to fill in the gaps where items haven’t dropped from bosses like Shoulders and Hands.
Yes its true they are an alternate version of what you can get elsewhere, but sometimes you just can’t get them to drop elsewhere and the JP version works out for you. So for those who do a lot of Heroic runs and have been fortunate with drops the Justice Points can be a waste, but for the unlucky ones, the JP items do server a useful purpose.
And to the other point about why spend a lot of gold on craftables when you can get the similar exalted gear? You have to remember that everyone is different. Some people hate rep grinds and have a ton of gold on hand. Some people like instant gratification and don’t want to wait to get an item. While logically it makes a lot of sense to wait to get exalted (I’m waiting for exalted with Hyjal to get my tanking cloak) not everyone wants to do that and that’s why there are options.
Agreed, I think they could be great for circumstances where you’re gearing up two specs at the same time. That way you might pick up both taking and DPS spec gear and use JPs to fill in the gaps. But for casters like Mages and Warlocks I suspect that there’s several of us sitting in a cap of points with nothing to spend them on.
I guess it comes down to class. Some classes give you wider gear options than others, so having the different gear offerings is helpful. For others, it just feels redundant.
As an additional affront, I was standing next to my smilarly geared Warlock guild mate as were were running about Grim Batol and for a dazed moment I though I popped Mirror Images and was wondering where the hell the other 2 mirrors were.
And then I realized it was the warlock….
The rest of my guildmates turned to look at us and laughed. We both lamented, “T11 will make us look different we swear!!”
I wish they’d just made chaos orbs boe rather than bound to you so that you could at least buy those with justice points.
But yeah… I’m getting down to the last few pieces with JP for my offset [I’m a dk tank mainspec] and then I’m wondering what I will do.
It would be nice if PVP gear was available to purchase like in Wrath. Right, I just have the points stockpiled for the next tier of raiding (since I’m out of raiding for 4 months due to RL)
Speak to a tailor, I’m sure they’ll knock out a few pieces for you at cost. You need to make a lot of the gear just to skill up from about 490 to 525, so you’ll probably pick it up for cheap.
I understand why Blizzard wanted to split the currency pools. I’m just not sure I agree with it.
I am a tailor, but I’m just a little slow with farming the volatiles I need to make Dreamcloth. Also, I lose rolls on the the orbs, but I’m doing my best to get gear.
Aye, the amount of volatiles needed is a pain. I’m lucky that I have a Warlock herb/alch that has a steady stream of volatile life ready for transmuting. Certainly makes things easier!
There are some points of your post i dont agree with (but if everyone agreed, what a boring world this would be) but i do particularly love the part about pieces of tokens dropping 🙂 i think that would be a much more fun (and like you say about everything looking the same and just having a slight shuffle of stats, which tbh is what i thought reforging was all about anyways?). Havent managed to get the mage to 85 yet :/ but from your post i am kinda worried about how the gearing is going to go. Luckily i doubt she will ever be getting into any raids lol. (on a side note, i ADORE the pointy hat! Its going to take a lot to part me from it once i get it tee hee).
Also Justice Points need to be revamped or something. Ive been capped since a week after launch. There is nothing to buy with them!!!!
Is it just me? Or are trinkets being evil things to drop aswell 🙁 still stuck with 325 one on Zee QQ 🙂 x
I play a Warlock and I’m having similar problems. A lot of the items I can buy from Justice Points aren’t even very well itemised for the stats I’m looking for (but thanksfully at least there’s reforging!). Still, I can buy a couple of pieces because of bad luck in drops – but that’s really it. I’d rather have some drops from instances that are better itemised.
I agree with what someone else said, I too wish we could buy Chaos Orbs with Justice Points. I never seem to win the rolls, and having no other way to get them than to run Heroics is rather tedious.