Now, I'm not talking about the JP that we brought with us to max level because we were already capped on our mains, or the JP that some people earn by dungeon leveling. It's obvious what those are for: picking up a piece or two of gear to get us into heroics if we screw up and disenchant too many poorly-itemized quest rewards (points finger at self). Now, that's a narrow niche, but it's somewhat useful.
What I'm talking about are the JP we earn at max level. What are they for?
There's one thing they're clearly not for: getting into heroics. Suppose you get to max level with only a nominal amount of JP (you're a new character leveled mostly by questing). You can't hit the 440 item level threshold (you lost some of your quest gear, let's say) and can't afford the AH prices for crafted gear. You'd like to replace a slot or two with JP gear.
The only way to earn JP at max level, if you can't get into heroics, is scenarios: 30 JP per scenario. At roughly 15 minutes per scenario, that's 2 JP/minute. The cheapest JP items are 1250 JP, so it would take you 625 minutes, or 10 and a half hours, of just straight grinding scenarios just to buy one JP item. That's not counting any queue times. Not only is that completely unrealistic, it's probably the worst conceivable time investment in the game. You could buy 4 or 5 equivalent Honor items in that time. Obviously, JP cannot possibly be designed to get new 90s into heroics...or if it is, it's designed to be drastically inferior to Honor for that purpose.
So, assume you can get into heroics. Then the primary source of JP is running heroics. That's actually not that terrible a source, especially considering you're also getting chances at gear drops. But once you're at that point, what are they for?
They're not for making heroics easier. The only way the heroics could be easier (excluding of course the trash at the end of SPM) is if the bosses just killed themselves when you walked in the room. You don't need JP gear to run heroics. So what do you need it for?
Prior to this hotfix, JP could have had a purpose: to be converted to Honor. But now both the Honor and the JP gear are sitting 5 item levels below the minimum gear requirement for the first LFR instance. If you want to raid LFR with slots filled in with JP gear, you also need to get raid or valor gear to compensate. But if your gear isn't good enough to run LFR, why is it good enough to run normal raids? And if you need valor gear first before JP gear is useful, doesn't that entirely defeat the purpose of JP being the easy/accessible 'farmable' currency?
This whole system makes no sense.
Perhaps I did misunderstand the intention of the thread! I'll do some digging, and see if I can't bring something more useful to the discussion. |
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I think that might be misrepresenting the situation a bit. Even if Justice Gear isn't at the same level as Heroic gear, it will still raise your average item level and help shore up your Heroic and Valor gear to potentially get you into normal raiding and LFR faster. |
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I think that Justice Points are perhaps more of a stepping stone than they once were. They were originally added for those situations where RNG turns against you, and you haven't obtained a drop for a particular slot. Even if you didn't get the gear over successive runs, at least you have some Justice Points to help fill in the gaps in the meantime. They are returning to that intent more than being an alternative method of accruing Heroic level gear. After you obtain your Heroic gear, it's true that Justice Points won't be as useful. Obviously, they can be turned over for Honor, and at some point in the future we may add trade materials or Heirlooms to the quartermasters. |
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That's part of the reason why I mentioned Valor Points in a previous post. Item level 489 Valor pieces will certainly help bring your average item level up. Some of those pieces are now available at Honored reputation with Mists of Pandaria factions. |
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Since yesterday's hot fix. |
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Also - Didn't you remove head enchants because you didn't like forcing people to grind a reputation so they could raid? We're not opposed to making earning some reputation compelling. You'll recall that a lot of those items were only available at very high reputation levels though, whereas the Valor Items I was referring to become available at Honored. |
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Granted. You won't need all of those pieces to progress into raiding or LFR though. Hopefully, as you continue to do dailies (assuming they're something you want to do, that is), you'll gain enough reputation to allow you to pick up the occasional Revered level Valor piece to supplement your raiding set. By the way, I don't want any of you to feel as though your feedback is falling on deaf ears. I'll make sure that your perspectives are shared with the development team. On the same token, I want to emphasize that Justice Points aren't useless, even if they don't fulfill the same role that we've grown accustomed to. |
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Sarcasm aside, Blizzard always operates in a spirit of cooperation. I'm sure that many of you recall the days before Valor and Justice. You'll recall that before there were points there were badges. Before that, there was nothing. Many of us remember the days when you could spend upwards of an hour in a single dungeon, and come away from it without a single drop: not a even an Uncommon. We try new things. A lot of the time they work well. We're not always right, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes what ultimately ends up being a good change for the overall World of Warcraft experience doesn't seem so great at first: there was a significant segment of the player base that railed heavily against the idea of purchasable dungeon quality gear, let alone raid quality gear, period. We've come a long way since then, and we'll see where this shakes out together. Again, your feedback is an important part of that. |
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In reality, that's no different from how Justice worked before, except the process would occur faster then. In the early days of Cataclysm, for example, between dungeon drops and Justice Point gear, active tanks (and to a lesser extent healers) very rapidly loaded up on all the tanking gear they could carry, filled out dps sets, loaded up on Heirlooms, then walked away from dungeons without looking back. There are potential down sides to any system. |
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The current system is okay--it's heavily gated, to slow us down, and I get that. I do wish that reputations, as a result, were account-wide, because for the rest of my alts I'll spend the rest of my life doing dailies, and that is just...buh. Just as a side note, since it's off topic for this thread, but we're actually working on a system that will make gaining reputations on your alternate characters a bit easier. More details on that will be coming soon. Edit: Now with links: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6794350230?page=1#1 |
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You can click the little blue "Blizz" icon on the upper right of the posts to read the various Blizzard representative posts in a thread. |
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I know that many of you have expressed concerns regarding the item level required to do LFR. This change will also help make Justice Point gear a bit more relevant for meeting the required item level. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6794229430?page=7#140 |
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