#0 - April 9, 2009, 4:12 p.m.
The developers have answered a few questions and concerns regarding Emblems of Valor, Emblems of Conquest and rewards in 3.1. Some of you may have already seen a couple of these answers already elsewhere, but in case you have not, you can find them below:
Q:I have saved all of my Emblems of Valor in hopes of being able to exchange them for one or more pieces of 10-man Tier 8 gear. Will Tier 8 gear be purchasable with Emblems of Valor?
A:We do not want players to stockpile Emblems with the purpose of gaining a big advantage as soon as the patch launches. There should be no options available for someone to buy a set of gear right from the beginning.
The Emblems of Valor that drop in Ulduar 10-man will give you access to items that are of the appropriate level to help progress in that dungeon. New items will be added to the Emblem of Valor quartermaster, which are the relic items that are in Naxxramas. Examples of these are Sigil of Awareness, Idol of Awakening, Libram of Resurgence and Totem of Hex.
The Emblems of Conquest that drop from Ulduar 25-man will have a new quartermaster, which will have new items available for purchase. These will include necks, belts, gloves, and leg slot items.
Q:It seems odd if there will be no way to get 10-man gear with Emblems of Valor later on as tier 7.5 and tier 8.0 should both be the same ilevel.
A:You just can't get the Ulduar tier token drop, but the Naxxramas valorous pieces are ilevel 213 so the gear you can purchase with Emblems of Valor are the right level, it's just a matter of set bonuses not lining up until you get gear from Ulduar directly.
Q:Will there be a way to buy 10-man gear with Emblems of Valor at a later time?
A:It is quite possible that new things will get added in the future, such as a couple of the token drops for an example, but there are no guarantees that this will happen.
Q:Will it at some point in time be possible to buy Tier 8 gear with Emblems of Valor, or is the gear that is currently available (disregarding the relics) all that we will ever be able to buy?
A:You should not expect anything to get added to the Emblem of Valor Quartermaster, but we will see if we feel that more should be added in the future. Adding items is always a possibility, but there are no concrete plans to do it.
Q:With Emblems of Heroism you can still get heirloom items, gems, and frozen orbs, even after having purchased all other loot of interest. With Emblems of Conquest, you can get Runed Orbs for trading or crafting. With Emblems of Valor there seems to be a lack of things to buy, so it would be nice to have something else there to fill in the gap.
A:This is the reason why we added in the ability to trade down the emblems. You can get Emblems of Heroism from Emblems of Valor, which will allow you to buy the heirloom items and such if you still need them.
Q:The problem with fighting over tokens was originally dealt with by providing a reasonable fallback for it. It feels rather annoying that you decided not to continue with that.
A:We are indeed continuing with that. There are chest and helm tokens that can be purchased with Emblems of Conquest.
Q:Running primarily 10-man dungeons will result in only having the same tokens, and it feels disheartening not knowing what to do with them if there is nothing worth buying.
A:If you already have numerous of valorous pieces, then you are a bit ahead of the 10-man dungeon progression patch. The goal is to make it so you can go from one 10-man dungeon to the next without hitting the 25-man ones. The players in this position will be able to start buying valorous gear to fill in extra slots as they progress through Ulduar 10-man and improve their overall gear around what they get from drops. Ulduar 10-man gear has a slightly higher ilevel (ilevel 219) than some of the normal Naxxramas 25-man gear (ilevel 213), but it isn’t a radical improvement as it is only half a tier better.
The Emblems of Valor will be a help to progress since they will allow players to purchase ilevel 213 items, which certainly is an improvement over the normal Naxxramas10-man drops that are ilevel 200.
Q:A 10-man raiding guild will get Emblems of Valor in order to purchase tier 7.5 gear, but how will tier 8 and 8.5 gear will be accessible? Tier 8.5 items can seemingly be bought with Emblems of Conquest, as they are all available from the vendor, but how is tier 8 gear accessible? Will it drop from Ulduar 10-man bosses?
A:Tier 8.10, or whatever you can call it, will drop off the bosses in Ulduar 10-man. Tier 8.5, or tier 8.25, will drop off the bosses in Ulduar 25-man, and two of the pieces will be available through Emblems of Conquest, of which you will need something like 50 in order to purchase one of these tokens.
Q:Wouldn’t it be reasonable to put at least one token from Ulduar 10-man for Emblems of Valor, like for an example gloves for 85 Emblems of Valor? When Sunwell came out, you had items on the island that were on par with items from Black Temple and Hyjal, but the price was raised a lot so that it cost quite a bit of Badges of Justice.
A:We want to do something different or better this time as we did not like how the Sunwell badge farming extravaganza turned out. The Sunwell isle method promoted people to farm Karazhan over and over again instead of trying to progress further, so this time we are trying to push progression forward and avoid encouraging people to farm Naxxramas until the end of time, like what happened with Karazhan.
Q:Are there any plans to add more gear to valor token vendors for 3.1?
A:At this point in time, the only things we plan to add to the Emblem of Valor Quartermaster are the relic items from Naxxramas, but as always, anything can change because until the patch is live nothing is for certain.
Q:Why are only the relics from Naxxramas 25-man being added to the vendor?
A:Because relic items are very class and spell specific and we feel they are different enough to warrant them being made available from the vendor. Also, you can’t exactly get those relics anywhere else, and it is not like there are plenty of replacements available either. If you want to improve a certain spell, you usually only have one option for getting the relic you need, and we don’t want to force you to run the same dungeon over and over again until you get it.
It cannot really be compared to for example weapons, as there are much more of options available to you in order for you to get a decent weapon. Sure, some weapons are better than others, but they will all do their job.