There are weekly points caps. You do not use points to collect gear that drops from boss kills. You use points to buy gear.
OS began a crazy road where people with no skills could pug every raid they could get into until they had enough emblems to buy gear good enough to offset their lousy play skills. Which allowed them to join more pugs with less scrutiny since they were no longer at the bottom in meters. This fostered more drops, more access to RNG benefits, more emblems, more purchases.
Clearly, Blizzard recognizes that there is a place for purchasing gear - I can think, immediately of how annoying it is to see a trinket finally and then see it go to someone else :: this would definitely be a situation where purchasing a relatively fair facsimile would be highly useful. Not every guild has the raiding momentum to take down bosses straight out of the gate in all new raid instances and raiders frequently clobber lower end tier instances to farm emblems/points in order to purchase gear to help them gear into the new tier. Farming easier tier to get comparable tier purchased is not what Blizzard had in mind I would haphazard.
OS3 zergs frequently began happening by button-mashers world-wide whom where happily geared from pugging everything under the sun and buying gear.
Brute force, versus finesse.
Having said that, there have been plenty of battles won IRL on pure play brute force and lack of finesse. All is fair in the eyes of those victors writing the history books.
The points cap will not be that impactful when you look at a single week; however, look at the effect over a span of weeks, and you can see the mathematical trending to support that guilds that have the skill to down bosses, start in week 6 to outstretch by far the raiders gearing by purchasing their items. To keep pace, those pugs are going to have to be downing the bosses at the same rate as the strong guilds (both of course are collecting the same # of points if they are downing the bosses).
The real duct tape that holds it all together as a strategy to both support fledgling guilds that need to purchase gear and strong skilled guilds versus unskilled mass-pug raiders is the new mechanic that enforces you do each raid boss only once. The well skilled raiders will do that boss once that week, not once with their guild and then once in a pug for extra emblems/points (which is when the pug raiders have been going along for the ride).
All in all, a good thing. We should see very quickly the gap widening between those with skill and those without. The mechanic of raid bosses being 10 or 25 man and not 40 man versions means any guild with skilled raiders can see all of the content. And you won't have to keep that annoying infantile idiot that simply has more time to pug everything!
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To be honest I dont like the idea, simply because not everyone has the chance to go with their guild, or join an elite guild. Its like saying "hey, you suck, so we never want you to get experience and get better so you can raid among the elites, we want you to continue to fail". I think people who are not hard core raiders deserve to get some sort of gear, although not to the same level as those who have no life and raid all the time.
Ironshield, what you are saying is technically correct, but it only applies for a short period of time.
Imagine that it takes 10 weeks of capping-out Valor to obtain all the gear for a single spec. Any time beyond the 10 weeks, the 'hardcore' are no longer rewarded and the gap closes.
With patches taking 3-4 months to get out, this gives most non-hardcore a chance to 'catch up' before the end of a Tier, even if their earning capacity is significantly less than that of a 'hardcore'.
I've no idea what Vordan is talking about. The whole purpose of the Justice and Valor points system is to provide what he's asking for... oh well.
What I am saying is that hardcore raiders want to take away epics from people who can't always raid, in some instances are not allowed to raid because there are "better geared" players bases on gearscores. Endless cycles of "oh you are not geared enough" and not being able to get gear to be geared enough to get into the raids. The welfare epics are always behind current gear like Josh said, but people are still going to bitch that "they are free epics".
@ both - I believe I can agree with both of you. This is a complex equation and you have to extend teh view to look at both sides of the '=' as well as each sub-function.
The short version is that "no-cap" emblem farming and the game mechanic allowing raiders to do both a 10-man and 25-man version of bosses created a glut of well-geared, poorly-skilled raiders in addition to raiders that were both geared and skilled.
The coming changes in Cataclysm include a weekly cap to points farming and a game mechanic that allows you to do each new raid boss only once per reset - both of which will serve to slow down how fast raiders can acquire gear - purchased with points or otherwise won from boss drops.
This will in effect both normalize skilled raiders and poorly-skilled raiders in the first stretch of the expansion (one could argue that conceivably they can both do the same content as long as it is not prohibitive to poorly-skilled players).
However, once the next and more challenging content is released, poorly-skilled players will either need to hone their skills, or will quickly face a gear gap between them and the skilled raiders that are progressing into the next tier (so to speak).
This will not prevent them from seeing the full content - it will encourage them to hone their skills instead of being carried in mass PUGS of 25-man runs ala VOA and OS. A result of Wrath, was that raiders in 25-man raiding guilds did VOA with their guilds, and raiders in 10-man raiding guilds did VOA with their guilds and then did it again in 25-man pugs - carrying under-geared and poorly-skilled raiders. It is specifically that which changes in Cataclysm.
Which is good.
When you raise the bar of skill expectations, people naturally rise to it (e.g. the 4 minute mile that "no one" could run and then "everyone" starting running once one person ran it); on the other hand, when you set it so low, people are bound eventually to trip over it.
In BC, if you were skilled and geared, you could see SP *if* you could find a 25-man to join. In Wrath, you could see ICC LK if you gathered enough GearScore and could get a pug (10- or 25-man) to haul you along. In Cataclysm, you will see end content if you are skilled and geared and you find a 10- or 25- man raid to go along with.
Cataclysm removed the 25-man barrier that BC imposed, which removed the 40-man barrier Vanilla imposed, and Cataclysm also encourages raiders back to the basics to hone skills, not just gather GearScore.
This is good. IMHO.
For one, it will improve the number of raiders with skill by reducing the number that could be skilled if they put some effort into learning how to raid well - I give you as Exhibit A those raiders in your raid groups that cannot tell you the spells or abilities or phases a current boss does (one that they see every week and have been seeing every week for months and months). Wrath has encouraged people to stop learning boss fights. Many learn this behavioral discouragement in the 5-man heroics they start gearing in where it is essentially one inconvenient 15-minute zerg. Seldomly ever now do I step into a raid instance with a raid group full of people that read about the boss we are about to fight. Most, are quite complacent to be told where to stand and what to do when, and have no understanding of why or what is going on in another part of the raid.
This all, IMHO, contributes to slower progression for a guild. Cataclysm encourages players to go back to the basics (e.g. set focus and keep that focus crowd-controlled) and hone their skills. We can all hope and encourage, then, that part of those skills extends beyond the traditional spells and abilities of the character and overflows to include the player returning to the basics of being knowledgeable raiders and practiced.
We can hope. = )
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