“New things” in store for Emblem system

With the announcement of what’s in store for us in the upcoming patch 3.2, it’s not unusual to start setting our sights on the raid dungeon that’s coming in that patch and even the Icecrown Citadel itself when patch 3.3 comes out. It would certainly be nice to have as many people as possible be able to go that far. This was the idea behind making the raids available in both 10 man and 25 man versions.

emblem reward vendors

It’s nice to be able to advance in the progression of raid content but one of the things making it hard for some people is the current emblem system. It wasn’t very evident before Ulduar came out, but as we advance in the content for this expansion, more and more people are going to be left behind in terms of gear especially since heroics still only give just emblems of heroism.

How do you find a balance between making the content available to more people and making the content available to only those people who put the work in on their gear? The answer seems to lie in CM Zarhym’s statement in the forums:

We have some new things in store for the badge system to help with the current end game progression curve that exists (as you noted: Heroics > Naxx > Ulduar > 3.2 > Icecrown ). We’re looking to put together this information for you and will provide it as soon as it’s ready to go. source

What changes/additions to the badge/emblem system could he be talking about? I doubt they’ll outright offer radically better gear for just emblems of heroism since that would make things revert back to how things were like in TBC where you could get Black Temple quality gear by running heroics. Maybe a version of of that would work wherein additional pieces of gear could be added to each tier of emblem rewards that cost more but are slightly better. This would be really nice especially since each tier of emblem rewards have an assigned set of slot pieces, for example only the emblem of valor reward vendor sells a cloak.

Whatever the changes/additions to the current emblem system is, I still hope it won’t be taken as a way of short cutting your way to way better gear than you deserve.