How the new emblem system ruined heroics (and what could be done to save them)

I am a busy player. I don't have the time to raid or the reflexes to PvP, so I run heroics instead. I still get to play in groups, but I don't have to dedicate a large portion of my time to the game; I can simply plop down for a half-hour or hour when I have one to spare. With the death of solo content in Wrath, heroics were really all I had left, and now my last little sanctuary has been perverted by the very thing that were supposed to save it: the new emblem system.

I'm talking about the system by which heroics offer the second best emblem in the game, while the first random heroic you do each day (previously, it was the daily heroic-quest) gives you two of the best emblems in the game. There was a time when heroics only gave you emblems of heroism, the worst emblem in the game. These emblems were used to obtain gear that was good for heroics, but would never let you out-gear them. With the new emblem system, amazing gear is obtainable by people who have never stepped foot in a raid. Now, certainly, this system has benefits. People can gear up their alts rather quickly and get them into the highest tier of raiding without forcing their guild to drag them through the previous raids. Through heroics alone, I have decked out my druid in tank gear good enough that I could run Icecrown Citadel 10-man if I wanted to. The issue is, I can't, so for me, and players like me, heroics allow us to obtain amazing gear that we will never put to use. You could say that the new ICC 5-mans, the Frozen Halls, are the place to go to use that gear, but in the gear I'm in, only Halls of Reflection is a challenge, and I'm not going to run that one over and over again just because it's the only place that is difficult.

And so we see the issue. For people who only run heroics, the new emblem system allows us to get gear that only serves to make the content we are running easier. These same heroics that once provided some level of satisfaction are now hollow shells of what they once were. They are not challenging, they are not interesting, and they are not enjoyable. To pour salt in the wound, the ridiculously inflated cost of emblem of frost gear forces raiders, most of which ran heroics nauseam in order to gear up for Naxx, to run heroics each day so that they can get their gear in a timely manor. Many of them hate the heroics with a passion, and their animosity makes heroics less enjoyable to run when it rubs off on those of us who still enjoy them to some degree.

The dungeon finder only exacerbates this situation. It allows people to chain run heroics, bringing them to the point where heroics provide no challenge even faster than players would get there on their own, and it makes the groups inconsequential, promoting the kind of dickish behavior we see in heroics today. After all, when the only repercussions for your actions are being put on someone's ignore list (a punishment that is completely intangible), what motivation is there for the common man to not be a jerk? He wants his emblems, he wants them quickly, and he doesn't want to bother with the niceties that were once required to successfully complete a heroic.

Where does the solution lie? The benefits of the new emblem system are that it allows raiders to gear up their alts quickly and allows people who are only now reaching the level cap to quickly gear up for the most recent raid content. If Blizzard were to scrap the emblem system, the new solution would need to address these two problems.

The first one could be addressed by making emblems bind-to-account, thus allowing raiders to send their excess emblems to their alts. Some may object to that idea, since heroics are supposed to give people practice with their characters, practice they need to perform well in a raid. However, the kind of heroic runs that have become prominent since patch 3.3 (the "silent but deadly" speed runs) are hardly good places to train oneself for raiding. Overgeared healers can heal the tank and DPS through their mistakes, and overgeared tanks make threat a non-issue for DPS, while overgeared DPS make the bosses die so quickly that the encounters are nothing more than tank-and-spanks. This particular issue could be solved if the dungeon finder only put people with similar gear together in groups. That would mean the people who need to do the heroics slowly and need the practice would be put with people like themselves, while the impatient people who outgear the heroics would be put with people like themselves and could burst through the content. While this might be a good short-term solution, it doesn't address the larger issues of the emblem system.

However, if all Blizzard does is scrap the emblem system while making emblems BoA, that wouldn't address the fact that the new emblem system helps people who have only recently hit 80 get into the current tier of raiding, saving them the trouble of finding people who will run them through the previous tiers. If heroics only dropped the worst emblems, there would need to be a way for people to still get good gear without going through the old raids. I propose that, when Cataclysm hits, with each patch that Blizzard releases a raid, they also release a 5-man dungeon or two, like how with the release of Icecrown Citadel, they added The Frozen Halls. These new dungeons would be harder than other heroics, obviously, but to compensate, they would drop the emblems and gear that are better than the last tier of heroics. To use the current heroics as an example, some Ulduar-based 5-man would have been released with patch 3.1, and it would have dropped emblems of valor. Trial of the Champion would have dropped emblems of conquest, and the Frozen Halls would have dropped emblems of triumph (perhaps the Halls of Reflection could have dropped emblems of frost, considering how hard it is).

Yes, this would mean that heroics would become a new kind of progression, but is that such a bad thing? They are very popular now, so it wouldn't be a bad idea for Blizzard to cater to the part of their fanbase that likes heroics more than raids. This system would also mean that people could gear up for the current tier of content through heroics, which are quick and don't require a lot of preparation, rather than by running old raids, which takes a long time and requires more preparation and people.

So, to summarize the changes I propose:
1. When Cataclysm is released, the heroics that are available upon the launch date with drop the same emblem as the starter 10-man raids, while the 25-man versions will drop the next tier of emblems. As patches are released, the new raids will give better emblems, but the base emblems in old heroics will not change.
2. Emblems will become bind-on-account so that raiders can use their extra emblems to gear up their alts.
3. With each raid that is released, one, two, or three new 5-mans will be released, the heroic versions of which will drop the same emblem as the 10-man version of their corresponding raid. This will allow people to gear themselves up for the current raid content without running old content.

Edit: I would just like to add that these are preliminary ideas to inspire others to come up with truly great solutions; they are not meant to be end-all-be-all fixes.