Should tier 9 gear be the standard in heroics?

This edition of WoW.com's The Queue stated that tier nine has become the new standard of gear in heroics, meaning that if you gear is better, then your are considered over-qualified for heroics, and if it is worse, you are under-qualified. From a purely objective perspective, this is a ludicrous idea. Heroics were designed to be easy enough that a group of people in ilevel 200 blue-quality gear could do them; after all, heroics are the next logical step after normals. Tier nine gear is a large step above blues, so where does this standard come from?

Put simply, we are spoiled. The new emblem system that Blizzard has added (where the second-best emblem is the base emblem that drops from any heroic or raid bosses that don't drop the best emblem, and the best emblem is awarded by your first daily heroic and the weekly raid quests) has made getting raid quality gear possible without stepping into a raid, and as such, even the average Joe can get amazing gear. In the time between patch 3.2 (when the new emblem system was first implemented) and patch 3.3 (when the dungeon finder was released), many people took advantage of that system, which made emblems of conquest the new base emblem, in place of emblems of heroism. Those who took the time to run heroics could get very powerful gear with these new emblems, and Casual Carl (yes, I just made that name up) could get raid-quality gear without dedicating the time to raiding, since heroics were short, and thus he could do them on his own time. As such, everyone and their mother was running around in gear that was much better than what they could get in heroics. In other words, those who ran heroics the most soon out-geared them.

Once patch-3.3 was released, many people started chain running heroics, and if it wasn't clear before, it became obvious that very few people were running heroics for gear these days. After all, emblems of conquest allow access to ilevel 232 gear, the kind available in 10-man Trial of the Crusader. It was as if these people had skipped two tiers of raiding. The ridiculous extent to which people out-geared heroics became obvious, and because so many people fit that standard, it became the norm. The consequence of such a mass over-gearing was that heroics became easy. Very easy. Previously difficult fights became trivial and people stopped using the strategies that were once necessary for success, or at least only used them to make the fights interesting. I've seen fights end so quickly that the bosses weren't even able to use the abilities that made the fight difficult. Everything has become a tank-and-spank. (Except Oculus; thank goodness I have only had to run it once.)

That is, unless, there is someone in your group who doesn't out-gear the heroic, or at least doesn't out-gear it to a ludicrous degree. Then the run goes from ridiculously easy to pretty easy. After all, you are only likely to see one such person in a heroic, and you probably won't notice their presence unless you are used to running heroics with fellow guild-members who are decked out in gear from 25-man TotGC. That's if the under-geared "offender" is a DPS, though. If he is a healer, then all that means is that the tank can't chain pull enemies in the instance like he may be used to doing. If he is a tank, then that means that healer needs to stay on his/her toes and the DPS needs to watch their threat. These are more significant inconveniences than the boss not dying fast enough to not use his main ability.

Back to the main question: should the standard for gear in heroics be tier nine? Since the standard can be defined what most people qualify for, tier nine already is the de jure standard. However, the implication of such a standard is that anyone who queues for a heroic with gear worse than tier nine is a burden to the group and should potentially be kicked. If tier nine were the de facto standard, this would be true. So, should tier nine be the de facto standard for heroics?

God no! Here's why: in case you haven't run heroics recently, they are incredibly boring. Granted, as a tank, it's more fun for me than in is for other people, but I recently tried healing a run with a competent tank, and it was a very uneventful time. I kept Rejuvenation on him and that healed 95% of all the damage he took. Sometimes I threw out a Regrowth of Wild Growth just for the hell of it. Overall, the experience was one I would not care to repeat. Now, if the tank had not been over-geared, the run would have been much more fun. I would have been throwing out Nourishes and it would have been a more interesting experience. Point is, "under-geared" people make heroics interesting because they bring us back to a time when strategy was required and we couldn't blast our way through heroics half-asleep. They make heroics fun again. (If you are still complaining that they make the run slower, you may wish to read my last philosophy post.)

Happy New Years everyone! As a special treat for the new decade, I am posting this post right before I go to bed after staying up until midnight.