Gear demotion and justice points

I'm going to write this post at the risk of putting my foot in my mouth due to lack of information, but I will give my reasons for believing what I believe so that if I look like a fool, I can at least look like a reasonable fool.

We already know that, come Cataclysm, the current emblem system will be replaced by a point system to simplify and streamline the process of getting gear from heroics and raids without depending on raid drops. (Which, incidentally, has motivated me to retire the "badges/emblems" tag for my posts and replace it with "gear currency", which reads better than "badges/emblems/points".) In order to finally retire the current badges and emblems, Blizzard is converting most of them to gold when they release patch 4.0.1, but emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are going to be converted into justice points. Not only does this mean our current emblems will give us a head start on gearing up in Cataclysm (though probably not a big one), but more intriguingly, emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are being converted to justice points at the same rate. (2.75 points per emblem)

Now, I am going to make a few assumptions at this point before I go on, assumptions which could easily be proven wrong by the PTR, but I'm going to take that risk. First of all, I'm going to assume that gear that can be bought with emblems now will be purchasable with justice points after patch 4.0.1 is released. While it might make sense from the players' perspective to save those points for Cataclysm gear that we'll use for a while, rather than spending now it on gear we'll likely replace while leveling, it wouldn't make sense from a business perspective to keep players from having that option. After all, I'm sure there are many players play just to see their numbers go up, and denied the option to do so with gear that was once available to them, how would they respond? Not well, I'd imagine.

The second assumption I am going to make is that both emblem of triumph and emblem of frost gear will cost justice points equal to 2.75 times their current emblem cost. Yes, this means I am assuming that a piece of armor that costs 50 emblems of frost and a piece of armor that costs 50 emblems of triumph will cost the same amount of justice points. Were it not for the fact that the two emblems will be worth the same number of points, I would not make this assumption. However, if emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are going to be converted to the same number of justice points each, it's only reasonable that cost of gear would be converted similarly. Suppose someone is limited to heroics and has been saving up emblems of frost for one special item by running the daily heroic each day. Just before he has enough emblems saved for that one special item, patch 4.0.1 hits. Now, if the point costs of emblem of frost gear was calculated at a higher emblem-to-point ratio than emblem of triumph gear (that is, unless the cost of emblem of frost gear were 2.75 points per emblem, while the cost of emblem of triumph gear was less than 2.75 points per emblem, a possibility I'll go over later), then that patch has diminished the fruits of his labor. That patch has now made it so he needs to work harder for gear that will soon be obsolete, and why would Blizzard do such a thing?

Of course, we must also ask the opposite question: why would Blizzard make emblem of frost gear so easy to get this late in the expansion? Elementary, my dear Watson; it's a final gear demotion before the expansion. Gear demotion (a term I made up for this post) has happened before, in the form of heroics and their daily quests rewarding better emblems with each patch after and including 3.2. When patch 3.2 made emblems of conquest the base-line emblems for heroics, gear that had once been exclusive to raiders who could enter Ulduar-25 or ToC-10 became available to anyone who could run heroics. Thus, the gear became less exclusive, which is why I say it was "demoted". The same thing happened in patch 3.3, which made emblems of triumph the baseline emblems in heroics. Why did Blizzard do this? To make it easier to get right into the most current tier of raiding content.

It's my theory that, by converting emblems of triumph and frost to justice points at the same rate, Blizzard is doing one more gear demotion as the expansion comes to a close. At this point, anyone who wants to defeat the Lich King while he's still relevant doesn't have long to do so, so being able to farm heroics for emblem of frost gear will certainly give players a leg up in getting the gear they need to do so. That combined with the more powerful talent trees and the stat conversions should make the process easier, allowing more people to see the content Blizzard put so much effort into designing, and in the end, that's a worthy goal.