To the dungeons with you!

Over a year ago, during the era of Wrath of the Lich King, I wrote a post about how to get exalted with every faction in the expansion (minus the Ashen Verdict, of course) without championing. In other words, this was a post about how to hit exalted on every faction by yourself, without needing to enter an instance. I was pretty proud of it, if only for the idea, and was looking forward to writing a similar post for Cataclysm's factions. Then Cataclysm came out, and as I plodded my way through the new zones' quests, I was hit by a sad realization: there would be no Cataclysm version of that post, because some factions are impossible to reach exalted with without donning their tabard and entering a 5-man instance. As such, if I should desire to obtain the Wrap of the Great Turtle to tank 5-mans, or if I want the Signet of the Elder Council to boost my stats while I'm out solo-ing, I can't get them by solely by solo-ing. And this doesn't sit right with me. Why, after letting us get exalted with every faction in Wrath of the Lich King by solo-ing, would Blizzard regress in its accommodation of us solo players?

Now, this is nothing new. Many of the factions in Burning Crusade required players to enter dungeons in order to earn reputation with them beyond a certain point (Honor Hold/Thrallmar come to mind), as did many of the factions in vanilla WoW. Wrath of the Lich King, however, moved away from this model by giving every one of its factions (minus one that was clearly designed around a specific raid) a way for players to earn reputation with that faction on their own. This was a good move on their part, in my opinion, for though those ways of earning reputation on one's own were often slower than championing, they gave solo players something to work for, as well as something to do, and they gave players a way to earn faction reputation that wasn't dependent on the competence of other players.

But there is one other major difference between the two expansion packs, one which may explain Blizzard's shift in design philosophy. In Wrath of the Lich King, the gear earned through reputation was the same ilevel as the gear earned through heroics, the primary source of reputation. The gear dropped by the last boss in all of the pre-3.2 heroics and the gear awarded at exalted status with Wrath-era factions were both ilevel-200 epics, and the gear dropped by all other heroic bosses and awarded at revered with the factions were ilevel-200 rare gear. In other words, factions awarded gear that was on par with what was awarded by heroics at the time, so by running heroics to earn reputation with various factions, players would be getting gear that was just as good as the gear they were trying to earn. What this meant was that it was quite possible for players, in the process of trying to earn one specific piece of gear, to earn another piece of gear that would render the reputation-awarded piece unneeded.

This has changed between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and in my mind, that change justifies some factions requiring dungeon runs if we wish to reach exalted with them. It is this one change that prevents this post from being one in which I merely complain about how this change to the faction design philosophy is unfair to those who don't wish to run dungeons. You see, heroics no longer drop epics. Heroics in Cataclysm drop ilevel 346 rare gear, while reaching exalted with a Cataclysm faction gives you access to ilevel 359 epics. This means that running heroics doesn't give you better gear than the gear you are trying to earn by hitting exalted with whatever faction you are trying to get exalted with. In fact, outside of crafted epics, the epics awarded by reaching exalted with a faction are currently the best gear one can get outside of raids. (With the exception of the epics that you can get if you save up enough valor points doing your daily random heroic, but it takes a couple of weeks of running a random heroic each day in order to earn enough points for just one piece of gear, so that's by no means a practical way to deck yourself out in epics.)

What this all means is that in order to obtain the best gear you can obtain outside of a raid, you will have to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid, i.e. running dungeons. This wasn't the case in Wrath of the Lich King, where gear awarded by factions wasn't the best gear available outside of a raid: you had the drops from the last bosses of each heroic, the emblem of heroism gear, and the crafted gear. But those first two sources of epics outside of a raid no longer award epics, so we players are left with factions and professions as avenues to earn epics without raiding. And since ilevel 359 epics are the best gear one can earn outside of a raid, it makes sense that to earn them, you should need to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid: running dungeons. (And the fact that crafted epics require Chaos Orbs, which are bind-on-pick-up and are dropped by the last bosses in heroics, further fits this trend.) To me, that seems like a fair trade.