My two cents on gear normalization

I'm not sure if normalization is the word. Honestly, I hear people throw the word around, but I'm not sure any of them, or even me, knows what it really means. And I'm too lazy to look it up because I'm just going for ignorant ranting here. So its not lazy, its ignorance on purpose. Just for fun.

What I'm talking about is gear in WotLK.

Spellpower will have all the lovely casters fighting for the same gear.

Druids of the feral variety will be rolling with Rogues and down-grading Hunters and Enh Shammies for loot.

And everybody's complaining.

ZOMG, they're gonna take my loot.

First of all, sorry, but F you and your F'in loot.

Loot sucks. I personally do not subscribe in any way, shape, or form to the whole concept of "improving your character is a cornerstone of RPG".

Sorry, that one just does nothing for me.

I want to play in dungeons and raids and battlegrounds and even small group or solo questing. The way the game is engineered, gear improvements are REQUIRED to open the door to additional dungeons and raids. So for that reason, I seek out gear. That, and I like the appearance of the one giant moving eyeball on my forehead (S3 Helm) and the two bear heads on my shoulders (ZA drop).

But I digress. (re-digress...f you and your f'ing gear. ok, back to work...).

Back to my take on gear normalization....

When you first kill a boss in WotLK, and you've got three mages, a warlock, three priests, and a holy paladin who loves pissing everybody off by downgrading to cloth, I'm willing to stipulate that you'll have roughly double the competition for a Spellpower cloth item that you had in the past.

Oh, noes. You might actually have to watch somebody else get gear.

Hopefully you surround yourselves with folks who are more interested in the game than they are in the loot, so you can still work together after you all watch some other coconut get that drop.

But, please people, lets not be quite so short sighted. (sited?).

What happens as you repeat some bosses over time.

Don't you all just love Void Crystals so much that you simply live for the moment that everybody passes on an epic so you can show us how cool your disenchanting animation looks?

Disenchanting epics sucks, because no matter how much you despise gear (did I mention that you can go f your f'ing gear?), any WoW player, loot whore or not, must understand that loot is a big part of gaining access to more content.

So hopefully, by making any one individual piece of gear be potentially useful to a wider audience, we'll see less disenchanted gear over time, as there's a higher chance that somebody in your raid is interested in any given drop on the current boss loot table.

And by making each boss kill have a higher probability of providing a gear upgrade for someone in your raid, Blizzard is actually opening up the game and making it just a tad bit less painful to farm one boss and get sufficient gear for the next boss/instance.