Specifically, Tigole said the following: Badges will definitely be back in Wrath, in some form. Like how it’s ended up in BC, they want badges to appear in both Heroics and raids. However, they want to stratify it more, so it’s not just one gigantic pool of items. (They also want to spread the vendors around the world, so it’s not just “”one dude in Shattrath and one dude out on the Isle of Quel’Danas”"; this sounds like an annoyance to me, and at any rate will not make a real difference in how the system works.) Proposed stratification options include:

“”A token from different levels of content”" as well as badges that would need to be turned in for the different levels of items Different kinds of badges I’m glad to hear all of this (except maybe the spreading vendors around part). I think badges are one of the best ideas they had in BC, since it means that as long as you kill a boss, you walk away with something, even if the item you wanted off that boss didn’t drop and/or you didn’t win the roll. wow gold Reputation does this as well, but not all instances have reputation (like Zul’Aman), once you get to Exalted there’s no gain, and there are typically not many items you want from a given faction. Badges avoid all these problems: all heroic and raid bosses drop badges, you can always use more badges, and there’s always something to spend them on – even if you’re kitted out in T6 or equivalent, you can at least buy epic gems or Nether Vortices to sell on the AH. I’m a little ambivalent on the stratifying idea, actually. Currently, someone running heroics or Karazhan can, eventually, get best-in-slot or near-best-in-slot items like the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes or the Adorned Supernal Leggings, although it might take them a month or two. wow However, if it was the case that you needed a Mystic Widget from the Tier 9 raids, or special badges from same, to get the T9-equivalent badge gear, it would be completely inaccessible to players on the lower rungs of raiding, no matter how long they kept at it. BitterCupOJoe and darian, in comments on the Blizzcast post, neatly addressed this issue through a simple mechanism: exchange rates.