Originally Posted by
Dracodraco
As long as you keep avoiding the point that VP gear will be bumped down to JP, thus giving you a *complete* set (barring weapons, which we might be able to craft, concidering that thunder-forge they hinted at in the preview stating it could make "raid worthy" weapons or something) of 489/496 gear, netting you about 492 average.
This is about as good as ANY normal mode raider will manage to get - might be slightly behind, but for all intents and purposes, 492 is enough to take down the vast majority of heroic modes in the current tier, and should be more than enough to take down the normal modes in the NEXT tier, rewarding you loot upgrades (usually, items are 8-9 ilvls above the previous tier - thus we can expect ilvl 503 items from the normal modes, and 516 from the heroic modes).
Stating that "JP is long/boring/hard" to get, doesn't matter. It is still a way for you to catch up - an ensured method, even, of catching up, because no matter how many times you raid, you might never see half the items you want drop. But JP? JP will be aquired from every boss kill in HC's. It'll ENSURE you a way to gear up.
Something you are also not concidering, is this -
back in Cataclysm, for one, each tier brought a new set of VP items. They usually covered 4-5 slots total. Thus over the expansion, you could get like... Half your slots filled out by lvl 359, 378 and 397 epics.
This time, YOUR ENTIRE GEARSET is provided for you. You can literally farm all the gear you'll ever need for stepping IN to a raid, from random heroics. There's no missing pieces - suboptimal? Sure. It's supposed to be a secondary choise to actually raiding. Viable? Oh hell yes.
We're getting new ways of aquiring JP (such as a boost when Vp capped, as far as I've understood?), which means that you can in no way compare the speed to now. But on average, each random hc holds what, 4-5 bosses. That's 42 vp per boss, or 210 vp per. I might be slightly off, but you need about 22K justice points for a FULL set of gear. that's all 15 items minus weapon. You can do 3 heroics an hour at this point, when next patch comes around, this should deffo hold true, that's 630 VP an hour. 35 hours for farming a full set of raiding ready gear, under the CURRENT system. Expect it to be maybe double as fast under the next patch. So let's say, 20 hours.
Of course, if you're really as dedicated to joining your friends as you're saying, you'll have both the lotus necklase (-1250 JP), the klaxxi ring (-1250 vp) and a Darkmoon trinket (-1750 jp) - all 3 extremely easily gained, and can be gained BEFORE the patch even hits without any shred of luck needed. Just some effort. That's 20% of the neccessary VP, gone.
Is that really so bad? How much time do you spend clearing all five parts of LFR in a week? an hour average per? Maybe two if you're counting in queue timers and you're a dps. You'll get stronger items here, you can do it on YOUR schedule (no waiting a week to get another shot at an item), you can literally have it knocked out in less than a week if you wish to.
And don't give me the bullshit that the items require rep. Repgrinds have ALWAYS been a part of WoW. The fact that you can't equip your tabard and sprint through the grinds so they didn't even really matter is just too bad, really. If you want to raid, you get rep. At this point, if you have every single reputation enhancer (+100%), and level a new character through townlong+dreadwastes, getting:
Klaxxi+lotus exalted.
Offensive+celestials+shadopan revered.
Takes you at most 14 days. Some of them are alot less (klaxxi is less than a week, shado pan is almost instant - longest is celestials as it requires revered lotus, then itself revered, and no questhubs are aviable for either faction with rep hubs).
You CANNOT expect to get a template character handed to you just because you want to raid in 5.2.
In less than two weeks, you can be fully geared, and ready to tackle whatever raid is thrown at you, for less than 3 hours worth of gaming per day - 2 for dailies, 1 for randoms. Less time will be spent on dailies as you get each of them to it's required rep level, winding down to just needing ten minutes to finish off celestials by day 10 or so.