While you're right, Hazerider, I think it's a really good sign on Blizzard's end that things have changed so much that way. I mean, for the most part it's gotten a little better with both expansions...
In vanilla wow instance gear was worth using, sort of, but only because the only other means of getting gear was raiding, which for a long time was 40 man only. Even the small raids were 20 man, almost as big as the max pve raid size now. I was definitely a beneficiary of this era since it was the point raiding gear mattered the most and I was on the bleeding edge towards the begining and the end, but it definitely wasn't a good system for accommodating a variety of players.
In TBC the dungeon gear, outside of stuff purchased with badges, sucked for the most part, which was almost a relative step down from vanilla. But the gear purchased with badges stacked up better than raid gear better than every before, and the PvP gear sucked a lot less, especially with Arena gear existing, which offered a much better alternative to raid gear.
And now in Wrath we've come so much closer to a system that works, the leveling/non-heroic gear transitions nicely into the heroic gear and the pvp gear(except resilience sucks right now but whatever they'll fix it eventually), to the raid gear and the higher set of arena gear(except vault messes with the system). It's pretty viable for almost anyone to get any item in the game right now, and there's actually rewards at every level that reward you for putting effort in at the level/playtime you're at now. The system is far from perfect, but gear is finally tiered - the literal definition, not the 7/8/9... etc. shit - well enough that the ladder that should exists does, rather than the silly leaps and jumps and sidegrades that were there before. We'll see if blizzard can manage not to do anything stupid gearwise for the whole expansion, and they still need to fix resilience, but I really like that gear at every level is actually a reasonable improvement over the previous one.
But seriously about the vanilla trinkets, I used Eye of the Dead for so fucking long...
For what it's worth I'm rerolling again, however. Even though it was only a few months ago really I went back to Horde(and the Druid by extension), Druid is weaker than it's been since I first started using at 60 in the BWL days, which it really deserves after how stupid it was in TBC, but I think Blizz will probably be pretty hesitant about buffing it since how OP it was for most of the last expansion cycle is still fresh in the minds of both players and devs. I could use a change anyway, so I'm giving Paladin a shot... I'll stay healing so Holy will be the way to go for me, but I like a lot of the tricks it got through wrath talents, stuff like the stun removal on BoF offered some minor changes to buff an already cool class. I'd originally wanted to be a Paladin anyway, but it never happened since I rolled horde because stupid TTS talked us into it and then didn't play with us...
