Blizzard Community Manager Zarhym(@CM_Zarhym) announced today that the developers have reconsidered their common practice of down converting the valor points to justice points, which was planned once again for the 5.2 patch. In a post on the WoW forums, Zarhym pointed out that several factors, as well as feedback from the community led to the decision.
We’re making the Valor change for a couple of reasons, but primarily because we think a down-conversion under the new Mists endgame progression model just feels mean. We traditionally viewed this conversion process with each patch as a necessary evil to discourage hoarding—it’s not fun to feel like you can’t spend your Valor in the weeks before a new patch because you have to be ready to buy everything up. However, we have a Valor cap now to prevent excessive hoarding, many of the Valor rewards in 5.2 require raiding to acquire (for example, many of the ilevel-522 rewards are tied to Shado-Pan Assault reputation, which you’ll only gain rep with by raiding in the Throne of Thunder), and the LFR version has an ilvl-480 requirement, meaning you can’t hoard Valor on a brand new 90 and jump straight to the best stuff. All of these factors being considered, it doesn’t make good sense to take Valor away from players in this context. Down-conversions may occur for future patch releases depending on the circumstances, but for 5.2 it’s safe and snuggly where it is.
This is a bit surprising to hear, considering the fact that the valor to justice conversion has happened in every patch since the two currencies came into existence in patch 4.0.1 as a means of avoiding the aforementioned hoarding of points so a player could get a jump on new content by buying shiny new gear. When you do take into account the factors Zarhym mentioned like the valor cap and the rep requirements for the gear in 5.2, it doesn’t make sense to punish players who are possibly still working in patch 5.0 content and trying to gear up by turning their valor into justice points.
I am very happy to hear this, first because my second 90 is still earning rep and gathering valor and I would have hated to be a few valor points shy of another piece before they all became essentially worthless until 5.3 when item upgrades came back to the game. Second, this means that Blizzard is not so stuck in their design philosophies that they can’t change their normal path. Does this make you happy, or are you one of the folks who just spent their valor when they heard the patch was so close?
