Why Shouldn't Old Gear Be Useful?

I hear this now and then from Blues, usually in response to complaints about old-world gear getting nerfed. I think they've taken it a bit too far. But I should clarify before I start: I completely understand and am happy about the rating stat system. It prevents what would have otherwise been terrible inflation of stats with each increase in the level cap.

However I see no reason why all cool items should be nerfed.

The first that I remember were grenades, they got various caps at which they became unreliable. The most immediate effect was to make engineering much more expensive in PvP, changing the grenades from iron to thorium, and now adamantite. Obviously Blizzard wants us to use the newer mats. It's part of a normal economy. But why should the past ones be totally useless? Add a tiered system where each time you go down a tier you lose a percentage of the stun time. Adamantite does 3 seconds, thorium 2, iron 1. This means that the most expensive grenades remain clearly the best (damage doesn't count, if we wanted just damage we'd use dynamite) but cheaper grenades are still usable. This helps leveling players since trade goods they gather are much more valuable than they would be otherwise.

Hand of Justice is another nerfed item. The proc rate on it used to be a fixed 2%. It was changed to be variable with level, dropping past 60 to only 1.33% at 70. Why do this? A trinket with a scaling 2% damage would be very useful. You'd have to have the gear so that the low AP would be offset by the multiplier, but I imagine this would be a highly desired DPS trinket.

Blizzard says they don't want people farming old instances for gear. Why not? Does a good item in an old instance discourage doing new instances? Why should we be pressed into new content anyway? We should move on because we want to, not because gear is hanging in front of our noses. If gear is such a major motivator, Blizzard should rethink how they make their content. Gear should be a requirement to see content, a pacing mechanism (in other words, slow us down long enough for them to have time to make more instances). Raids and instances shouldn't just exist to give gear. I'm getting sleepy and having trouble forming coherent thoughts now.

I'm reminded of old forums posts requesting that pre-BC raids be updated or have heroic modes so people would still do them at 70. The idea was rejected. Why? I don't understand why Blizzard would want to discourage any content in the game. It makes no sense to restrict options, to shuffle us into a few raids. Imagine if BWL gave gear equal to level 70 regular instances. It would remain useful for gear, but there wouldn't be a need to do it for gear, since there would be other instances to get the gear. Think of it as the parallel 10-25 raid lines.

To jump back to an old topic, Naxxramas should remain in EPL and instead be duplicated in Northrend. Removing content and charging people to get it back, in modified form, is a ridiculous concept. It sounds far too much like the stories friends would tell of greedy tricks Sony would pull with their games. I already complained about the lore problem in an earlier post.

Save Naxx.