Update! This arti­cle is well-intended but the truth has been revealed, and I guessed wrong. More infor­ma­tion in the arti­cle “Wrath Emblem Design Revealed”.

How­ever, it kills me to delete text, so I’ll leave it here any­way. Also as a reminder to myself that design is opaque.

Only raid or instance once a week? Won­der­ing what to do with those 25 or 30 emblems you’ve finally accu­mu­lated? Like real-life money, don’t let those shiny tokens burn a hole in your pocket.

“But, but, but how can I wait? Zomgepics!”

I know, I know. The siren call of zomgepics beckon us all.

The emblem gear will (in all like­li­hood) be refreshed when a higher tier of con­tent comes out, just like the Badge of Jus­tice sys­tem did in the Burn­ing Cru­sade. This means that your Emblems will (in all like­li­hood) appre­ci­ate in value.

The item level (or ilevel) is the bud­get of good­ies that roughly deter­mines the strength of an item. In gen­eral, you’re going to be bet­ter at what you want to do if you have an item with a higher item level.

Right now (Feb 2009), the ilevel of the items you can buy with Emblems of Hero­ism are the same ilevel as those obtained from the final boss of a heroic instance or a Naxx10 raid, which is likely where you got the token in the first place. Basi­cally, you’re buy­ing entry-level raid gear that can be got­ten through the dili­gent run­ning of hero­ics and entry-level raids. Good deal.

So why wait?

Well, I’m assum­ing two things:

1. You’re in late-Wrath quest gear and heroic instance blues, with per­haps a cou­ple of pvp and raid/heroic/crafted epics mixed in.
2. You aren’t gain­ing Emblems at a mas­sive rate.

For the most part, the dif­fer­ence between your cur­rent blues and those intro­duc­tory epics is not game chang­ing… not with just one item. Upgrad­ing all of them? Sure, that’s a big dif­fer­ence. But you’re not play­ing fre­quently enough to upgrade all of them. You’re look­ing for the one item that you’re spend­ing your hard-saved tokens on to give you a notable change.

When the next level of con­tent arrives, there will be new items for sale at the Emblem ven­dor. Those items will be the same ilevel as the new raid con­tent. And guess what? Your Emblems, the ones you’re sav­ing right now, will still be accepted there.

So why not wait until that day? Sure, it means pass­ing on cur­rent Emblem gear. But if you can wait until then, you’ll have gone from a blue item to a zomgepic Ulduar-level item with the same cur­rency you have now. That’s a notable change.

So when I look at my (hum­ble) col­lec­tion of Emblems, I don’t see one Naxx10 piece of gear right now, I see an as-yet-unreleased Ulduar-level item in the future.

(Of course, all of this is pred­i­cated on the Emblem ven­dors get­ting stock of bet­ter items, which is how it worked in TBC. I’ve read noth­ing to sug­gest that it won’t work this way in Wrath, as well.)