Please Bring Back Justice Points

Justice Points, which were removed at the start of Warlords of Draenor, was a currency rewarded from endgame PvE content that was primarily used to purchase gear. It initially took the form of Badges of Justice in the Burning Crusade but within two expansions it took on a different name by Cataclysm. At that time, it served as a lesser version of Valor Points, which were a more limited PvE reward used to buy higher end gear. This changed over time as Valor Points eventually became known as the currency used for upgrading gear and was eventually shortened to Valor when it made its return in the later stages of Warlords of Draenor.

Since its removal, other currencies have been added that are suspiciously similar to Justice Points such as Apexis Crystals, which were used to buy endgame gear throughout the Warlords of Draenor expansion but was awarded more from solo PvE endgame content instead. In the Legion expansion, Order Resources, Nethershards, and Veiled Argunite also filled a similar role. Timewarped Badges have also filled a similar role since they were added and their existence has spanned multiple expansions.

While others questioned this, I didn't mind it too much until I realized how wasteful it seemed to keep adding Justice Point analogues while drafting articles for my recent series. While I've kept the details vague about the Justice Point-like system I would like to see in those articles, I have since brainstormed more specific details. Based on what I've devised, I believe the game can comfortably have a Justice Point system in place that is more universal and eternal than ever without being remotely as imposing on players as the current analogues do. In this article I will analyze the Justice Point system and its analogues, then describe the system I wish to see implemented based on that analysis.

The Justice Point System Summarized

As I mentioned above, the Justice Point system can be easily described as one where players earned a currency mainly for doing endgame PvE content, which in turn was used to buy gear. Since Justice Points are based on currencies primarily awarded in Dungeons and Raids, they were also acquired from the same sources. In addition, an option to convert Honor into Justice Points was added shortly after Cataclysm released, meaning PvP activities were an option for farming Justice Points.

However, this almost wasn't necessary since the demand for Justice Points wasn't too high especially once a player was geared enough. This wasn't too difficult to do since Justice Point gear was comparable to gear from entry-level content. Blizzard responded to this by adding a currency sink that allowed players to buy reagents for Justice Points. In addition, gear that was available for Valor Points often became purchasable with Justice Points in later patches to account for the release of new raid tiers and higher item level requirements.

To encourage players to spend Justice Points, it was capped at 4000, which was just enough to buy a few pieces of gear at most. This allowed players to store the currency to buy a few pieces of gear when new raid tiers release since unlike Valor Points, the currency wasn't taken away upon such releases. It is reasonable to restrict the accumulation of Justice Points to this degree since one of the purposes of releasing a new raid tier is to renew the gear hunt and while Justice Point gear isn't incredible, making it too accessible too soon may trivialize the gearing process. At the same time, punishing preparation too much may discourage such forward thinking.

Based on this summary, I have made the following observations that are worth keeping in mind when analyzing its analogues and suggesting my own system:

• The source for Justice Points is relatively limited and focused more on group content.
• The usage of Justice Points was similarly limited but plays an important role in providing players with a way to gear that don't involve relying on the random chance of acquiring desired gear as a drop.
• Dedicated players generally ended up with a huge surplus of Justice Points.
• Justice Points had a decent, albeit expensive, currency sink that allowed players to maintain this surplus since the cap was relatively low.
• Accumulating Justice Points in preparation for new content releases was moderately rewarding striking a good balance of rewarding dedicated play.

A Look At Justice Point Analogues

After the removal of Justice Points, many analogues were gradually made available. Almost all of them were listed in the opening paragraphs and in this section I will briefly summarize my thoughts on how comparable each currency was to Justice Points and also explain what it did better and worse.

Timeless Coins were the unofficial replacement for Justice Points during the Siege of Orgrimmar raid tier. While it was possible to get some gear for Justice Points at the time, Timeless Coins could buy superior gear, were fairly quick to farm, and more accessible because its source is Timeless Isle's solo content. Furthermore, players could earn similar gear tokens and the Burden of Eternity upgrade item while farming Timeless Coins which allowed players to shift their expenditure of the currency to other items such as weapons or cosmetics.

Because Valor Points primarily became a gear upgrade currency when Timeless Isle was made available, Timeless Coins also serves as a weird conjoining of the roles of both Justice Points and Valor Points due to the great variance in item level between the less expensive gear and more expensive gear from the Timeless Coin vendor. I believe Timeless Coins may have served as the inspiration for removing Justice Points in favor of using a different currency for players to earn and gear themselves with.

Apexis Crystals were initially very underwhelming since they dropped in miniscule amounts relative to the amount needed to purchase gear. Because one of the only major sources of Apexis Crystals was a single rotating daily quest, Apexis Crystal income was insufficient to buy the gear that cost thousands of Apexis Crystals initially and many thousands more to upgrade. It was faster to acquire similar or better versions of such gear from content such as Heroic Dungeons and LFR Highmaul even if it relied on dealing with random chance.

Patch 6.2 greatly improved Apexis Crystals by increasing their abundance from solo content and improving upon the previous iteration of Timeless Coins. Also much like with Timeless Coins, one could purchase a fairly high item level gear token that could be upgraded and both could also be found randomly while farming Apexis Crystals. While Apexis Crystals started out poorly, they closed out the Warlords of Draenor expansion spectacularly and are still worth acquiring for the many cosmetics and useful items that can be purchased.

Order Resources are much like how Apexis Crystals initially were: they didn't do much to improve the rate at which players developed in the endgame. However, unlike Apexis Crystals, Order Resources have another primary use in the form of funding missions, so it could be argued that being able to upgrade the Order Hall armor set is an afterthought in a sense. It probably didn't help that the upgrade requirements got so demanding and time-consuming that the player would likely be more geared from other content by the time those requirements were met. Ultimately, Order Resources are the most tenuous analogue to Justice Points in any case and Legion effectively might as well have shipped without one.

Nethershards are very similar to Apexis Crystals in the sense that they are mostly earned from solo content and are mainly used for gearing purposes. Instead of using an upgrade system, Blizzard opted to add two different types of gear tokens instead since while Dauntless gear tokens awarded generic gear and could be found as a random drop, Relinquished gear tokens could award any gear available from the expansion's endgame and could not be found as a random drop. This means players could earn many appearances and had a wider selection of trinkets they could acquire but they had to earn enough Nethershards to buy the gear tokens. Nethershards, much like Apexis Crystals and Timeless Coins, could also be spent on various cosmetics and useful items.

While I think the idea for how Nethershards is spent is pretty solid, acquisition is another story. I've already explained in a bit more detail on why I think the acquisition methods are poor and it basically boils down to there not being enough accessible sources. I also found acquisition to be especially poor because there was some evergreen (or almost evergreen) content such as World Quests and Mythic+ Dungeons that could've served as an excellent source of Nethershards.

Veiled Argunite improved upon Nethershards somewhat by providing more accessible sources but not where I mentioned. Argus Rare spawns, Invasion Points, and randomly spawned loot serve as sources of the currency and fortunately all of them are fairly lucrative. Veiled Argunite can also be acquired from a weekly quest, missions, and emissary quests. Veiled Argunite is exclusively spent on Relinquished gear tokens of a higher item level than Nethershards were able to purchase. Overall, it's nice that a lot of solo content on Argus can help a character progress towards their next Relinquished gear piece, though the system is much narrower in focus than I would like.

Timewarped Badges are gradually becoming a timeless currency in a sense which makes sense since the Timewalking Dungeons that mainly award them are effectively timeless due to their item level downscaling to ensure there's some challenge for all applicable players. Timewarped Badges can be spent on gear that scales with the player's current level, cosmetics, and other useful items. The accessibility of items that can be purchased varies depending on which expansion's Timewalking event is active.

Blizzard has also occasionally awarded Timewarped Badges during anniversary events and offers exclusive items that can be purchased with the currency during such events. Timewarped Badges also featured as a currency reward in the Deaths of Chromie scenario, meaning it may become more accessible to acquire outside of Timewalking events.

The Justice Point System Suggestion

Based on the information above, I've devised the following suggestion that attempt to unify elements of previous system to produce a solid universal system that appropriately rewards players for various in-game activities. To make this suggestion easier to understand, I have split the suggestion into two sections. The first section, Acquisition, describes how Justice Points are awarded in terms of source and quantity based on analyzing all the systems above. The second section, Expenditure, determines the sort of goods players can expect to buy for this new brand of Justice Points and the pricing including situational pricing.

Acquisition

Acquisition of Justice Points would be much more varied than the initial implementation that focused on rewarding group content or later implementations that focused on rewarding solo content. This idea works well with my design philosophy of providing a wide variety of content to appeal to and retain many types of players and gives meaning to the idea that Justice Points are universal and time spent on most of the content in-game will offer that currency as a reward.

Having such a reward will also address the fact more content, such as World Quests, have randomized rewards that a player may not desire. This means that having a currency reward to buy gear will help to compensate for those undesired rewards, which I believe is why currencies such as Nethershards were added.

Each type of content would have a reward amount based on the activity that the player does. The following lists Justice Point reward amounts from lowest to highest and some common activities that would award that amount. The general idea is that the reward given is based on time invested, meaning significant time investments would yield greater rewards. Time gating is also taken into account in cases where it's relevant.

• The following activities would award 100 Justice Points:
• Defeating a specific Rare Spawn for the first time in a given day.
• Completing a World Quest.
• Defeating a Dungeon boss on any difficulty including Mythic+.
• Defeating a Raid boss on LFR difficulty.
• Defeating a boss in the Brawler's Guild.
• Winning an Arena Skirmish.
• The following activities would award 200 Justice Points:
• Defeating a Raid boss on Normal or higher difficulty.
• The following activities would award 300 Justice Points:
• Completing a Random Daily Dungeon or Random Daily Heroic Dungeon.
• Completing a LFR wing.
• Winning a Random Battleground match.
• Winning a PvP Brawl for any subsequent time in a week.
• The following activities would award 500 Justice Points:
• Completing the weekly event quest.
• Looting the weekly Mythic+ chest.
• Winning a PvP Brawl for the first time in a week.
• Completion of a major quest chain (enough to advance or earn a zone achievement).

These rewards would remain constant at all levels. However, all Justice Point rewards would be reduced by 75% if the player outlevels the content by 9 or more levels to discourage players from steamrolling older content to farm Justice Points without entirely removing the reward like with the previous iteration.

Finally, Justice Points can be earned in small amounts as random loot at an average of 1-2 per enemy including enemy faction corpses looted in PvP. The amount gotten would typically be uncommonly earned in batches of 6-20 and if looted in a group, the amount is split between the group much like with gold to maintain the average acquisition rate. I believe the average acquisition rate is low enough to discourage grindy farming but serves as a nice bonus when doing structured content like with all the activities listed above.

Expenditure

When it comes to spending Justice Points, how much it should be capped at is important to consider to give a general idea of how much players are allowed to retain in preparation for new content releases, which will be important very soon. I personally think a cap of 5000 is reasonable.

With the cap established, the next point to address is the main item to spend Justice Points on: equipment. Much like how I opted towards having a variety of methods for acquiring Justice Points, I also opted to offer players two different options for types of purchasable gear.

The first type of gear would be fixed stat gear similar to what could previously be purchased with Justice Points and what is currently purchasable with Timewarped Badges. Since it might be a little too much work to create suitable gear of every armor type, fixed stat gear would feature jewelry, cloak, and trinket slot items. Ring slot items would have stats budgeted evenly over two secondary stats and would offer every possible combination of two different secondary stats (such as Critical Strike and Haste, etc.). Neck and cloak slot items would evenly budget its secondary stats to Critical Strike, Haste, and Mastery. Outside of making them stat sticks, trinkets can be designed at Blizzard's discretion since there's many interesting mechanics that trinkets can feature. Other gear could be added later, but I think having even these fixed stat options alone is enough to satisfy players who are a little tired of randomized rewards.

The second type of gear would be the randomly produced gear from gear tokens purchasable using currencies such as Timeless Coins and Nethershards. This means that one can purchase a gear token for a specific equipment slot and use the item to produce a piece of gear they can equip in that slot. The types of gear tokens would be similar to that of the Dauntless and Relinquished token system.

The Dauntless gear token type would produce a piece of generic rare quality gear appropriate to the player's level with two randomly selected secondary stats, meaning that players can purchase and use them at any level if they have enough Justice Points. If used at level cap, the gear would be comparable to just above entry level or, in the case of expansions like Legion, a Heroic Dungeon drop on release. The Relinquished gear token type would be offered when new raid tiers are made available or are about to be and would produce gear of an item level appropriate for preparing a player for a Normal raid in that tier. The gear produced would be any gear that the player could normally get from endgame content in that expansion up to the item level of the gear token much like with past Relinquished gear tokens.

Both the first and second type of gear would cost 1000 Justice Points per piece. However, once an expansion enters its second raid tier and offers Relinquished gear tokens, gear of the highest item level that can be purchased with Justice Points would cost 1500 Justice Points per piece. This price would decrease to 1000 per piece when new, purchasable gear of a higher item level is made available within the same expansion.

For example, if this system was applied to Legion's gear tokens, which we'll call "Dauntless," "Relinquished," and "T2 Relinquished," Dauntless would always cost 1000 Justice Points, Relinquished would initially release at a price of 1500 Justice Points, but would then drop to 1000 Justice Points when T2 Relinquished released at its own 1500 Justice Point price tag.

The general idea of these specific guidelines for Justice Point gear is as follows:

1. Players can deal with randomness to a degree by purchasing gear with fixed stats to deal with the outcome of earning suboptimal gear.
2. Players can use gear tokens to help fill slots they may not have gotten gear for to deal with the outcome of not getting gear.
3. Players can buy higher quality gear while leveling to improve the experience and get a grasp on the Justice Point system early.
4. It is fine if the Dauntless gear tokens become pointless to purchase in later tiers of an expansion since they'll still be useful for leveling players to purchase.
5. The pricing rules are consistent so that players have a good idea of how effort they need to exert to earn gear of varying power levels using this system.
6. The pricing rules are also consistent to further give players a good idea of how much they'll be rewarded for accumulating currency in preparation for new releases. In this case, a player will be able to buy 3 pieces of gear when new gear tokens are made available, which is around 20% or less of the player's gear slots.

Beyond gear, Justice Points will need a sink not just because I plan to cap them at 5000, but also because they'll accumulate fairly quickly from normal play but might not always need to be spent on gear. In this case I think there's a few fairly decent ways to sink Justice Points based on past systems.

The first sink would be to offer reagents for Justice Points at a premium price much like in Cataclysm. Since players may want to sink Justice Points while leveling, offering every single possible reagent individually would be impractical. Instead, I suggest that there are multiple satchels containing various materials like with the herb satchel that one could purchase in Cataclysm. Specifically, there could be satchels for ore, herbs, cloth, leather, cooking materials, and enchanting materials.

In addition, there could be specific satchels available for each expansion so players can have more agency over the materials they get. To prevent potential botting-related abuse, opening satchels requires the player to be of a high enough level to experience that expansion's content. For example, a Wrath of the Lich King reagent satchel would require level 60. However, this is not entirely necessary and the reagents awarded could be at any level or based on the opening player's level instead.

In terms of specific numerical information regarding the reagent satchels, I think 2500 Justice Points is a good price for a satchel that contains 20 of a common reagent on average. Satchels can also contain a smaller quantity of rarer reagents with uncommon counting as 2 common reagents, rare counting as 5, and epic counting as 10.

If this sink seems pricey, there is another option and it's one that makes me thankful that Blizzard implemented so many Justice Point analogues even if I think they waste slots in the Currency tab. Since these analogue currencies can be spent on cosmetics and other useful items, being able to convert Justice Points into these currencies effectively allows players to buy all those items for Justice Points. The conversion rate need not be that generous but it should be possible to purchase some moderately expensive items when converting thousands of Justice Points. For example, a 1:1 conversion ratio from Justice Points to Nethershards is probably fair. In addition to this, Justice Points could also be used to purchase bonus roll currency including future ones.

Finally, Justice Points could be spent to inefficiently convert it into usable currency on alts. One may have noticed I did not mention making gear tokens account-bound and while randomly acquired gear tokens could be account bound, I do not think purchasable ones should be. I do not believe there's any need to when I can instead suggest a way for players to send some of their surplus Justice Points to alts to gear them up faster. When it comes to a specific conversion ratio, I think it's fine to be a bit generous so I think a 500 Justice Point bind-on-account cache for the price of 1000 Justice Points would allow for a nice 2:1 conversion ratio. Larger versions of this could also be made available if bulk purchasing cannot be implemented.

Final Statements

Much like with my other suggestions, it would be nice to see it in game in its full form but it's more likely that elements will be derived. What I think is the most important element is that Blizzard continues to offer currencies like Justice Points in order to add an element of consistency to player progression. This is especially important since the game has historically been full of randomized rewards and Legion upped the ante in that regard. The best way for a currency like this to successfully work is to have it be a common reward from many sources much like how Artifact Power was in Legion so that players always feel like they're earning something for the time and effort spent even if they do not desire other rewards from that content.

While the title of my article expresses a strong desire to specifically bring back Justice Points and I do believe having a currency that lasts for more than one raid tier or expansion makes it useful throughout every stage of a content release cycle, it is okay to keep releasing specific currency for purchasing gear as long as what I mentioned above holds true. Also, the currency need not be called Justice Points. It could just as easily be called Badge of Justice to cater to nostalgia, but I do think name recognition of the currency is important since my ideal situation is to have the currency last for as long as the game does.

Also worth noting is that while I listed specific values for Justice Point rewards, pricing, and cap, they can be adjusted if needed. Those values are what I considered to represent a good pace at which players should expect to earn gear using Justice Points.

Finally, while I implied it somewhat in the article, I should make it clear I do not want Valor Points to come back. The acquisition of Valor Points was heavily time-gated and encouraged unenjoyable grinding for gear often comparable to what can be acquired from Normal raids. Instead, I believe they serve a better role as Valor and should return to allow players to upgrade gear for reasons that I explained in my article on Titanforging. I think there only needs to be one universally acquired currency for buying gear with and if a tiered gear purchasing system needs to be added, prices can be adjusted much like how I suggested.