The death of Level 80 Heroics.

Every once in a while something just walks up behind me that I should have noticed, and smacks me upside the head with a 2x4.

Reading Keeva's blog earlier today just such an event happened.  Keeva had a great little compilation of short topics that got all put together into one post, Quickies for Maintenance Day.  An off comment while talking about mount/pet changes hit me, which I've paraphrased such that no one will be trying to do level 80 heroics anymore.  I felt like this needed a little more discussion.

Level 80 Heroics have been around for a source of daily runs in order to produce a source of Frost emblems, now changed to Justice Points.  Since the change to 4.0.1 they actually produce more in the way of rewards as all of the runs give Justice Points when earlier only the first run of the day produced Frosts.  Now there's a mad rush to do chain heroics, in order to get your toon's banks of Justice Points topped off so that you can buy higher level'd gear as soon as it's available from Cataclysm.  

Wowwiki has a great rundown on the topic of Justice Points.  Per wowwiki, "outgrowing content by out-leveling it will result in the listed objectives no longer rewarding Justice Points."

Whoa!  You can only do level 80 heroics (for Justice point rewards) at, duh, level 80!  Once you hit level 81, you can do the heroics, but you will not get Justice point rewards for them.  There will no longer be lines of people queued up waiting for a level 80 Heroic.  Of course we'll have Cata's dungeons to do, but you know what I mean.  Aside from the short time you're a level 80 toon, you'll have very little incentive to even deal with the level 80 heroics.

Soon there will be ONLY ONE REASON to do these heroics: to get the Achieves associated with their completion.  In the near future, if you have a toon you've got leveled up finally to 80 and above you'll be looking to your guildies.  Guilds will have "fun days", where they do the level 80 heroics in chain fashion. Doing so over a period of time in order to get the achieves for all their leveling alts.  As monotonous as some of them were, a small part of me will miss them.