Don't panic! (yet)

According to Bob Turkey and WoW.com the prices for many Tier 10.0 items have been added to the PTR, which are 60 for the Gloves and Shoulders, 90 for Head, Legs and Chest.

Remember the old Tier 9.0 cost 30 Triumph for the cheapies and 50 for the expensive stuff, so what we have is a 100% cost increase for the cheap stuff and 80% for the other items.

In 3.3 on the PTR you get 2 emblems of frost for the first random heroic of the day, ie the same as we get now for the daily heroic quest. The new VoA boss is unknown but is likely to also drop 2 frost. Then there is that weekly raid quest which now gives 5 frost, but it will likely need to be done close to server reset day, so that there are enough groups running it to have a good chance of getting in. Pugging raids on the day before the server reset is usually a fruitless activity on Aszune. So to cope with the rampant inflation of Tier 10, non-raiders get the chance of 5 extra emblems of frost per week. Woot!

Before I panic, let me take a look at how many emblems of frost drop from the raid bosses in Icecrown Citadel, as this is the usual way I gain emblems. Recall that bosses in ToTC drop 3 Triumph each, so one might express the cost of Tier 9 as 10 boss kills for gloves, shoulders, 17 boss kills for the rest. After a google search and hitting wowhead & wowwiki, I can't find any information about how many frost drop from IC bosses so I won't panic... yet. If Blizzard want to keep the same number of boss kills as ToTC then I would propose 5 to 6 Emblems of Frost per Icecrown Citadel boss kill is reasonable. But given how hard they are hitting non-raiders, I am not hopeful.

At the end of the day, Tier 10 is only useful to me for making progress in Icecrown Citadel and then making it easier - there should not be anywhere to go after IC apart from a gear reset in Cataclysm. However there is always the heroic 10 man encounters, which should require better gear than Tier 9. Thus I am waiting for news of how much frost drops from IC bosses in massive anticipation!