While there was a lot in 5.4 to be excited about - the removal of reputation requirements on the 5.0 and 5.1 gear, which, incidentally, was also downgraded to JP gear, as well as the huge slew of alt-friendly timeless armor pieces (and with cross-realm mailing, you can equip all your toons, regardless of which side!) - one thing that seriously worried be was the lack of new valor gear. At this point, the best stuff you can buy with valor points is Shado-Pan Assault gear, which has been around since 5.2.
Instead, the seeming intention is to have us use Valor Points to upgrade the iLevels of the gear we find dropping off of bosses.
I realize I've gone into this before, but I think it bears reiteration. The entire point of Valor points and its forebears was to help with bad luck in drops. You could run a raid many times over and just from sheer bad luck, never get new gear - or perhaps just never get those gloves you needed. With vendor-bought gear, you could end that streak.
What we've traded that system for is one that merely rewards being lucky with those drops. Sure, you might consider the ability to upgrade your, say, 522 gloves to 530 allows you to close the gap a little between what you have and the piece you want, but ultimately, upgrades just raise the numbers. Your newly 530 gloves are not a substitute for the 540 ones you want, because if you had gotten those 540 gloves, you'd upgrade them to 548. The only, only thing that valor upgrades as a game mechanic do is give people a reason to keep grinding valor.
Blizzard might want us all to raid more, and I think they've accomplished that to an extent if you consider LFR to satisfy that goal. What I miss, and I think a lot of people do, is the sense of progression you can make in alternate forms of content. The reason they started awarding valor points for doing daily quests was theoretically to allow people to just be hardcore questers (how many dailies you'd need for a full set, though, I don't even want to think about.)
Cataclysm gets a lot of flak (much of it deserved - I'll definitely say the raiding game is far better in Mists than it was in Cata) but one thing I think it got dead-on was the progression of Justice Points and Valor Points, and the gear one could get from them. Combining that with progressive dungeon tiers (admittedly, the 5.2 Zul'agains might have worked better if they had come in with Firelands - and the difficulty of heroics in Cata was definitely too high until 4.3,) you could feel like you were getting a serious sense of character progression even if you didn't want to deal with the hassles of raiding.
I worry, especially with the randomized nature of gem sockets, tertiary stats, and "war forged" iLevel boosts for gear in WoD, that Blizzard is determined to dismantle the system that they built up starting in Burning Crusade. Yes, getting a drop off a boss is exciting, but the game's a lot healthier when the routes to gear acquisition are diverse.
Give us raid drops, dungeon drops, crafted gear, Valor gear, and Rep gear, and anything else you can come up with.
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