Kill Ten Rats has an article on the link between raid apathy and gear needed for the Burning Crusade. Basically if people expect to need epics to succeed in BC they would go raiding more, but if they expect lesser gear to suffice they would raid less.
An alternative explanation for less raiding would be the widely reported fact that raiding has become a lot less pleasant since the patch. Servers are less stable, Decursive isn't working any more, and when killing Nefarian with your Alliance guild you might end up finding two shaman breastplates (screenshot at MMOG Nation). But as the raid apathy started already before the patch, it is more likely that the expectations for the Burning Crusade are responsible, and not the WoW 2.0 patch.
The endgame of World of Warcraft is a game of diminishing returns. Improving your gear gets harder the further advanced you already are, and the improvements are getting smaller. Now lets assume you aren't totally burned out from playing WoW, and like most players you have several characters. In that case the decision which character to play depends very much on your expectation of what gear you will need to level in the expansion, and what gear would be a waste of effort to acquire.
My priest is on a break for two equally valid reasons: I got tired of raiding, and I felt that I had more than enough equipment for that character to start playing in the expansion when it comes out. Improving the gear of my priest would have been very hard, as only BWL and higher still yields items I could use. Meanwhile my warrior feels less than optimally equipped, with only a single epic, wearing mostly tier 0 or equivalent blue items. Doing PvP with my warrior both enables me to play WoW without having to raid, and enables me to equip him to a level where I'd be more comfortable with when starting to play him in the new content.
I'm not claiming that this is absolutely necessary. There are two major reasons *against* equipping a level 60 alt now: A) Green and blue items are probably sufficient to go questing and visiting dungeons in the Outland. And B) by the time you actually get around to playing your alt, the auction house is probably offering cheap green items which are better than anything you can acquire right now. So an alternative strategy to collecting gear for your alts now would be to farm gold now, and buy better gear after the expansion comes out. But hey, I'm financially prepared for the Burning Crusade, I stocked more metals and gems than I think I'll need to level up jewelcrafting, and will hopefully be able to sell the excess at a huge profit. ;)
So what gear do you really need for the Burning Crusade. My personal impression from the BC beta is: not much. I did quests and dungeons in the beta with both of my level 60 priests, the undead priest in full epic set, and the human priest in just-reached-60 green/blue gear. And both did just fine. Of course the priest is probably the least gear-dependant character class for soloing quests. And the tier 1 and 2 priest epic gear, which helps a lot for raid healing, doesn't improve my soloing ability by much. But I also saw a lot of other players with other character classes do just fine in green/blue gear. I even grouped once with a level 58 character in the Hellfire Rampart instance, without that causing too much of a problem. I don't foresee anyone being blocked in the Burning Crusade just because he doesn't have enough shiny epics to start with.
*Not* having epics at the start of the Burning Crusade has one major advantage: doing the quests is more fun. The earlier quests and mobs you kill drop green items which are "as good as" tier 1 epics, approximately. My epic priest found a lot of green stuff which he ended up not using, because it wasn't much better than what he had, and I didn't want to destroy the set bonuses of the tier 1 and 2 I was wearing. The same items were a huge improvement for my human priest, and getting a quest reward or drop which you can actually use is always more fun.
For me that means that playing enough PvP to get one epic sword for my warrior is probably a good idea. I get to experience more of the PvP content, which I don't know that well yet, and which is thus more interesting to me. And the dps for a warrior's sword should have some influence on how fast he progresses in the expansion, at least up to the point where he finds a better one. At the same time I don't feel that I absolutely *must* equip my warrior now. Even after the nerf getting the one sword isn't too much of an effort. Afterwards I can decide whether I want to continue doing PvP and get a bit more equipment purely based on how much fun I am having doing so. As soon as PvP starts feeling like a grind, I can stop without fear of missing some essential gear. That is a good situation to be in.
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