Go as far as you want to go. If you have no desire to do end game, then don't. If you do, then you can get geared up fairly well with just badge gear (full T9, and a few other nice pieces) and slowly you can get T10 (daily heroics, weekly raids) You can pug ToC for some decent gear as well. On my server they are even pugging ICC 25. They are even doing ICC25 as a GDKP run, so you could literally just ding 80 on an alt, and bring 50k gold into a raid and buy your way to a 5k GS...