Exactly the problem. While the iLevel for the t5 is 120 as opposed to 105 for the Frozen Shadoweave the points are much better utilized. There are no wasted points on stats like penetration.

It really just isn't possible to have a largely shadow-immune dungeon at this point and I'd say it is vanishingly unlikely that we'll even see a single shadow-immune target. Shadow Priests as mana batteries (nevermind as excellent dps sources) are already entrenched into raiding strategies and losing both their utility and warlock's non-fire damage simply won't happen outside of a gimmick fight.

This is why many mages have always said that having three schools of magical damage is a liability and not a strength. Blizzard feels quite comfortable shutting down fire, frost or even arcane but disabling shadow is far more severe. Heck, even demons take shadow damage.

From past experience, this seems likely. There were a lot of worries for warlocks going into Naxx, because we didn't have a spammable fire nuke (and the R&D forums were lit up by mages proclaiming "now you know how it feels!"). However, Naxx was fully shadow-acceptable, so I don't expect any future instances to have significant SR.

This is a truly interesting point and one that has never occurred to me. The mages' 3 schools are listed as one of their strengths. However, I can't think of any raid settings where a more restricted class (shadow based, nature based) was systematically marginally / lockedout via immune. It may be the case the 3 schools are more of a liability.

/end derail support

Arcane ?

Curator is the only one I can think of (Although Shazz'rah had a large resistance to arcane). There's certainly enough trash mobs that are arcane immune in Karazhan...

Yes I know there is a power scaling. But a power scaling across 5 items wouldn't make much sense would it?

I agree it would be cool to see some schools do more dmg (ice versus Rag?). It would have to be a much smaller multiplier, however, or people would stack their raids. If Hydross, a DPS fight, took 1.5X dmg from fire, stacking raids would be the norm for the next 6 months.

Any such fight would have to have more elements than DPS. Chromaggus showed this strength, having 5 mages to exploit all his vulnerabilities was nice, but I don't think anyone took out 3 rogues for 3 more mages on this encounter.

I await the day that a boss such as Doomwalker or Voidreaver is melee immune, I mean they are made of metal, isnt that why a water blob resists frost? "Realism"? . Or how about a Sword Immune mob, time to respec daggers..


Back to the topic at hand, and seriousness;
@OP I completely agree that as it stands now from looking forward through known progression drops that Tailoring has set people up for a stagnant progression path. We won't see increased dps gear like the rest of our raid.

For example, I came into BC with a mix of the Naxx offset dps items, and quickly began replacing most of my gear like a lot of people did. I tailored up my ugly Frozen Shadoweave set, got my Spellstrike and Girdle, picked up a new MH/OH and voila. fin

I'm sitting at pretty close to as good as I can be for the forseable future. My dps is a flat baseline now. If I need to pot now, I will till tier 6 level gear, and maybe even further in some slot cases.I know people have been complaining about the "marginal" upgrade path every class is seeing from the first few instances, but in the case of tailoring we have 0 path for 6 slots. I've already seen random gear driving certain classes in my guild noticeably higher from week to week, and I almost envy them for having smaller stepping stone choices. As much as end game raiding is about standing up to a giant mob and kicking his teeth in for the challenge of it, stocking up dkp for the next 4 months doesn't seem all that appealing to me at all.

I think the "gift" of usefull tailoring, may have been as bad as it was good to some.

"Too much, too soon"

Azuregos is arcane immune

That's because rogue poisons did mad damage during nature vuln, among other things.

Havok is retardedly good because epic bracer itemization in general is retardedly bad. Blizzard seems afraid to put spell crit on the bracer slot unless 1) it's a PvP epic 2) it's on a ghastly bad item or 3) it's on an item few people will ever have.

They're also afraid to put more than 29 spell damage on a neck item that is not Choker of the Fire Lord (although I found one item combination that is better: Pendant of Dominance + Runed Ornate Ruby).

Hush you!

Ok, I'll admit that relatively few serious targets are arcane immune or have been in the past. There are arcane-immune trash though as pointed out and actually we have a whole sub-species of mob (the albino voidwalker type) that seem to be immune. My main point is that Blizzard could make more arcane immune dragons or giant blobs of mana or whatever and there is precedent already and frankly mages would probably not ever bother to complain anymore. This isn't really a complaint so much as an observation.

Anyhow, tailoring... I hate it and resent the fact that I felt I had to drop engineering (which I've had since the T/S patch in beta) in order to contribute my share to raid dps. Now that I've done that and farmed the 100s of primals involved, I'd be naturally upset if Kara drops started being better. Shocking, the mysteries of the human mind, I know!

The main issue with tailoring might be that +dmg to a specific school is too powerful compared to +dmg in general.

Crafted BoE gear being equal to entry-raid drops is a feature. Crafted BoP gear being slightly better than entry-raid drops is also a feature (leatherworking fails here). But I guess +dmg to a specific school might be too good of a mod when it's available on multiple pieces of crafted gear. I'd still be wearing Spellfire if it was generic +dmg, but I'd only be slightly better than raid gear (set bonus and +5 ilvls over most Kara/Heroic drops). With it being a specific school, it jumps up an extra tier.

This whole topic brings up questions about what Blizzard's goals are, if any, with itemization. As mentioned before, the "holy grail" of itemization is having no wasted stats. Whether through incompetence, ignorance, design, or a combination of the three, most items are designed to waste stats on either useless of less useful stats. Any class/spec out there can give you a list of stats they absolutely want, stats they could use but are marginal, and stats they can't use at all. If you look at gear that they can use or even gear designed specifically for their class/spec you'll find very few items with no wasted stats. The few items that are perfectly designed end up becoming almost legendary because everyone uses them.

For my part as a shadow priest I can mention some items like Ebony Flame Gloves and Fel Infused Leggings as examples of this. I STILL see priests running around with Ebony Flame and I know there's people still using the leggings, which are only now outclasses by Spellstrike and maybe a few select others. I'm sure there's other old world items that fit this description, and some new world items that are going to end up in this "legendary" class of items.

The BoP sets and even the BoE epic patterns fall into this category of item. The items are universally well designed for everyone that can use them with nary a wasted stat on any of them. They even opted to drop the stamina which in some cases is a liability but I'm sure many are thanking them for allowing them the decision to be glass cannons or not with the use of sockets and zero base stamina.

The question is, does Blizzard realize what they're doing when they do this? Do they realize that by wasting stats on the vast majority of items that the few that are perfectly designed end up being a staple and basically a requirement for any min/maxer? Furthermore, where does the disconnect come from in designing these tailoring items versus the raid drops?

I know this may be useless conjecture but it is frustrating when Blizzard is all over the map like this. I suppose it's just a result of having a large design team and the inherent communication inefficiencies that come along with that. I would have just thought that they could at least effectively coordinate the various people doing itemization.

The sockets on the tailoring gear is what really puts it over the top. Remove the sockets from that, put sockets on the T4 pieces, and that closes the gap significantly.

I'm definently using Spellfire. The point was Spellfire currently vs Spellfire w/ generic damage instead of fire damage vs Tier 5.

BoP Tailoring gear should be better than the first set of raid drops. I'm using a profession slot that could be making money (Herbalism/Mining/Skinning) on Tailoring. I see no problem with that. The point is that the next tier of raid drops (Tier 5 for example) is still worse than the BoP tailoring gear because it's a specific school of damage.

Assuming that the Spellfire/Shadoweave gear is considering the +dmg as a single school (which it is with ilvl stuff) a generic damage set would still be better than Tier 4 and any other raid drops... but Tier 5 gear would be better than the tailoring stuff.

For example - Frozen Shadoweave would be +60 generic damage, 2 gem slots, 30 stam and 20 int
Going to Tier 5, it would be -23 damage, -8 stam, +9 int, +23 spirit, +1 gem slot, +15 crit

I would take the Tier 5 gear over the Tailoring BoP item there. And that's with gem slots taking up slightly more budget on it. But with Frozen Shadoweave giving an additional +12 damage over it because of the school specialization, Tailoring BoPs get to be an additional tier in power over current gear and comparable to or better than ilvl 120 gear.

From a design perspective, I just wish blizzard would consider where these optimally min-maxed items come from.

Wthin a set (or non-set group of similar gear) Blizzard has tended to put items with a higher item budget on the later bosses in any progression sequence. First you get your bracers, then belts, boots, gloves, and shoulders, and lastly the max-budget items of head, chest, and legs. But in most cases, these items all have the same ilevel.

Blizzard could stretch equivalent ilevel gear much better if they used min-max metrics (like AEP or whatever) when they considered where things dropped. I think it would work well if items dropped by harder bosses in a progression sequence were intentionally better optimized for their ilevel to create bigger upgrades. It would help bridge the gap between content and help people keep drops from big-ticket bosses for a little longer, simply becase they were so well itemized. This would be an alternative to hanging on to leather gloves from kazzak because they were just itemized in what can only be consider an unintentional stroke of quality.

Heroics are another place where this could be used. Everyone hates getting the same blues from L70 heroic bosses as they get from the normal version. There definitely should have been a 5 ilevel difference between all normals and heroic blues (in my opinion, normal blues should have capped at 110 to further differentiate them from L95-100 epics), but as an alternative, heroic items could have just universally been better min-maxed. Does your normal mode L115 cape have some stats you don't want? Well the heroic version L115 cape would trades those stats for things you do.

I'd agree here. Remove sockets from Frozen Shadoweave or Girdle of Ruination or whatever and you still have amazing items, but maybe some raid drops would actually begin to be competitive with them.

They don't need to remove the sockets. They just need to give every epic piece sockets. An epic without sockets is worthless right now.

People needed alternate ways to obtain competitive quality gear and tailoring sets and the like is Blizzard's solution to this problem. The intention was most likely gold spent on crafted items being "equal" to hours spent on raiding, so equal work is awarded with equal items. But Blizzard overlooked one detail here, almost all TBC encounters, by their nature needed heavy consumable usage, which added up and passed the cost of tailoring item mats pretty quickly. In the end, effort & reward ratio got screwed, so they are buffing raid items while tuning some encounters. Right way, i'd say.

That's not the case though. It works for other professions, but tailoring allows you to get 3 tier 5+ items completely solo (or from the AH) - no other profession does that. Nor does any other profession give so MUCH high end gear. Blacksmithing gives what, 2 items at best?

I don't think Blizzard have ever intended for you to be able to solo for the best gear in the game - doing so forever removes the risk versus reward part of the game for those classes, as soloing simply cannot ever compare to grouping.

Even if they buffed raid items, the fact is, tailoring needs looking at. Both the way they allocated the points, and the fact it's so ridiculously easy to get, making the profession a must have for any player serious about upgrading their character - 7 armour slots out of 8 being crafted gear that doesn't require you to step near a raid is too much.

Final point : I think everyone's forgetting this isn't EQ2 or Vanguard. Crafting was never supposed to be an "alternate path" in WoW. Blizzard are on record as saying it's something you do for fun to fill in gaps in your gear and give you a couple of nice pieces at the end. It's not an "alternate path" to gearing up your character at all - thats heroics (to some extent) and PvP.

I shy away from using t5 in arguments until patch 2.1.0.

Oops, looks like I missed your 3rd paragraph there. I think in the raid item changes, they won't be upping the iLevel so much as fixing the allocation, removing most of the issue here. t5 will stay iLevel 120, crafted gear will stay iLevel 105.

Yeah, I wasn't quite clear what I meant.

Using the item calculator here - http://www.ragnarokproject.org/vk/itemlevel.html

I can make a solid ilvl 100 epic (30 stam, 20 int, 14 hit, 14 crit, 60 dmg). Converting that into a single-school damage epic, such as tailoring does, give me an extra 12 damage (for 72 damage). Now, if I wanted that same epic, just with 72 generic damage, it would be an ilvl 110 item. Effectively, the tailoring BoP epics are acting like ilvl 115 items because of their single-school damage boost- in addition to their great overall stats.

Aha. In that case, I don't really see a solution. I wasn't around for pre-review t1, but didn't the mage set have +fire/+frost/+arcane? Wouldn't that save some item points?