Kind of an overstatement. Tier 2.5 and 3 set bonuses for locks were amazing (relative to the other class sets, Doomcaller in particular) and Tier 4 isn't anything to sniff at.

Lifebloom idols aren't that great;

Emerald Queen:
88 Healing is applied to the whole spell, then the part that is for the final burst is removed, its effectivly +40/50 healing on Lifebloom Ticks,

Unsure about the Tenacity one, never found anyone willing to waste arena points on buying it, but im going to safely assume its the same mechanic.

The idol says +88 per tick though, that is not factual?

For whatever reason with all my slab runs I've never gotten it, but it seems better than the Rejuv idol to me (only 4 ticks of rejuv vs. more ticks of lifebloom).

My thoughts:

Druids: feral - awesome, Resto: 2piece awesome, 4 piece not so awesome. oomkin- not so awesome
Hunter: seems awesome but once you figure out that steady shot is not 50% of your damage it is even worse then the mage/oomkin ones!
Mage: not awesome
Paladin: tank - seems to further increase aoe tanking supremacy. ret - mana? bigger executes? not awesome. heel: sort of awesome? at least two piece is.
Priest: dps: Mind blast? That should say mind flay! Heel: two piece yells AOE healing further down raiding. 5% on greater heal is 5% more overheal!
Rogue: meh dps increase
Shaman: ench: ugh. not awesome. ele: sort of awesome? not pvp oriented at all as some of the other bonuses are: heel: screams aoe healing.
Warlock: no clue on first bonus, but the health returned by life siphon is insane as it is, and 6% on shadowbolt adds less dps then 5% on fireball. Ugh.
Warrior: tank: ugh. How about dreadnaught style hit etc? dps: Ugh, 5% on ms/bt is a very small pve damage increase.


I think by far the best bonus is druid resto 2piece

For whatever reason resto druid set bonuses seem to trump priest sets by a good bit. Then again the druid tier 5 (regrowth? wtf) sucks compared to 4 or 6, so I guess it doesn't always hold true.

The 2 piece t3 bonus was arguably the best for druids as well. Finally something the devs got right, giving us all the good stuff :-)

Emerald Queen adds 7 (49/7) per tick, the extra 39 healing points would of gone onto the end burst (wasted).
Harolds adds 22 (88/4) per tick.

Effectivly Harold's will net you more actual healing value than Emerald, but it depends which spell you use most I guess.

He was talking about shred and feral bonii in general, so I presume he meant the everbloom idol, which gives a bonus to shred.

Still funny how everbloom idol and idol of tenacity were switched..


In reply to the original topic, it doesn't bode well for tanking druids. On the other hand, however you look at it, tier 6 isn't finished yet. It's all speculation, so no doomthinking yet..

Yeah, I loved the pre-BC set bonuses. Even stuff like the +23 damage set bonuses weren't bad. But the TBC sets have all been "meh" in my book... our blue set is 45mp5 for your pet. Not a bad set bonus with dark pact, but hardly a significant boost. Tier4 has an awesome 2-piece bonus, even though it's not proccing off DOT casts for some reason. The 4 piece is alright, but not worth giving up non-set items with better stats.

Tier 5 is even worse- the 2-piece is completely useless 99% of the time in raids, and even in groups. The vast majority of warlocks either have a phase-shifted imp or a sacrificed pet. And the 4-piece results in a .6% DPS upgrade for me, which is again not worth giving up non-set items for.

It at least makes planning for upgrades pretty easy. Our guild also has a fairly large number of hunters, mages, and warlocks, so it will be nice to to be competing with as many people for gear.

If the stats match the bonus and are kitty oriented, it can hardly be called awesome. Maybe it's awesome to use green quest rewards in BT so you can save your DKP to...hmmm... nuke the other druid if the wildfury staff drops?

They seem determined to force druids into a claw->shift->brez->innervate->heal->shift role when there just really isn't room in a raid for it. It's hard to justify taking a glove token when I'm going to put on my Verdant's more then half the time. They should reitemize T4 to be the equivalent of the quest rewards in terms of tanking, while providing more offense and a noticeable amount of caster stats. This is possible in the item budget. T5 and 6 should be upgrades in every way... modest upgrades in the tanking department if that is necessary to keep balance with warriors, but still better then what they replace. These bonuses make me doubt they will do it.

The probably realize that they dropped the ball on leather items, quest reward or otherwise, that have an armor bonus. You can't just give druids increased armor on their leather items at the same item budget cost that you give it to plate-wearers, because they're ultimately going to get 5x the benefit out of it. Every item that Blizzard loads all or most of its budget into armor immediately becomes "always-use" tanking gear, because armor is such an insanely powerful stat for druids. I'm sure they realize that if they took an entire high-level set and itemized substantial extra armor onto every piece based on the current item formula, then all druids would be sitting at 75% mitigation.

My first thought upon seeing these was about how these bonuses kickass, then my brain kicked in and thought about the reprocussions of giving us such large upgrades based on holding the sets together.

Is the stat upgrade from T5->T6 going to be small in order to account for the huge boost we're going to be getting in set bonuses?

Is moving past T6 content going to require T6 bonuses in order to push the dps needed? Just adding the 2pc and 4pc bonus to any person's gear is almost like getting a whole new tier worth of upgrades it seems.

Is there going to be a huge stat upgrade going from T6->T7 in order to accomodate the loss of T6 bonuses?

Maybe T7 will be a set of some combination of Bracers, Belt, Boots, Rings, Neck allowing us to go back to using bonuses from multiple sets.

Obviously, we can do nothing more than speculate. Maybe I am looking to deep into this and maybe I am just in awe of seeing across the board amazing set bonuses. Either way, it doesn't look like people will be passing on T6 anytime soon.

Last lolferal post I promise. There aren't just two choices - normal armor and godly. You can budget an item that has about the same armor as the quest rewards, but has a little bit more offensive stats like +hit and some int/spi. This item would only be a marginal upgrade for tanking (perserving whatever balance they want between warriors and bears) but you can justify taking the token for those encounters where you tank for a while then change to DPS (Mulgar for one - trivial example but I've only seen 2 25 man raids).

It would seem that the grass is always greener on the other side. The feral two-piece bonus is pretty lackluster considering mangle is not used as a main source of dps(the four-piece is superb however). The resto druid four-piece could also be good depending on how it works.

The same goes for the mage four-piece - no one really knows at this point whether it affects only the base spell or whether it takes gear into account.

For hunters you essentially have two main styles between beast mastery and marks/survival really. It would be nice to have a set that buffs you and your pet. Tier 5 2 piece bonus is great but as always more options are nice.

These Tier 6 Hunter bonuses are very meh. As mentioned getting more out of Viper is exceptionally weak as you take a pretty significant dps loss in using it. The 4 piece is alright but nothing amazing making me go oh man I must have it!

I made a (long) post about this on the druid discussion thread. Some budget wastage -has- to go on those raid pieces, to prevent druids from scaling way beyond other classes.

While most classes efficiency scales more or less with item budget when you have 0 wasted stats (crit on DoT gear, str/dodge on rogue gear, etc) druid gear -needs- to be limited by item design. Itemization-wise, there should have been a solid "exchange rate" of, say, how much armor bonus (and to a lesser extent, Agi vs def/dodge) would be tacked onto a tanking piece to make it equally good for a druid vs a warrior toting a tanking piece of the same ilvl. Lets call this the intended druid itemization law.

I think, initially, that's how the druid raid gear was designed. With the 1400 armor bonus from 4 piece and initial 550% modifier, it seemed to be a more or less passable set, totalling about 23-25k armor with various decent ring/cloak/weapon choices.

What I can speculate happened was that concurrent to that, someone else said "hey, druids need a tanking set in the form of quest rewards". If you look, there's exactly one item per slot that has ridiculously high armor, (sans chest, choice of HFP or BEM for that) and they're all from quest rewards in Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley. This can't be a coincidence... someone PUT a heavy-armor tanking set into the game.

However, due to what I can only put down as a lack of communication and double checking, this set had zero wasted stats (hence not conforming to the intended druid itemization law) and resulted in overpowered mitigation and survivability. Think about it... Greens and lower-level blues allowing a druid to tank Maulgar/Prince equally good as (or, arguably by some, better than) a warrior with full blues and Karazhan pieces?

What *should* have been done would have been to keep a tight rein on the heavy armor itemization... Armor should have been dished out in amounts that keeps its tanking viability on par with equivalent level warrior gear. If they'd done this systematically, we could have easily seen, from leather gear all following the same ration, a solid druid tanking gear progression first from quest rewards (think Junior Tech bracers for warriors), to 5-man drops and craftables, to Karazhan drops, and then on to T4/T5/T6.

As it is, we got stuck with the non-conformist quest reward set (and again, I use the term set because it can't be a coincidence) which made druids ridiculously overpowered tanks at an early stage of the lv70 game, resulting in nerf after nerf, and we arrive at the mess we're now at, where Blizzard is scratching their heads re: how to draw out an upgrade path which doesn't hit the mitigation ceiling.

Those priest bonuses are supremely underwhelming. PoH is situational and rarely ever used outside of Karazhan and 5 mans. I could see the value in the Greater Heal bonus except for the fact that it's just another stat boost to Empowered Healing. With paladins, shamans and druids all healing at the same time, you can't take 2.5-3 seconds (depending on latency) for a full Rank 7 heal of that length without overhealing by a megaton.

I'll stick with the Tier 5 Avatar bonuses please.

This (and the rest of your post) sounds like you didnt like the high armor pieces from quest rewards. I fully agree with you there. What strikes me as odd is that the first paragraph sounds as if you think getting 23-25k armor without the "exceptionals" would be possible. To be honest I cant see how that would work since for many leather items the armor value has stuck to level 60 values.

I think that is the real problem of druid itemization ... leather armor is the only armor type which has such exceptional pieces with twice as much armor on it compared to other items of the same level requirement, and that should not be the case. A fellow rogue has said his damage reduction has gone down from 25% at 60 to 15% at level 70. While Rogues dont really need damage reduction as much as Druids I think this is a neat example to show where "the problem" lies. In comparison Plate armor and especially shields has gone up by a LOT compared to the level 60 values. So I think all leather armor values should be given a boost so Feral Druids arent limited to a rather narrow choice of what to wear for tanking.

On the T6 boni I think it is a little disappointing to get such a weak 4-piece bonus for Bears (15% more damage for Swipe) since 15% of "ridiculously low" is still not really much ... compared to the level of opposition you are fighting when you have 4 pieces T6. Swipe alone is not enough to keep the aggro of several mobs if there is any dps on your target atm, how would 15% more help after acquiring 4 pieces of T6? Probably not at all since your dps will have got that too and will do more damage respectively.

Um, as a plate wearer, my % mitigation from AC has dropped by 10 points or so. I used to have 60~% mitigation wearing a shield at 60 - now I barely hit 50% at 70 with a shield. (throw in increased damage from warrior/rogues, and PvP against them has become more... balanced)



Part of this is because I switched from L60 epic to L70 blue items. The rest of it is that Blizzard changed the AC formula. Yes, we have more AC points, but each point does quite a bit less now, too.

An overstatement in that it's a great set bonus, sure .

The problem with the TBC warlock sets at least have been that they cater to the mythical 41/41/41 warlock who will pve, pvp, or raid based on what his set bonus is at the time. They're all over the board, and have incredibly varying values depending on your spec -- sometimes flat out useless (pet heals. most raiding locks use an imp. It's not just a bad bonus, it's 100% useless.)


Take even something like the 4-piece T6. Ele shaman is 5% bonus to lightning bolt -- that's a straight 5% damage bonus. Mage isn't quite straight up, since they do need to maintain scorch, but that's just one firemage, and the rest of the time on a "real" fight they're casting fireball, no?

Warlock T6, I cast shadowbolt about 20-40% of the time depending on the fight. Even when I go destruction, that doesn't go much above 60%.


I had the impression before TBC that someone was trying to make the warlocks into something different than mages, but stymied by things like the debuff limit. But T6 itemization just screams that it's the opposite: more crit than mages (1 damage is as much dps for me as 5.15 crit rating (0.23% crit), a pretty horrible ratio), and set bonuses that cater to our nuking tree.

(sort of. I'm still not sure what the 2piece caters too -- the nuker won't be dotting as much, so gets less out of it, but the dotter frankly barely needs the set bonus, and if that sets bonus causes threat, I'm going to be furious, as I'm always bumping the threat ceiling as things stand right now. I don't need wasted threat from heals when there's so many other sources of HP, especially threat I can't turn off just by respecing. If the damage is too heavy, I need real heals anyways -- and if it's light, I'd rather get it back by threat-less heals since I have time to recover my HP more leisurely.)


It's funny: when I rolled this warlock, the fact that we had three very different trees was much of the appeal. And then when TBC further refined those, I rejoiced. Looks like it's biting us hard in terms of itemization, however.