If they indeed move back to 8-piece sets, he could easily become the "Onyxia" of the T8 content, dropping 1 part of the Tier 8 set.

I don't mean ony for gear position, I mean ony for "simple entry 1-boss instance". Malygos is an aspect and he should thus be just that hard to beat. With such a major figure in lore it would be a serious disappointment if he was an "entry level pushover" (much like a good deal of TBC sadly).

Yeah, I don't think he would be simply due to the fact that Naxx is likely going to be the only T7 zone.

"Decent" is not a fix. Never has been, never will be. If the best trinket is on Gruul or Hex Lord, people will want that. Many of us will not stop until we've improved our character to the maximum it can be. And there either needs to be a way to ultimately buy that trinket off a rep vendor after 8 billion Gruuls or there needs to be an unambiguously better trinket in the next tier of content -- actually there needs to be 2 when it's trinkets. If not, we are suck sitting in Gruul after Gruul after Gruul. I had to do more than 50 personally. Not at all fun.

Do you think they'll retain the T3 system whereby every boss can potentially drop a piece? If not, I'm wondering how they'll do it.

A neat way to do it would be to have the first boss in a wing drop 1 tier piece, the boss behind him drop 2 of the same piece, and then to have the "Big Boss" of the wing drop 3 of his set piece. And of course Gluth would be the wonderful slot machine he was before.

Put tier pieces on the wing end bosses and Sapphiron/Kelthuzad.

The spelldamage-only gear discussion seems pretty much void already.

PC Gamer: What else is changing?
Tom Chilton (Kalgan) : We’re also going to be doing away with spell-damage only type gear. We’ll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.”

via mmo-champion.com

I wonder if the talents will convert stuff like spellhit and crit too?

Well, with the new Imp FF for balance druids giving 3% hit to melee, ranged, and spells, along with wrath totem and probably some more hit buff class abilities, I think a lot of hit is just going to come innately. After the hit you get from abilities, I imagine that gems are going to take care of the rest. I sort of like that idea when it comes to gems, it makes them feel more important and further your ability to customize your gear to your liking. Possibly no more important then it is now, but hell, feels cool to me.

Everything seems to point to the hit cap being lowered, also, so it becomes less of a big deal.

One begins to wonder how jewelcrafting and gems will factor in to all of this....

Personally i hope they wont do that. This is the last thing that would make the difference between healer and dd loot. With my current Raidsetting this would mean like 10 - 12 ppl rolling on the same loot, when it comes to trinkets, rings, cloaks and such things it were like 15-16 out of 25 ...

Which could in essence be solved by giving these drops a 50%/60% chance of dropping, or just doubling/tripling the amount of healer/caster drops.

But isn't it better to have more people demanding fewer pieces of loot? Then you (ideally) wouldn't have the 6th boomkin leather drop in a row to DE. Especially once you get down to cloth, having more people looking for the same items should allow the itemizing team to make it easier to gear people, not harder. You might have to wait a little longer sometimes to get that one item, but the odds of getting said item should go up dramatically.

Anything that can get rid of the niche pieces that no one wants after the first drop is a good thing.

I'd be more excited if the hit-requirements at lvl 80 would go up rather than down while keeping them the same for PvP. If they then put tons of +hit on raid/tier gear and the same amount as now on arena gear, it would mean that even with all the nice sidestats, PvP gear would be utterly and completely useless for PvE.

By the looks of it they're moving towards a loot system where more people can use the same piece instead of having to DE 90% of all the farmed content loot after a few weeks of farming. The downside here is, obviously, that they would have to very carefully watch raid balance and group setups here and adjust droprates/loottables accordingly, because the last thing we're looking for is another Protector token.

As is, the average raid has ~13 clothies, ~5 mail, ~4 plate and ~3 leather. Boss loot needs to reflect this situation as clearly is not the case right now.

Even if a raid's taking only 2 druids total (and some take 3, one of each spec), and 2 rogues, that's 4 leather, maybe 5. I'm in agreement on the mail, at least if they balance shamans so that they don't obscenely stack. You're off again on plate, where we're likely to see 3 paladins, 2 warriors (1 MT, 1 DPS), and at least 1, if not 2 Death Knights. So that's more like 6-7 plate.

Remember, this is a thread about WotLK, not a thread for bitching about TBC.

This leads me to thinking, would it actually be such a bad idea if raid drops were just a magic item, with certain stats attached to it, which you could take to your local dungeon tailor/leatherworker/mailsmith/platesmith, who can convert it into your classes armor type? Would lead to much less wasted loot/shards.

From the Blizzcast:

While I appreciate having different architecture given the "rail shooter-type hallways" comments of TBC dungeons, does anyone else think the idea of having relatively diverse mob types is a bad one?

That is, some classes are preferred over others by virtue of their CCs, depending on the dungeon - a Shadow Priest shines in Magister's Terrace thanks to Mind Control, while a Warlock is great help on banishing the Underbog's elementals.

It seems to me that making mob types far less consistent is going to hurt more than help because of target limitations on the CCs, unless there are specific points which are especially hard.

Which would be fixed with decent itemization. I don't wear leather as ret because it looks cool, I do it because the plate DPS stuff is bad.

My point was that the BT class trinkets didn't have to be as good as say skull of Guldan, but as good as the trinkets a tier behind like Tsunami Talisman. The problem is for some classes the BT class trinkets are worse than level 60 blue quest rewards.

If Blizzard's intention is to make the 5-mans viable for any class composition, then it seems to me that the variety of CCs will just make the pulls easier rather than being impossible without CC. Considering that every class brings something to the table in the way of CC (except shamans, of course) it means that the DPS are going to have more to do than just spamming their spell cycles.

This mentality of "CC as a bonus" instead of "CC as a requirement" will probably scale down as you approach the level 80 5-mans. Magister's Terrace really begged for CC because of the sheer number of high-pop pulls, but that's because it was the ultimate level 70 5-man content. There were drops in the heroic mode equivalent to Kara epics, so it makes sense that you'd have to pay more attention to your party composition in there; the difficulty is that much higher. So I think that we can expect Utgarde Keep to be 5-mannable by just about anyone, but Utgarde Pinnacle (the level 80 5-man) will be a bit more particular.

The big thing to keep in mind is that Blizzard is going to save all the really hard content for level 80, the heroics, and the raids. I expect that competent players will be able to blow through the <80 5-man content, especially considering that the T6-equivalent Badge Gear they'll be toting won't be replaced until around 75-76.

This makes no sense. First he says there'll be no spell damage only gear, then he says there'll be gear with spell damage on that can be converted to healing with talents. What gives here?