This is generally the case for legs, since t6 legs have 1 socket but the nonset options often have 3. That's what makes them better.

Also, regarding Pillager's Gauntlets and Leggings of Divine Retribution, in the original BT those were Ret paladin items with the same stat spread as the trash belt. They were changed at the last minute to be more generic, with armor penetration, probably because they either decided that ret paladins were too rare to justify all those slots, or because they decided that ret paladins could just use warrior DPS plate anyway.

Changing them to generic plate dps items basically makes no sense at all. If anything they should have changed them into plate healing items considering holy paladins have zero non-set options for those slots.

I'd also like to add that non-set items are even less necessary now than they were in Naxxramas, because we're getting the same amount of tier gear now as we were then and we have less people to distribute it to.

In some cases and for a more lengthy time-invested-per-boss zone it might make sense to introduce some non-tier items in the major slots on very early bosses. This also makes the flaws behind Kael and Vashj more clear.

That is to say, a guild won't regularly get T6 Shoulders/Legs/Chest until late in their BT progression. While getting to that point isn't spectacularly difficult (and getting Hat tier tokens from Archimonde even less so, arguably) there is still room on the very early bosses of Hyjal/BT for non-set armor in those slots for the major needs. This is especially true because very few people ever get their T5 chests from Kael. In Naxx this wasn't an issue because C'thun overlapped into the ilvl of early Naxx gear with chest pieces and hats from Emps that wouldn't get replaced until Thaddius and 4H. It's both important to not flood a slot with extra upgrades and to prevent people from having an upgrade for more than an entire instance or more. (Hello, DST.)

I would rather have undergeared raid members early on in the progression of a zone than be forced to reclear it for 4 months in the future for an single item which is a significant upgrade due to the idiocy of Blizzard who is unable to provide true upgrades in the next tier. (DST, Tsunami Talisman) The loot tables can and need to be thinned; there is too much garbage on them.

I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that they reduced sets from 8(9) to 5 piece. Now they need to have (ideally) some 17 belts, bracers and boots instead of 3 of each with the current token system. In the perfect stream-lined but off-spec friendly world, thats a difference of FORTY-TWO (51-9) item spots.

Now you get the dev who thinks that they should have 'non-set' pieces drop following the logic that the tier pieces suck, so you should have 'better options'.

THERE IS NOTHING EXCITING, CHALLENGING, REWARDING, FUN OR INTELLECTUALLY STIMULATING ABOUT HAVING TO USE A NON-SET ITEM BECAUSE THE SET PIECE IS BAD. Blizzard simply refuses to acknowledge that people will always use the best option, and there will always be a best option for whatever their goals.

There is no point to having 5 piece sets, because everyone will look the same anyway, only it won't match often because the best items aren't considered the set-analogs of the proper set. There are virtually 0 options in gear because Blizzard goes so far out of the way to make things wildly different, that one choice ends up being obviously better than others.

They did one thing right, and that was adding off-spec sets. But instead of doing that and stopping there, they added a metric crap-ton of useless items that people might use until they get what they want, if the tier-1 or tier-2 items aren't better due to itemization.

I think Kazanir means to put some non-optimal, non-set items on these early bosses that you'll have to clear anyway while learning the zone (i.e. putting some head/chest items on Supremus and High Warlord Naj'entus). I think that's more an issue with the clockblock/difficulty/pacing of Vashj/Kael more than the itemization however.

I think it comes down to what people think should happen in regards to slots that are already itemised by tokens/tier armour. Whether people feel that there should be only Tier armour or more options.

That also ties in to Blizzard in that they have to itemise the tier armour to be the best for the class/spec its designed for.

On designing items, lets say a designer spent an hour reading a few mage threads on this forum. He'd pretty much know exactly what stats most raiding mages like. I'd be amazed too if they didn't have some sort of stats program that could see what slots have been itemised in mage gear. Also another hint.

I personally feel that there shouldn't be any gloves/shoudlers/leggings that aren't tiered sets. For helm and Chest it depends, if you've got a major cockblock boss you may want to throw one of each in to cover broad areas like 1 dps cloth chest, 1 healing cloth chest (to go between shams/druids/pallys too), 1 prot helm and maybe leave it at that.


One option that hasn't been touched upon is implementing a system similar to the ZA chest style quest into future raid dungeons. Kill Leotheras and you get 3 T5 gloves. Kill Leotheras in under 8:30 (or whatever) and you get a 4th loot from a VERY small loot table (lets say [Fang of the Leviathan],[Tsunami Talisman] and [Girdle of the Invulnerable] and ditch the healing leather boots and the hunter wrists. The wrists are duplicated with TK trash bracers + the new 2.3 bracer rewards and if they are better than TK trash bracers you simply swap them. Then move the Orca boots to trash. Those boots are no less an offspec item than feral boots or whatever as only one spec of one class uses them.

That way you have a target that makes it easier for farming guilds to get what they want and provides a target for newer guilds to acheive too.

Same with Gruul. Kill before 10 growths or whatever and as well as his normal loot chance he will guranteed drop either [Dragonspine Trophy] or [Bloodmaw Magus-Blade].


I also don't think theres any need to have bracers drop at all from anything in raids. In general they are a tiny upgrade and theres no real need to have them dropping off bosses. You can't even see them on most characters due to gloves.

At a quick glance, excluding crafted items, there are:

16 bracers at T6 level (ilvl 141)
9 Bracers at T5 level (ilvl 128)
14 at T4 level (ilvl 115) the Gruuls bracers are ilvl 125. Should probably make this figure 10 as 4 of thsoe are the Kara trash boss bracers.

Not suggesting this is an ultimate solution to it, just a start. Not only that you free up 8 slots on rage winterchills loot table. As a trash boss he can sponge some of the trash epics from other bosses (council shoulders etc...) and cull their loot tables. The items are still there but no ones gonna really care if Rage drops two crap items because afterall its the first boss in the instance and a free kill once Kael is dead. Yes its more of a plaster for the problem but its an easy fix and would take almost no time to implement.

What would you do with the other bracers? I don't know. Probably a rep faction. Exalted VE lets you buy your choice of T4 bracers, white vashj quest item lets you choose your T5 bracer from quest reward, exalted ashtounge or hyjal =T6 etc...

You can test this system and see how well its received, if its well you can also maybe do the same for belts and possibly boots. All are smaller improvements than other armour items and none you can really see on the character (well I suppose alliance and BE can see boots).

Agreed, but the idea that it is in fact amazingly fun to not wear your tier set has been latent in the loot system for a long time. This is like an extension of the pre-TBC cloth damage item philosophy into all items, in general. I never quite understood Blizzard's obsession with providing cloth casters a full or near-full suit of non-set gear that usually was superior to the tier set (though there were exceptions), but it's clear that Blizzard felt that it added gameplay value.

You can probably add back in the haste craftables. I didn't when I also listed 16 bracers earlier, but now that I think of it, haste bracers shape the usefulness of boss loot. Either they're worthless, and thus getting those patterns is meaningless, or they're good, and crowd out boss drops and cause more loot to be unused. Adding those up shows that there are in fact twenty-four different ilvl 141 bracers in the game right now, nearly one for every raid member. I'm not sure that this statistic needs more commentary than that.

I always thought this was their solution for shadow priests (and perhaps moonkin) so they would have some gear they could use.

I can't really say why they did it either (think Naxx here), but it sure did make it nice to have choices. We had a few Mages who went for full Frostfire with a preponderance of stats and less overall damage and a few Mages myself included who went for full glass-cannonship and only wanted 4/9 Frostfire with the smattering of better +dmg / +crit items (Rime Covered Mantle, Eyestalk Waistcord, etc.).

And it did make Mages look different. Rime Covered was a distinctive piece artwise, and the EW broke up the Frostfire Robe look.

Basically, Vaccine, I agree with you. RNG is attrotious and blizz designing encounters around DKP is just upholding the status quo.

A multy-token system is definitely the best solution imo. Everyone gets regular loot instead of pure luck. I think brining timed kills into it way over complicating the whole thing.

Imagine the complaints if arena players were subject to RNG...

This is pretty common with Tier gloves as well. Compare T4-T6 to the gloves off of Magtheridon, Attuneman, and even badges next patch.

I think your statement is part of the problem. You are not alone in your sentiment but its something that needs to change.

Agility *is* that bad on a DPS Warrior set. Crit rating costs the same and is unequivocally BETTER for a DPS set of gear.

Because they chose to use Agility instead of crit rating (and because the set bonuses are weak), the T6 Warrior set is almost universally inferior to non-set pieces. The only piece that is clearly the best in slot are the shoulders. All of the other pieces have a plate drop that is as good or better and when you consider leather and mail options, the T6 gets even less desirable.

For enhancement shamans, Agility is about 15% worse than Crit Rating without Kings and about 5% worse with Kings. Nonetheless, I'd be fine with having all our Crit Rating as Agility, if Blizzard would just remove the useless MP5 on our gear. I think the problem I have is that a raiding enhancement shaman at the T6 level will never run out of mana, but at least that Agility is providing you with some DPS and some ancillary benefit from randomly dodging a cleave once in 20 trash pulls, boss attempts, or whatever. All our MP5 could be dumped into armor penetration or passive haste and many of our Tier items would instantly become best- or second-best in slot, but Blizzard is too stubborn to change their obvious mistake (indeed, even as they are patching in a mana-cost reduction talent for our primary way to burn excess mana, shocking.)

I guess what I'm saying here is that Blizzard doesn't necessarily have to design 100% optimal items, but they do have to design items where the budget is spent on useful stats, not useless ones. Tier sets don't have to be designed to be the best-in-slot, but I would like it if the [Skyshatter Tunic] dropped by Illidan wasn't inherently worse than the [Ranger-General's Chestguard] dropped by Hydross.

It seems like you could just as easily make the argument that stamina isn't useful. Agility does augment your general survivability in the case that you're called upon to take some damage from things that don't hit very hard. Now, it's true that this doesn't happen much, and the notion of warriors being a slightly more durable DPS class might not actually play out in practice, but at least there is some not altogether inexplicable basis for their decision.

Putting spirit on warrior/rogue gear makes no sense. Putting agility on it makes some sense.

I think you're speculating here. As far as I know, the only reference was in some Blizzcon panel where somebody said "we thought warriors wanted agility", which does not imply that they thought it was a better pure DPS stat (they could have felt that way due to reasons I mentioned). Unless you can demonstrate otherwise, I will stick with my recollection of what happened.

No, you could not just as easily make that argument. Stamina will always be useful to all classes and specs, at least until Blizzard stops designing the majority of boss encounters with any damage on the raid. If I'm called upon to take damage I'll wear gear accordingly, most likely not dps gear. Their basis for decision making, at least on dps warrior tier 6, has been publicly stated: they didn't take into account the change in the conversion ratio from agility to crit from level 60 to 70. Agility was good at 60, it isn't at 70. The only thing correct in that little spiel was that putting agility on rogue gear makes sense, although I'm not quite sure when rogues entered into the argument.

Anyway this is getting pretty tangential to the original topic, so I apologize for steering it that way, but it is hard for me to passively stand by as people (somewhat frequently) try to justify badly itemized plate dps gear.

It's equally hard for me to stand by while people make claims that are apparently unsubstantiated about the origin of the agility on tier 6, and also while people make outrageous claims like "the people who put agility on this set should be fired from their jobs!". Again, if you can point me to some evidence of Blizzard acknowledging that they made some colossal screw-up to arrive at that outcome, then fine. Otherwise, it's clearly suboptimal, but not some sort of "slap in the face" that warrants termination of employment.

Like I said in my post, does that 4 piece bonus make up more damage gain than using all the non-set items? If so then it isn't poor design of the items, it's poor use of the items. Its a raid dropping set designed to be used in raiding.

The problem with almost all sets is that the set bonus's do not help the overall effect. We want the DPS sets to maximize dps, have no survivability, but then we have encounters built around survivability. Sure the T6 4 piece bonus's are very decent compared to what ones we've had in the past. But it all come down to the balancing of the set bonus's to what the intended use and the actual non-set items boost provides are.

We want our set bonus's, all of them to be balanced, and beneficial, so that when we equip the inferior part of the set, we don't feel less of a player because we choose to use the set piece over a non-set piece.

For most classes, the T6 legs are the weakest piece, and we then use the non-set corresponding legs, and use the helm/shoulders of the set to finish off the set bonus.

Again dropping the sets down to 5 piece created an inflation of pieces that belong to the off-slots of the sets. But I see this as to the imbalance that the set bonus's created, and a way to fix that loophole....

[Updated] BlizzCon Day 2: Professions and Items session liveblog - WOW Insider

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It isn't an outrageous claim. The people who itemized warrior dps tier 6 didn't know what they were doing; would you pay someone to do a job if they didn't know how to do it? The "slap in the face" is the fact that Blizzard publicly acknowledged that they designed an entire set of tier gear poorly, but didn't do anything to fix or change it.

I'll listen to it when I get home. The brief excerpt in that article doesn't suggest to me that they accidentally used level 60 conversion values for agility, it just suggests to me that somebody just felt it was a little better than it actually is. And yes, in spite of this travesty of epic proportions, I would continue to employ such a person if they were an otherwise competent and dedicated worker.