Did they reitemize everything again or are you just confirming that they went back and redid the 70 dungeon blues and such?

Surprisingly they still haven't changed the 4-piece Retribution T6 bonus (even after the huge number of times they've updated the gear), despite the slew of threads regarding just how worthless it is. C'est la vie.

I have no explanation for you other than to blame thottbot. >Thottbot's test server version claims nether vortexes are BOP again. I assumed it had simply updated before wowhead, which is the other one I checked to confirm. I've checked and Wowhead also includes the retadin gear changes but still has vortexes as BOE, so it's clearly not an update issue.

Edit: Yes, confirming that it was also dungeon blues/purples. I don't believe they re-reitemzed the set pieces. I did not remember ever seeing this in any of the patch notes. and now that I checked, I can see that it was in the test realm patch notes, just none of the key words I used to search were the necessary ones. Sorry for any confusion.

If you remember back in the day, putting weak talents at the top of trees and strong talents at the bottom was Blizzard's philosophy before the talent revamps pre-TBC and 41 point trees. A while after the initial release of WoW, Blizzard felt that bottom-loading talent trees strongly discouraged hybrid talent specs and made throwing all 51 (or 61) of your talent points into one tree pretty much the only useful spec for many classes. Since having everybody throw all talent points into one tree is boring, Blizzard decided to add useful talents at the top of many trees.

I wasn't a druid back in those days, but I'm willing to bet 51/0/0 Balance, and 0/0/51 Resto type specs were a lot more common then (proportional to spec population) than they are now. After talent trees were reorganized to be more hybrid friendly, most Balance druids have varying degrees of Resto included in their specs, and Resto druids can choose from 13/11/37, 11/11/39, 0/0/61, 1X/0/4X, etc and feel like a viable spec regardless of their choice.

Shifting useful hybrid talents such as Feral Charge downward would only work to return us to the boring talent trees and spec options of yesteryear.

I do not understand this paragraph. How does having strong talents at the bottom of the trees lead to less hybrid specs? Please explain.

I think he is talking about bottom visually not points wise. EG the 41st point talent is the bottom of the tree when looking at it in game (because you put points at the top and flow down).

And yet Blizzard is actively nerfing HYBRID specs such as 13/11/37 and 34/27 for druids, while leaving 8/11/41+1 relatively untouched. And their original position of making 41-pters "neat" rather than essential largely failed, especially when they realized they had to balance them against 31/30 and 40/21 specs, which they actively nerfed in a number of cases. Druids are pretty much the only class where hybrid builds still exist, mostly due to the situational nature of the 41pt balance and 41pt resto talents, and 2.4 looks ready to end those builds.

If we could travel back in time and make ToL + treants base abilities, Lifebloom 41pt resto and Cyclone 41pt balance, maybe we would be in a better position to balance the three trees, but what's done is done, I suppose.

Talent-wise, Feral is bloated. It takes far too many talents to get the basic feral skill set. 41 are necessary in Feral and 14 are required in Resto -- that leaves 6 talent points of flexibility. We can't even get the famous 100% interruptible Cyclone talent without completely gimping ourselves.

Additionally, Feral doesn't have the ability to choose between DPS/Tank and DPS/Healer, which I think is a huge oversight on Blizzards part. Both Resto and Balance can almost seamlessly choose between a custom ratio of healing and damage.

Feral PvP at 60 was a DPS/Healer, and the same could be said for some of the S1 and S2 Feral Arena play. I remember dreaming about a 0/30/31 spec at 60 when reading about BC, but once BC came out, it became obvious nothing like this would ever be possible. Even our beloved 0/30/21 or 1/29/21 specs are worthless at 70. Basically if you spend more than 12 and less than 41 points in Feral, you have a worthless spec. Are there many other talent specs so dependent on their 41 point talent for all facets of play?

Deep feral talents provide no hybridization (neither Resto nor Balance) -- actually our only hybrid talent is 20% more intellect.
Deep balance talents provide Resto synergy.
Low-tier Resto talents provide Feral synergy.
Low-tier Balance talents provide Resto synergy.

However, in general, Ferals #1 problem in PvP (beyond the range issues) is the cost of shapeshifting. Oddly, there are 0 talents in the Feral tree that improve shapeshifting.

The fix?

1. Combine some of the worthless feral talents together:
-- 2 talent points for 20% damage on Mangle (Cat)
-- 3 talent points for 105 ap => combine with above, or add expertise to it
-- 2 talent points for +1 sec on Bear stun => change it to reduced cooldown
-- 1 talent point for FFF => make trainable
-- 2 talent points for Improved Leader of the Pack => should work like this by default

2. Add healing/shapeshifting bonuses on deep feral talents (or add as new talents):
-- increase healing done temporarily after shifting
-- chance on shift to remove debuff
-- further reduced cost of shifting
-- better frenzied regeneration scaling
-- barkskin while in forms
-- innervate while in forms
-- brez while in forms
-- omen while in forms
-- reduced mana cost for hots

It's disingenuous to say that talent trees were "bottom-loaded" pre-BC. Plenty of classes had top-heavy trees with either very strong 11pt talents or core mission-critical talents before 20pts in the tree. It seems to me that the only classes who've consistently been able to put 40+ points into a tree have been druids and shamans, because nothing in their other trees does much for their healing (speaking pre-BC when it was basically resto or bust). My primary pre-BC experience is with my mage and priest, but 2x/3y builds were the standard then. Wasn't until BC that putting 40 or 50 points into one tree became commonplace for most classes.

I think he means the latter - items like the [Truth Bearer Shoulderguards] and [Golden Cenarion Greaves] have had their spell damage removed and turned to STR instead.

I think a set of criteria like THIS would cover that pretty well.

I agree, but this is largely because of their attempt to make 41-pters "nifty" rather than essential. This made a lot of 41pters (priest disc/holy is a great example, druids ignored ToL in preBC/2.0 due to no lifebloom / stacking problems, and shamans have always just maxed out resto) entirely ignored in favour of hybrid builds, but apparently they eventually decided this was undesirable and buffed things up the wazoo until 41pters became popular, if not essential again.

It was a failed experiment, and druids were the last holdout.

^
Not trying not to derail this into a "Feral Arena" thread, but it is clear from this post that Blizzard's priority is to bring resto druids in line first.

According to World of Raids :: Index all the epic JC patterns are now 50G each (up from 6G). Which tops the content out to ~ 1800G to get all the patterns.

Ouch. Sounds like they are really encouraging guilds to finance their chosen gemcutter there. While I know its conceivable that many people have several thousand in the bank, I don't see that many people bothering to pick up all these cuts right away just due to cost. This might make certain cuts quite a bit rarer for those looking to game the system as much as possible. Although does anyone know if the cuts will be immediately available or do you need to unlock part of the island first? I know the gem vendor needs to be unlocked, but are the rep patterns unlocked too?

@Rayeth: The 2 new meta gem cuts are available from the SSO Quartermaster at Revered, while the epic gem cuts are available from the different, unlockable, gem vendor (the same one who sells epic gems for 15 badges each).

There's a fair number of cuts that are essentially useless and aren't likely to be purchased by anyone except those crazy people who must have every pattern. See: [Stormy Empyrean Sapphire], [Flashing Crimson Spinel], [Infused Shadowsong Amethyst], to name a few.

You can still get all the gem patterns from Hyjal bosses/Rep, correct? Or did that change and I missed it? With Hyjal no longer requiring attunement and giving more reputation in 2.4 than 2.3, it would seem to be the cheapest path by far for "main" JC's. The high price on the vendor simply let's an end-game JC buy whichever boss dropping pattern the RNG had hitherto denied him while discouraging the recipes from being purchased by every single non-raiding JC able to do a few dailies and clear Magister's Terrace several times. Frankly, I'm extremely glad that my faction will finally be able to cut Shifting Shadowsong Amethysts.

Is that new daily quest working towards anything? Like is it still using the system of "Do x amount of these to open the next content"? Or is that it, is that the Alchemy Lab recipies "lost in time" or whatever was mentioned before. Time to drop Alchemy if so.

The problem being stones don't stack with WF. For anyone besides an extra melee stuck in a no shammy group to use them they'd have to be better than WF and then enhance shammys are out of a job.

Actually the 2/4part T5 bonus on the warrior tanking set make it preferrible to T6 in a lot of cases, especially when the 2part T6 bonus is so useless.

Bit offtopic, but anyway:
The 100 BV against a single attack is ~1,7% mitigation against a 6k attack. T6 (or similar ilevel gear) has more armor, it mitigates that amount off every attack. The set bonus applies once every 5 seconds. Getting more shield slam dmg is also unreliable, or if you start timing shield slams with shield blocks, you'll propably lose more TPS to concentrating on that than what you get of it.

AND NOW I JUST READ WHAT YOU SAID? 2pt6 warrior bonus useless?! Gief those mushrooms, free 170 hp useless? :<

My thoughts exactly. Your 'bloated' tree would be what Protection warriors would be dreaming of, something that lets them effectively tank/dps in either role with the same spec. I think you have it pretty good.

For some reason, I fail to see the problem with this. On my server, elixirs of mastery sell so bad that I stopped making them long ago.