Some of the badge gear isn't bad at all, and would certainly suffice to assist in gearing up a few people's unlucky slot drops in preparation for sunwell. In answer to your other question though, the gear and performance requirement for sunwell is quite steep, and I don't expect to see T5 and primarily badge geared players making a lot of boss kills, if any, assuming the zone goes live at its current difficulty.

Kalecgos is probably a bit more doable with less gear, but it would be a very difficult fight, and strategy/execution would have to be pretty flawless. Brutallus in his last-testable PTR state (he's been auto-killing himself for a while now) will basically be the brick wall that will send people packing back to BT and Hyjal to gear themselves out more. You need very high DPS, lots of healing, and close-to-perfectly-geared high threat-gen tanks to even consider beating him, and this will be the definite stopping point for many guilds until they're either A) geared enough for him or B) he gets nerfed.

All the encounters are hard, and good, but they will definitely be a harsh awakening to many guilds who perhaps might think that simply because there is no attunement, it will be free loot. My guild is nearly fully outfitted in T6 at this point, and we're still scratching our heads over the requirements for Brutallus. The time before 2.4 goes live will be spent making efforts to maximize our Raid DPS in the hopes that we won't be cockblocked by him for TOO long. We obviously aren't going to be vying for any world firsts (or even 50th's) but we're anxious for the challenge.

And yes, Marks of Illidari drop in sunwell.

The change is also implemented for BT/Hyjal.

"All 25- player raid bosses that drop set tokens will now drop an additional token!"

EDIT: Per the post below, that's not what he was saying. He quoted a line from the SSC/TK section and thought it didn't apply to BT/Hyjal. It does. From this post, "One of my concerns with 2.4 is that a change that went live with patch 2.2 for Tempest Keep: The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern doesn't seem (to my knowledge) to have been implented in 2.4 for Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, namely this change..."

YET ANOTHER EDIT: Fine, I won't object to a third piece of loot. Though I agree it doesn't appear to be coming.

He was referring to a third piece of random loot from those bosses that do not drop tier tokens, not to tier tokens dropping.

Well I think its another case of wanting classes to all use the same gear (Ret pally/DPS Warrior, Enhancement Shaman/Hunter, etc.), which would explain the Attack Power instead of Strength (which gives Hunters a valid reason to cry "Hunter Weapon lolz!!!111"). In this case though I can't understand what is happening with weapon speed. Hunters don't care about melee weapon speed. Blood Elves do fine with slow weapons. However, Alliance Pallys and all Arms Warriors benefit a lot more from having nice fat 3.8 speed weapons. If weapon speed only matters if its slower why isn't the sword a 3.8 to begin with?

In fact, with a 3.5 speed weapon with 32 additional haste rating on the weapon (not counting the huge amounts of haste on SWP gear) BE pallys are getting giant DPS increases while alliance are left out in the cold, seeing marginal white increases at the expense of SoC procs.

I know Tom Chilton said they don't want to look at the seal system until the next expansion, but something is very wrong with itemization right now. The devs can't stop halfway with ret fixes, no matter how much we may "rule the PvP world".

Yeah I see that. Sorry the thread was moving so fast and discussing so many subjects that I missed the posts addressing it. My apologies.

I am also glad they put the profession requirements for gear on the Sunwell drops. Although items like Hurricane Boots and Bracers of Nimble Thought can be obtained through profs you can subsequently drop, for more important items like chest pieces it is more important to have restrictions. As for the itemization of items, it is something enhancement shamans have had to deal with. There is very little in the way of itemized shaman gear out there. We would like the stats warriors get on their gear, but instead are forced to use a mix of hunter and leather gear. Even with the split item system coming out in Sunwell it looks like the choices are still going to be devoid of str. However I'm not sure if this is anything Blizzard is prepared to do. While I'm sure its possible for them to put out shaman gear without any mp5, I don't see them going all the way we want and putting out gear with no or very little int on it. That difference is probably going to always make us lean towards rogue leather gear over enhancement shaman mail.

Just giving seal of blood to both factions would fix that though. =/

It's an amazingly synergistic tool in PvE situations and causes gear dependencies that allow a SoB using ret paladin to mimic Warrior gear choices almost exactly.

SoC using ret paladins still have to shun Haste, while also having comparitively reduced benefit from bloodlust/heroism and windfury. It's silly.

It also has no effect on PvP either, so there doesn't seem to be any reason NOT to. That 10-15% damage discrepancy is the difference between "minimally acceptable with near-perfect gear" and "viable highly-valued raid member".

That on it's own wouldn't fix 2h itemisation completely though, since bloodfrenzy warriors still prefer 3.80 speed weapons.

That would make sense, but then why itemise a Polearm for hunters (Both BT and SWP seem to have a polearm itemised purely for hunters as far as I can tell).

Moogul is correct, sorry not making it extra clear.

When 2.2 was released the following bosses starting dropping 3 epic items instead of 2:
Al'ar, High Astromancer Solarian, The Lurker Below, Morogrim Tidewalker and Hydross the Unstable.

Basically all T5 level bosses that did not drop any tier tokens.


If the same change would have been (there's still hope, I guess) implented in 2.4 for Black Temple and Mount Hyjal the following bosses would drop 3 epic items instead of 2:
Rage Winterchill, Anetheron, Kaz'rogal, High Warlord Naj'entus, Supremus, Shade of Akama, Teron Gorefiend, Gurtogg Bloodboil and Reliquary of Souls.

Yet again no bosses dropping tier tokens.


I guess that should make it crystal clear.. I do really hope that they somewhen would push such a change in or I fear that it would hinder many people to properly see Sunwell before the next expansion since as mentioned above that place is apparently really tough and requires you to be decked out in T6 content gear.
Farming such gear could potentially take a very long time to farm for any new people starting/being in the middle of Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, especially with the attunaments being removed in 2.4 and a lot of new blood would be flowing in.

Hey all. Long time reader, first time poster and all that jazz.

While the fact that Paladins cannot also get reasonable use out of SoComm compared to SoB regarding haste benefits is a bit unfair, Ive always thought that the reason SoB is so great for DPS is due to the fact that SoV is so great for tanking (this is from what Ive read on various tankadin forums/threads). I believe it is just a matter of faction flavour, with Alliance having defensive faction skills/racials compared to the more offensive Horde ones. EG. Perception, Quickness etc vs Blood Fury, Warstomp etc.

I would put the chances of SoB/SoV remaining faction-specific in the x-pack at around 0%, given what they've done with the lore, and the changes to Priests we've seen (Fear Ward going to all races.)

Until then, though, Ret pally itemization's gonna be a bit weird.

The idea that SoV is a good tanking seal seems to be a very common misconception.

Theoretically it is higher TPS than SoR if you're lower than some arbitrary amount of spell damage (something like 500 SD, ask on the tanking thread if you want exact numbers). SoV scales much worse than SoR because of the DoT mechanic. However, because paladins have such a wonderful combat system that requires both melee and spell hit, it is nearly impossible to keep up 5 stacks on a real boss fight.

Between misses (9%), blocks (don't know the exact percentage), parrys (10-15%) and dodges (6%) alone you're looking at a large chance that you won't even see the melee attack hit. On top of that, you have a 17% chance the spell will be resisted. And on top of that you're not even guaranteed a proc thanks to a crazy 20 PPM mechanic while almost every tanking weapon is a 1.5-1.8 speed weapon (50-65% proc chance or so). In short, SoV looks amazing on paper, it fails miserably in practice.

SoV is not a good tanking seal. It is a flimsy (at best) argument to compare SoV to SoB, especially when the former can be easily replaced by SoR with equal if not better results while latter is better than the only spell we have for retribution by such a huge margin.

This isn't entirely true, but I would suggest perusing the Paladin: Protection and You thread for the discussions that have been had there, versus having the debate here.

TL;DR of that though is that depending on the pally you talk to, SoV is at best a situational seal. It also scales worse as your gear gets better.

I think it would be a valid comparison to SoB though, were pallies given a slow enough tanking weapon to more reliably keep up the stacks. SoV does 10's of TPS better than SoR at low levels of spell damage (the break even point on a full-stack is ~1k spell damage), and it would actually be a significant advantage to the alliance. As it stands now though, it's really not a valid comparison.

I just launched WoW and found this.



Sooner than expected?

Well, remember that for very big content patches, they've had big chunks available way before the real release in the past. If the terrain and models are completely nailed down already, there's no reason not to start downloading those now, even if the patch doesn't come out for months yet. It's not like this is proof that it'll come out next week or anything. (Though of course it might.)

But... neat.

Really hard to judge ETA off the background downloader. I remember they were pushing 2.1 to it almost 3 weeks before it went to Live.

With a patch that size, I wouldn't expect the patch to come by next Tuesday. Besides, if I remember correctly, at least as of late they pushed out additional content after the first round was downloaded, and stuff changed on the PTR. Chances are this batch of data is mostly textures and music.

If that is true, that would leave us with a release in early April, which isn't too far off the expected date.

EU Downloader started, but then shortly after stopped. Guess it's some test or something? Qutie weird.

I opened and closed wow without the background downloader kicking in - however opening background downloader manually caused it to start downloading the patch.

And as people have said its unlikely the patch will be out for a couple of weeks - they're likely pushing out textures, sounds, and icons that can then be hotfixed/patched with updated item stats and such.

SoV is shit for anything and everything except possibly producing slightly larger judgements than righteousness if for some reason that gets you all wet.

The DoT drops too frequently and too easily to realistically be used for boss threat, and builds up too slowly to be used on trash. Once you have a stack full the seal's tiny holy damage proc can't even make it mostly acceptable as a seal. The only advantage over Righteousness it has is that the Judgement is fairly large; and since it only has 43% spellpower scaling while Righteousness has closer to 90%, at a fairly easily attained point (somewhere around 4/5 t5) that advantage goes away too.

Vengeance sucks and just doesn't compete with the baseline spell in any realistic manner.

Seal of Blood, even without considering the synergy in terms of Spiritual Attunement and better mechanics in regards to windfury and Haste, beats out Seal of Command by 5-10% or so overall. With those things included, even without the difficult-to-quantify advantage of the extra mana efficiency, a SoB user beats a SoC user by as much as 15% or so overall. For a t6-complete Ret paladin, that really does mean the Blood Elf will have a 200 or larger DPS kick over the Alliance equivalent, in the exact same gear.

This is absolutely insane for something factionally linked. Rogues and Mages and Warlocks will actively respec and regem and regear over a 1% refinement to their overall damage, as their talents are redesigned and new concepts are discovered.

Having such a large difference persist is just silly, especially considering that the Sunwell items are apparently designed with this synergy in mind and are absolutely perfect for Seal of Blood users, and would be markedly sub-optimal for Command users if Expertise wasn't so ridiculously strong. It's also a big enough difference that it could potentially interfere with balance if you tune things tightly enough; Brutallus comes to mind as an easy example.

You can just fix SoV and give alliance paladins an advantage for Horde paladins to whine about, but that's stupid and divisive. It makes more sense to fix SoV as a tanking seal and give both seals to both factions.

I didn't mean to get off on a huge rant about this, but the sheer immensity of this imbalance really gets on my nerves, particularly how it has lingered for so long without being addressed in the slightest. I think Deepz said it; Blood Elves use SoB, Alliance Paladins just sob.

It only starts up automatically through the launcher now.

The funny thing is that the SWP polearm is excellent for blood elf ret pallies, with only Apolyon surpassing it. Chalk up another one to unexpected effects of game mechanics.

I don't want to make a new topic about this, but how many are awaiting the drama when 2.4 hits and half your full T6 members who disappeared 4 or 5 months into farming BT come back because they "missed you guys <3 <3". In the most cases, we replaced people like this, but some of them were better raiders than their replacements, and had been in the guild for years.

I wonder how many people can handle 5+ days raiding again. Are they too used to going out on a Friday/Sunday/Monday/Tuesday?

Oh dear. At least we'll be able to field excellently geared resto, elemental or enhancement shamans; balance, resto or feral druids, as well as protection or dps warriors on demand this time for the cost of only 100g per night.