Indeed, this surprised me as well. Destruction warlocks basically get 6% damage increase, while for other dps classes the bonus is either 5% (elemental shaman, mage) or only applies to some spells (e.g. increases Steady Shot or Mind Blast by 10%). I think the setbonus was designed under the assumption of either SB + Corruption or Incinerate + Immolate. Tier5 seems to be based around that same idea.

Despite talents like Emberstorm, destruction turned out to be shadow bolt spam, instead of incinerate spam. I am actually glad with how the situation is now because of the raid synergy with ISB. Changing this may lead to strange results. I think this is way balancing incinerate is so difficult, if you consider the options:

1) Buff incinerate: more personal dps (even more?) at the expense of ISB uptime for shadow priests or affliction warlocks (if any). Depending on the trade-off, incinerate might still be inferior for raiding.

2) Change ISB into increase shadow and fire: this would mean substantially more dps for both fire destruction and mages - which would be overpowered.

3) Make ISB a personal buff only for both incinerate and SB: this would just mean a nerf to shadow priests and affliction.

4) Change little or do nothing: incinerate remains inferior to shadow bolt. Talents like Emberstorm will remain unused.

I am not yet sure what the impact of the new Emberstorm will be. But I think the Emberstorm changes won't change anything. It really makes me wonder what will happen with destruction when 51 talent trees are introduced in WLK.

Check the class mechanics forums, we already have a good assessment of the change. You'll be surprised.

Ignore this if this is against the spoiler rules, but how difficult is the Sunwell trash?

A lot of my friends are rather excited at the prospect of farming the trash drops for the new craftable recipes and would probably be willing to divert a night off to do it. We're mostly in T5 gear even though our progression is 4/5 MH, but we've only been there a few weeks so loot hasn't really been allocated as much.

The Kalecgos trash is far more boring than any other trash in the game, 5 mans and other raids included: it's by far the most repetitive trash out there (9 pulls in a row that are more or less the exact same, each pulls takes a decent amount of time - far longer than the humanoid pulls before Council). The actual difficulty is tied to how much CC you have.

It is my understanding that there is little to no trash after him though, until you get towards the Twins.

I was actually referring more towards the gear requirements as far as tank damage, DPS races (if any) and healing are concerned, since we're not very far into BT at all. Your comment about CC is very helpful though, and I'll be sure to keep that in mind.

I guess the only complaint people have had about the trash is claiming there's too much of it leading up to Kalecgos, but they're forgetting a really salient point -- that's the only source of gems/sunmotes/epics that you really will have for a while. There's only 2 pulls to Brutallus including just a single Sentinel, and of course Felmyst directly follows Brutallus. I rather like it the way it is though.

Having a vast majority of the trash front-loaded, before the first boss no less, really says to me that they want even guilds that aren't able to kill Kalec to be able to farm trash significantly. Progressing in BT and Hyjal and don't have enough [Class/Role X] one night? Go farm Sunwell trash instead!

It compares quite well to Kael'thas trash. Not hard, but you want two sheep or so, some coordinates ranged burst and some decent stamina on people.

From my experience, it requires a full raid, or as many people as possible. I don't think it can be cleared with 10-15 people though, from what if felt.


Patch Thursday 13th

Sunwell Plateau still closed, but the armour on most sunwell gear has been fixed.
There are still some issues with an ilvl 164 item having ilvl 159 item armour though.
Didn't see any other changes.

Did you enjoy the ZA dragonhawk scout mechanic?

You can stun/hamstring scouts. I found the ones in Sunwell quite a bit more annoying.

We just had 3 tanks, actually.
Anyway, as the progression in the SP will advance, the gear available to the members of the raid will improve as well, trivializing the initial trash and speeding up the whole killing process (without mentioning the couple of pulls you can actually already skip).

Indeed, as Astrylian and Snowy said, I see such trash more of a very first gear/raid check to avoid pattern and epic farming by guilds not yet ready to face the instance. The annoyance of the rather big amount of trash you have before Kalecgos is anyway mitigated by the scarcity of it later on. From that point of view, you can anyway think positive: nothing will ever beat 9-10 months of Mount Hyjal trash waves farming

Best offhand in the game for Enhancement shaman drops off trash.

You also have a good 5 seconds to kill them once they start to channel the robots, whereas the scouts will instantly summon their troll buddies.

The Sunwell scouts - unless changed - aren't slowable and aggro at very far range, even if you have 5 seconds to kill them it's almost guaranteed to get the sentinel as well, we just brute force the sentinel down and tank/cc the pack. The trolls are stunnable and you have untill they get to the drums before troll buddies are spawned.

Well, most controllable way would be to do sentinel also, had most success with this even with an undermanned raid (so few casters that killing scouts was an issue). Except for the fun that sentinels bring while being offtanked with just 1 healer it's pretty much the same as just killing the pack.

On the other hand in a full raid scouts die and that saves time.
It's fun trash ... for now.

If by well-oiled execution you mean creative use of soulstones and Paladin bubbles then I agree 100%. But I digress...

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...gvengeance.jpg

I stand corrected. But what i meant is, it's time for another mail trashdrop. The last one we had are the mail bracers from Tk trash.

Never got the chance to see the twins trash but I understand it is a gauntlet? Does it drop patterns and sunmotes? How's the amount of trash between twins and M'uru?

Just trying to get a guesstimate of how many sunmotes you can expect from a full clear, I believe we got 8 from the Kalecgos trash the one time we did it. If that is the majority you will get from a clear I'm afraid it will be many months before everyone has gotten their desired crafted BoE gloves and rings.

Serious Casual fully intends to farm the pre-kalecgos trash for what that's worth. Your milage and guildmates may vary. It seems silly to kill Kalecgos, get stalled on brutalis, and not have a healthy stock of sunmotes from the front-loaded trash farming.

Mother trash should have taught us that trash can be a profitable venture in it's own right. I only hope that it's taught blizzard that such trash needs to be fun and forgiving of odd compositions if that's it's purpose. We'll see how it pans out, but for guilds which are going to be blocked primarily by gearing (and our 70 day tour through the raid game didn't exactly have rest stops for farming) the trash is going to be a large part of what we can farm to help even out the gear gap.

It definitely provides an incentive to show up and wipe, even if your guild is borderline (or completely) undergeared. Due to the lack of attunement, probably 90% of total wipes will be occurring in the first 1/6th of the instance - I could even see Sunwell PUGs in high pop servers, if purely to see what the place looks like and enjoy dying outrageously.

Compare to the rather demoralizing Razorgore.. at least, visiting Kalecgos, you have a shot at trash purples.

This is what I mean exactly, 4T6 is an insane bonus for Destro locks. Now compare that to 4T6 of DPS Warrior T6, we get 5% more damage on mortal strike/blood thirst.

While in both cases (Lock & Warrior) the bonus applies to the main focus of the rotation (destro locks being focused primarly on Sbolt, and MS/Fury warriors alike prioritising BT/MS over any other instant/on next swing/casted attack), they affect the gain in dps from the setbonus differently.

I don't exactly know the casting time of Sbolt, but I'm fairly certain that you should be able to get off 2 Sbolts during the cooldown on Mortal Strike (6 secs).

What I'm wondering is how blizzard came up with the set bonuses. For example, in my opinion the 4T6 for DPS Warriors would be better suited to be something like "Increases the damage done by Slam/Heroic Strike by 5%". Which would bring it much more in line to other classes setbonuses.

Either Blizzard simply doesn't really look into the spellrotations used by classes, and thus just picks a random spell and makes the set bonus apply to that. Or they do try to line the setbonuses up to the rotation, but manage to completely fail to give the setbonus any meaning for some classes.