Is it safe to assume that the "T6 level badge gear" Drysc mentioned are actually these token-based transmutes from inside Sunwell? If so that would be a relief to a lot of people who see T6 Badge of Justice gear as pushing the limit. I know there's a lot of datamined gear, but the loot lists on WorldofRaids shows a lot of the gear coming from this individual vendor, so I'm wondering if any of the dataminers have found items that are obviously not from Sunwell, but not on the current vendors?

Edit: Actually, I think between the current badge gear and the items we'll see in Magister's and Sunwell, it covers all the new gear that's been datamined. Is it safe to assume Badge of Justice gear will not be included, and that all the original tokens come from inside Sunwell/Magister's?

I think I figured out part of what's going on with the Armor xmute.

It allows "tokenization" of offset loot, but why not make tokens? Because this way, when the xpack comes out, Tanks/Healers will be able to trade their (near-useless) tank or healing loot for dps gear to level with. (And of course, Fury Wars/Boomkins can just grab their stuff now.)

I really hope the tokenization of Bracers/Belts/Boots continues through the x-pack. It would really help cut down on the amount of junk on loot tables (Spelldamage leather in BT/Hyjal = silly.)

No to both. First, the token-based transmutes aren't "badge gear" any more than T6 in 2.3 is "badge gear", which is to say not at all. Second, we know from his post that a vendor that we haven't seen yet has fist weapons that we haven't seen yet. You're thinking wishfully (though I don't even agree with your desire).

It's an interesting theory and it has come up a few times here now. I really don't see the point but I applaud the experiment if that's what it is.

Now, the reasons I am not so sure about it are several but boil down to some basics. One, if WoTLC is like TBC then the easiest and fastest by far leveling methodology is to run 5-mans all the time. Healers and especially tanks will be desired here so swapping out your set pieces would seem silly. Two, there is no shortage of offset stuff and what with the increase in set piece token drops, no shortage of tokens period anyhow. Just get both, as most tanks at least already do. Third, re-gemming and re-enchanting makes it unpalatable anyhow versus just taking offset items as you go.

For 'casual' healers and tanks I can see the draw for certain and I imagine many PvP people would love the option with their Sadistic set or whatever they have by then. For people gathering the top-end raiding sets though I'm not sure it is quite the big draw.

The non-80/nonheroic 5-mans (assuming they're not much different than TBC's) will probably be tuned so low that a healer should be able to heal through it in their Sunwell-level DPS gear without a problem.

I digged in and managed to datamining and stumbled on the rep pvp set.

Crusader Ornamented Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...Ornamented.jpg
Crusader Scaled Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...aderScaled.jpg
Dragonhide Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...Dragonhide.jpg
Dreadweave Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...Dreadweave.jpg
Evoker Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...247/Evoker.jpg
Kodohide Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...7/Kodohide.jpg
Mooncloth Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j.../Mooncloth.jpg
Oppotunist Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...pportunist.jpg
Satin Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...r247/Satin.jpg
Savage Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...247/Savage.jpg
Seer's Linked Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...SeerLinken.jpg
Seer's Mail Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...7/SeerMail.jpg
Seer's Ringmail Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...erRingmail.jpg
Stalker's Chain Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...47/Stalker.jpg
Wyrmhide Battlegear: http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...7/Wyrmhide.jpg

I also found http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...n-Drenched.jpg which i havent seen on the other pictures

Yeah, so basically the old Grand Marshal's / General's Stuff. Also looks like it won't stack with Gladiator gear, which is actually a good thing here I think - more resil faster.

edit: also, no sign of the blue ring/neck? Boooo.

So.. gloves and shoulders at Honored, other three at Revered, all with different factions, shuffled on a class by class basis.

That would pretty much mean that a new alt can grab the gloves and shoulders for "free" after questing to 70, gaining roughly 65 resilience with the set bonus, plus the opportunity to socket for some more in the shoulders.

Naturally. Just as a healer in greens can heal the entry TBC dungeons.

For us though it sure as hell was fast leveling speed-running the instances with 5-man appropriate specs and gear. Yes of course for Warrior tanks that does mean wearing some dps stuff but for healers I'd max efficiency as much as possible. I did my initial leveling in TBC (after seeing it in beta) in a pretty set 5-man group and frankly, the 8 or so of us that were running the group were all the first eight to 70 by a good margin.

One could achieve the same effect without overgearing things but with the exception of warriors outgearing what is tankable, I don't see it being better. Speed is speed after all, right up until you can't enter more instances that hour.

I imagine the new trend will be Paladin tanks though, much like heroics are now. It's almost funny how closely WoW's trends are following what EQ went through.

</derail>

Kind of odd that they seem to think because they cocked up Retribution PvP itemization in the first place, that they absolutely need to continue doing so. Hence that comedy blue set.

It's getting really silly now.

The first few Level 70 chars are appearing on the EU PTRs. It seems that the chars trinkle slowly in.

The whole zone now looks like a big invasion, there is a ship with the token vendors and just at the quai, there are enemy archers. There are Bloodelfs flying around and throwing some fire bombs at the invasion force NPCs.

The first quest to retake the village seems to be to kill Bloodelves around floating red crystals (such as can be found in Netherstorm) which control Arcane Sentry Robots. Those then seem to switch allegeance and help defend the bridge head.

EDIT: attached image
EDIT2: The few people with lvl 70 chars that I talked to all said that it was not their transferred characters, but they simply found the char in their charlist. There might be some serious trouble with the character copy system.

I wonder if it's related to the whole cross region test realm thing. For example: copying a character from account X-US also copies it to X-EU and X-KO.

The patterns seem, rather obviously to me, to follow the current raid crafting formula; one piece requires a raid-specific mat (Sunmotes) and one piece does not. Presumably the Sunmote craftable recipes are BoE and the non-Sunmote craftable recipes are BoP, following the style of both tier 5 and tier 6 raid craftables.

The US PTR is up, and apparently at least a few people have managed to get their characters copied over - saw several 70s running around at Eversong Woods.

Few hundreds drowned 1lvl blood elves on EU PTR at this moment . Never knew before that you can die in spirit...

Part of opening up deeper inside Sunwell.

Wonder if that's a "requires one guild on the server (or one per faction)" to move the plot onwards or if servers with many Brutallus farmers will get a headstart?

Same thing going on the US PVE Realm right now. A few of us that made through are standing on the edge of the fatigue water healing up the people trying to swim over, there was about 15 healers spamming each other in the water about 10 minutes ago... easily one of the most awesome expontaneous teamwork efforts that I've seen pulled off on WoW.

Totaling up the 3 new T6 pieces:

priest set: 139 dmg, 59 haste, 23 crit
mage set: 139 dmg, 80 haste, 42 crit
lock set: 139 dmg, 79 haste, 24 crit, 20 hit

... how is that fair?

(shamelessly stolen from Inch's post on shadowpriest.com)

http://cika.adrenzone.net/Kalecgos1.jpg

Stealthed to the first boss, got around him then died to a trash pack.

Just got on the US PvE PTR and saw a couple of things I don't think have been mentioned so far:

The "Hand of A'dal" title is indeed a right-side title. For example, my Druid will be "Alerian, Hand of A'dal" when 2.4 goes live.

It appears that the flight master uses Dragonhawks instead of other types. Since my character is still in queue, I couldn't verify this as folks were only flying in and not out. But here's the image of the flight master with his (supposed) mounts:


I know folks have posted the zone map, but I've been following the thread since it started and I hadn't yet seen the EK map. So here's my cap of that:


One last thing, I remember several pages back someone asked for a screen cap of a Sunmote and a reply was that you could not screen cap it because mousing over the Sunmote on the vendor would just show the turn-in item. This is not the case, so here is the cap:

So most likely he will be the mentioned gearcheck. Is there much trash around?