If everything I'm seeing in this thread is true the changes to Mag are excellent for this stage of the expansion. He's more casual/PuG raid friendly and even offers an incentive to Tier 6 raiders to take twenty or so minutes to do for the gems, bag, and extra gold.

That bag better drop only shadowsongs and crimson spinels.

I saw someone post about the gold Kael drops but wanted to ask those who have cleared some BT ot Hyjal, whats the gold rate on those bosses? Is it till 10-12 gp per person?

I think the changes to mag should have been in place since TBC was released.

I thought progressive content was supposed to get harder?

Instead it appears to go like this:

Kara (Easy) -> Gruul (Medium) -> Magtheridon (Hard)
Start of SSC/TK (Easy) -> Middle bosses of SSC/TK (Medium) -> Kael'thas/Lady Vashj(Hard)
Start of MH/BT (Easy) -> Middle bosses of MH/BT (Medium) -> Last bosses of BT (Hard)

Every tier has easy and hard bosses in it. Instead of how it appears to have went in vanilla wow:

MC (Easy) -> BWL (Easy/Medium) -> AQ40 (Medium/Hard) -> Naxx (Hard)

Agree/Disagree?

It's all relative. The easy bosses in MH/BT are easy because you've beaten all of SSC/TK. Take a guild just starting in SSC/TK and throw them at Naj'entus and Rage and tell them "Oh, they're just as easy as Lurker" and they're going to tell you that just isn't true.

I disagree (to a point). The earlier bosses in MH/BT are much easier than the end-bosses you just killed. Najentus and Supremus may be gear checks for the tanks, but Rage, Anatheron, etc should be easily doable for a Kara/early SSC guild as long as they're focused.

Now if the guild's been stuck in SSC/TK for the past 6 months, that's different. That implies to me they don't have the coordination or gear to go past T5. But not all SSC/TK guilds are the same.

I think when 2.4 comes out, the guilds that can't get pas Lurker are going to try to hit MH/BT and wipe spectacularly. Much emoness will ensue and guild breakages will occur. But the guilds that are say, 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC I think will get at least halfway into BT/MH without too much drama.

At the risk of a long offshoot tangent, how in the world did you 10-man Anetheron? Combination of dps requirement for the infernals plus his vampiric aura seems a little insane for 4-5 dps to overcome.

Not attempting to de-rail the thread in the slightest, but, what makes rage easy is having all the healers use a macro to assist Rage and spam heal whoever gets the frost bolt. We decided when progressing through him not to rely on a clutch like a pvp trinket.

On Topic:
I'm really against the PvE/PvP mixing that Blizzard is working into the game. It makes all my accomplishments as a T6 raider seem less important. Sure I cleared it all before 2.4, but I would still like a method of standing out from the crowd. At the same time, I find it hilarious that the welfare epic pvpers are crying that "scripted encounter" masters can get the same gear as them. I'm torn. It's funny but saddening at the same time.

I'm all for what was mentioned earlier in this thread that Illidan killers should get a title. They should also get a 310% mount! Top PvP'ers do...

Months back we were so desperate for warlocks for mag we took a gold botter/farmer in 300ish spelldmg and mostly boe stam greens. (he played from a lan center where many other guilies used to play, kinda became a mascot of sorts.)

Going by my realms recruiting posts etc most guilds either struggle to get enough warlocks or skip mag entirely.

Looks like they finally are making raiding about killing bosses and getting piles of loot, not just a 2-3 items and a pittance of gold. Every boss should have a little hoard of special goodies to give out, it makes thematic sense with the concept of raiding dungeons in a fantasy setting.

I actually leveled a warlock to 70 for the sole purpose of downing Mag (we only had 1 raiding warlock when we started running Gruul).

As long as they keep the badges on the body. Having each person to loot the badges from the kara chest is annoying. 25 people doing it would be obnoxious.

Not that I don't believe you, but is there any way we could get the itemid for that bag?

Lots of addons will show you the itemid, but my personal favorite is RatingBuster (http://www.wowace.com/wiki/RatingBuster).

Oh and was this on the PvE or PvP PTR?

EU PVP.

While it's true that as you progress through content there is a general trend towards greater difficulty, that doesn't mean that there has to be a linear increase in difficulty from one boss to the next. I distinctly recall a comment made by Tigole a while ago in which he said that Najentus had been deliberately tuned to be easy, as a reward for having got that far. Knowing that mindset, the situation doesn't seem so strange that the difficulty is distributed as it is, and any incongruity (in terms of effort vs. reward) that we now see can probably be explained by Blizzard having a change of game plan midway through TBC, resulting in the removal of attunements.

In fact (as many others have pointed out in many threads prior to this one) the difficulty curve in TBC compared to vanilla isn't nearly as different as you might think. The only difference was that in vanilla the cockblocks were placed at the beginning of the instance, instead of at the end of the previous one.

I believe this is what happens if all people go by bosskillers and co. You can down Magtheridon with 0 warlocks at all. Warlocks are not required. But everyone believes that you need at least 3, better 4 or 5 before even attempting it.

I believe my former guild's firstkill was with 4 warlocks yes, but our second kill was with 2. And that was back when the channelers and infernals dealt more damage, channelers had more HP and the trash in that instance gave us 5 dead players per pull on average (until we finally got better at them).

A warlock can banish one and fear another infernal, true. Curse of Tongues is also nice. But for CC purposes, almost every other class can deal with infernals as well. Infernals are not exclusive Warlock business. It's up to the raid to deal with them. Shadow Priests fear them. Hunters kite them, Icetrap them, Scatter/Wyvern shot them, free Warriors can chargestun/hamstring them, heck even Rogues can use their half arsenal of effects, Mages can slow, Shamans can frostshock, Paladins can stun them, and so on. Almost every single CC there is in the game works on them. Just because Warlocks have the most convenient one since the mobtype is demon, does not mean that you absolutely need to have a metric ton of Warlocks there.

Also we regularly had to "tank" the first channeler with a Rogue due to lack of tanks.

What you need though is players that are able to forgoe their primary battle role for a second and just deal with something else in their vicinity, before going back to what it is that they did. If you don't have those, then be glad for the changes that underwent with regards to the cubes and the Mind Exhaustion debuff.

Not sure Gruul would require such a loot buff to still be ran by raiders. He drops DST after all.

I've read bits of this thread and felt similar concerns about the new "badge" loot of BT-equivalent item levels. I'm a little concerned that the actual value of this gear is being vastly overstated in this thread. I decided to run numbers through my spreadsheet to get a real idea of how good (or bad) these items will be in their current data-mined form (as they pertain to raiding destro warlocks).

I have a special spreadsheet that I use for evaluating warlock gear using relative stat values for a variety of situations. It's largely built on the numbers I've gathered from Leulier's spreadsheets (http://www.leulier.com/) averaged over a number of commonly encountered raiding scenarios.

I've created a miniature version of my gear calculation that compares the relative value of gear across 4 different "tiers" (for my 0/21/40 destruction warlock including the new 2.4 spell haste mechanics) for each of the item slots that will have a new 2.4 badge-acquired item. Keep in mind I'm using blue gems for everything.

The 4 tiers of comparison:

1. The T6 level (minus sunwell)
2. The T5/timed ZA level that my guild is working on
3. The 10-man/non-timed ZA/KZ/badges that most "casual" raiders have easy access to
4. The new "BT-level" badge gear

Just as a disclaimer, I fully realize that this only applies to destruction warlocks and that other classes may see larger or smaller relative upgrades from the data-mined 2.4 badge gear. Anyway..

chest:
Vestments of the Sea-witch (t5): 157.53
Malefic (t6): 151.16
Corruptor's (t5): 135.82
Tormented Demonsoul Robes (2.4 badges): 134.72
Shroud of the Lore'nial (2.4 badges): 122.9
Vengeful Gladiator's Felweave (welfare arena): 122.47

hands:
Malefic (t6): 108.67
Enslaved Doomguard Soulgrips (2.4 badges): 98.08
Studious Wraps (current badges): 91.63
(no T5 listed since Studious Wraps are the best of the tier)

weapon:
Tempest of Chaos (t6): 311.42
Vengeful Gladiator's Spellblade (arguably welfare): 279.5
Blade of Twisted Visions (2.4 version, ZA): 270.4
Scryer's Blade of Focus (2.4 badges): 266.32
Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade (definitely welfare): 253.92

ring:
Mana-attuned Band (ZA timed): 88.82
Ring of Arcane Knowledge (t6): 85.37
Sunwell caster ring (2.4 badges): 77.89
Ring of Endless Coils (t5): 62.51
Violet Signet of the Archmage: 53.78

boots:
Slippers of the Sea-caller (t6): 99.51
Boots of Incantations (2.4 badges): 94.44
Footpads of Madness (ZA): 94.28
Frozen Shadoweave (tailoring): 83.16

pants:
Malefic (t6): 151.53
Corruptor's (t5): 139.7
Corrupted Soulcloth Pantalones (2.4 badges): 135.05
Legwraps of Sweltering Flame (2.4 badges): 129.44
Spellstrike (crafted): 124.58

---

There are certainly some decent items in this lot but I really can't say that they're comparable to the drops in BT. The chests aren't better than T5, the weapon isn't better than ZA/T6/PVP, the boots are roughly T5 equivalent, the pants fill the niche between spellstrike and T5. The gloves are a small upgrade over the current badge gloves but don't come close to the T6 gloves. The ring is quite a nice item for its level.. but there are so many T6 level rings that beat it: Ring of Arcane Knowledge, Band of the Eternal Sage, Ring of Captured Storms.

On top of this.. these numbers completely ignore the value of set bonuses. The warlock 4-piece Malefic bonus (+6% shadowbolt damage) is a substantial damage upgrade and makes the 4 necessary Malefic pieces worth much more than their individual stats suggest.

Bottom line is that these pieces are not upgrades for the T6 raider except those with exceptionally bad luck or those with a disproportionately small pool of DKP relative to their raiding peers. For the T5 raider, most of these pieces aren't upgrades or are slight upgrades. For the 10-man/welfare raider, there are some nice pieces in here that provide decent upgrades over commonly available items. This means that no matter how many heroic mech runs the "casual" player endures, they'll never be as well geared as someone in T5/T6 content. However, it is possible for a character in the same situation to be able (because of this badge gear) to join a T5 (or maybe T6) guild and be readily useful. On the whole, I think this is a good thing.

(Once again I have to make the disclaimer that I'm only looking at this loot as applied to destruction locks. That's a big YMMV.)

Seems like Season 4 items are now on the PTR: Mmo-champion

Stats are buggy, look at the order on them, it's either a fake or someone at Blizzard fucked up quite a bit....

Most of the things they post are data-mined, they wouldn't post fake things just for posting them without the disclaimer that they're suspect, or may in fact be fake. At least this is what I've observed viewing the site in past months.

Nice work quantifying what we've all been arguing about. The "T6 quality" badge loot seems to be more accurately qualified as "better than T5 quality" loot. It seems a lot more reasonable to have slight upgrades from T5 via badges than it does upgrades from T6--but this has been discussed too much already.

I'm really curious about some of the itemization choices, though. It seems as though, from the Sunwell and Badge loots, that they've stopped giving out Armor Pen (my favorite stat) and starting ruthlessly trying to shove Haste down our throats. The Spell Haste change goes a long way to making it a valuable stat, but melee haste is still underwhelming for many specs. Making spell haste but not melee haste effect the global cooldown seems very odd to me. Consider what classes a shorter GCD on haste would really help:

Hunters: a lot. huge.
Warriors: Helps arms a bit during Bloodlust, otherwise doesn't really matter...And it doesn't really matter for fury.
Rogues: Not that big of a deal, assuming any kind of limit based on energy regen.
Tanks: Helps a lot for threat, but no tank has much haste.
Enhancement Shaman: Helps a bit... Limited more by cooldowns on SS/Shock, but shorter GCDs reduce overlapping.
Ret paladins: Doesn't really matter that much.

I could honestly see making Haste apply to melee but not ranged and it not really change anything at all except make bloodlust a bit more effective for some classes limited by the GCD (like me, an Arms warrior).

The only reason I bring this up is that there's SO MUCH haste on the dps plate gear from badges and from sunwell. I find it quite confusing.