Ok, I was just looking through some of the changed T6 pieces, and I've noticed something that seems a little odd - the Retribution Paladin belt seems to have considerably more stat points than the DPS warrior belt.

Compare [Lightbringer Girdle], [Onslaught Belt]

Same number of sockets with an equal budget bonus, and then the Lightbringer Girdle has:
+1str
+2crit
+10expertise
-1haste

Seems a little fishy, no?

Agreed. They only really require focus testing for the scripted abilities, timing, and tuning the numerical values for its abilities. The actual technical bugs like paladin taunt not working, or hunter pets not behaving properly, can be reproduced internally pretty easily if they know what to look for. The script that governs the boss shouldn't be affected by that.

Mistakes happen. The mail healing/haste belt from T6 is substantially underbudgeted compared to the leather equivalent, and it's blatantly obvious looking at them side-by-side:
Naturalist's Preserving Cinch - Items - World of Warcraft
Belt of Primal Majesty - Items - World of Warcraft

Fixed.

Why do they not make the PvP/arena stuff less desirable for raiding instead of the other way around? You have to put in a lot more effort to get the PvE gear anyway.

Of course mistakes happen, that's what the PTR is for. People should bring this up (and I will once I get a character copied over), so that they can hopefully fix it. I'm sure it is just an accidental wrong value, someone typed in the wrong digit or such, but we should still bring it to their attention.

Is it really that difficult to disable a tiered set bonuses while in a battleground/arena? Alter the tooltip text to indicate it, as well. Then they won't have to reitemize gear, remove stamina, invent negative resilience, and/or otherwise do extra work to curtail an imbalance.

There are some itemization mistakes, but whether or not they go back and fix them? Who knows. I expected them at some point to replace the AGI (with say, crit rating) on DPS Warrior T6 a long time ago. It has not happened despite them admitting at Blizzcon that it was a design mistake. At least they did not repeat the mistake on the 3 new T6 pieces.

I think that Blizzard's trend is to stop people in Season X gear to plow through PVE just as much as it is to stop people in tier Y to steamroller through the arena ladders. However, that doesn't mean they want to cut off PVErs from PVP (hence the new tier to season token turn ins, the resilience drops and so forth), nor the PVPers from PVE (hence the top season stuff, despite resilience and stamina stacking, are still very viable in some cases).

What they do intend, however, is to have an "all guns blazing" kit of gear for raids and a survivability kit of gear for PVP. That way, they level the playing field a bit. It's not perfectly equal, there are cases where one item is better for both roles, but it's the closest thing to having everyone start with equal opportunities. Otherwise we'd be back in the days of 2% of the raiders in tier 3 steamrollering through 98% of everyone else. Or the days when a fight was decided by who could two shot the the other chap first.

As for the hardships of earning gear through PVP or PVE, this is not the place for that. I'm sure a fairly played 2.1 k rated team is just as challenging and as difficult to manage as a successful raid.

EDIT: I really mean it... it's not the place... leave this die

Agi on DPS warrior pieces might not be optimal, but it's fine within the 'rules' of itemization. I'm not saying that the points on the Ret belt are better allocated than those on the Warrior belt, I'm saying the ret belt simply has more points to allocate.

Umm

2 3 5 people vs

25 people with group setups, supplies potions/food/arrows fair amount of incomming gold (repairs/consumables).

Its much easier to form and run an arena team then a raid.


Also 25 people on at the same time != 2,3,5.

Its substantially harder to run an effective 25 man raid then an arena team if you think differently then... I'm not sure how you could possibly think differentlt /boggle.

The ret items are clearly overitemized. The 78 passive expertise on the 3 pieces should scream that to begin with.

A CM addressed this issue recently by saying that while it would be possible to disable various things in the arena, they were looking more towards the future where World PvP will play a larger role, particularly with Lake Wintergrasp. A set bonus that "Increases the damage caused by Fireball by 5%" would be easy to just toggle off against PC opponents, but how would you handle something like the feral T6 bonus, a run speed increase?

In the end, "disabling" bonuses would be a lot messier than just flipping them off in arenas or BG's, and doesn't specifically target the issue that Blizzard is trying to prevent in this specific case. They don't want to disable all PVE set bonuses in PVP, they just want to implement something that discourages players from stacking both S3 and T6 set bonuses.

Just out of curiosity was anyone able to kill Brutallus and Felmyst last night after that small patch or were they DT'd for people to further test twins and to see M'uru? If this is a dumb question just ignore/delete it.

No stamina on my T6 belt/boots/bracers is simply unacceptable.

I will lose 79 STA (before sockets) over my current gear. Having less survivability while tackling harder content doesn't make any sense to me, nor does stressing healers more to get *slightly* more DPS.

For example, going to T6 boots over my Quickstrider Moccasins:

-1 Hit rating
-10 INT
-30 STA

+28 AP
+28 crit rating
+2 AGI
+140 Ignore Armor

I'll definitely get more DPS from the T6 boots, but actually using all 3 of the "new" T6 items is too much of a penalty. I want the final TBC raid, with the toughest content, to offer the best gear FOR RAIDING. Don't give me a 'feeling lucky, punk?' hope-your-healers-like-you sidegrade.

So far, the gear from the first half of SW25 makes me want to /afk until Twins.

There are some "creative" ways of bypassing some of the obstacles that force you to proceed in a fixed order. If anyone had actually killed Brutallus last night, they'd have said so.

There has to be a better way of doing this. I'm looking at using pvp gear on Sunwell bosses if they do a decent amount of raid damage. I don't see how their pve itemization provide meaningful rewards and gear progression in pve anymore. With how low mage hp is, there's too many instances where it's better to switch in pvp gear in MH/BT already. I sure hope that I don't need to wear some pvp gear on half the fights in Sunwell.

We just killed new Brutallus, going to try the new Felmyst now.

I don't understand why this is bad, you can use both gear with lots of stamina and gear without. Look at the DPS increase you get from the removal of the stamina, that is a huge increase and unless you are using every bit of your stamina to stay alive it is a DPS waste on an item.

Edit - In fact if you really feel like you are missing out on stamina you can gem in solid stars which takes huge pressure off the spinel supply.

It's better than hit; there's worse ways of itemizing the gear.

They have spell hit on the new priest healing belt... Obviously some items need to be corrected.

On the topic of the new badge rewards being easy T6 equiv, my suggestion to blizzard looked something like this:

How would you guys feel about having the new 2.4 badge rewards only available to players with the "Hand of Ad'al" title?

I think that this would be the most fair route, since it would require at least a bit of playing the game outside of 5-mans and kara to get gear.

How do you guys feel about this idea?