Still very good for Druids. I'll be keeping Stormrage cover, bracers, and gloves.

That'll mean I'll lose the 8 pc Dreamwalker set bonus, 55 healing, and 4 intellect. I'll gain 3 spirit, 1 mana/5, and 15% mana regen while casting.

Yeah that's the point I'm getting at. Every time you get an 8 piece, there is new gear waiting around the corner just waiting for the day that you decide to drop your 8 piece bonus for more beneficial stats.

That's been the trend for tiers 1 and 2 at least.

But, just looking at every 8 piece bonus from tier 3 on the blizzard website just now, even those don't seem worth it regardless of the fact there is no better gear available. It seems that mixing/matching pieces of different sets to obtain the first 1-2 set bonuses of each is overall more beneficial than going for a full set.

As an example, I sport 3 piece Doomcaller, 2 piece General's and 3 piece Nemesis (at least for pvp, I use 5/5 DC for pve now). I would literally have to upgrade 4 of those items to plagueheart - each with a certain upgrade in statistics - just to obtain the same benefit I got from the set bonuses I'm losing. 4 freaking pieces!

you use 20 stam set bonus of Dreadweave in PvE?

I JUST SAID that I use 5/5 DC in PvE now.

Edit: Although saying that I've been using the Dreadweave gloves and boots for PvE for a long time simply because I had nothing better..

Only time I ever wear 8 Trans is on Loatheb, it's too good to pass up there. On every other encounter I just don't GHeal enough to make it beneficial. 5 Trans on the other hand goes on for almost every trash pull and then back to 3 Trans for boss encounters.

I'm currently running a bit of an experiment in regards to Faith, my playstyle, mana, and +healing. I currently have 7 pieces (8th will be quite some time off), and I've made a point of wearing all of it to every fight in Naxx just to see how it works out. Loss of my 3pc Trans bonus is definitely noticeable, though not crippling; the only fights where I get worried on mana are the same fights that I usually have to hit a mana pot for anyway--Patchwerk and Thaddius. Granted, I'm playing around in farm content where things rarely go wrong to the point that my mana suddenly gets strained, but even then it seems pretty easy to allow for. I do what I normally do if I start to get low, which is wiggle around with the 5 second rule and lean a bit more on heal 2.

So, is more than 5pc Faith optimal? Certainly not. But I've found that wearing the extra Faith fits within my playstyle and the encounters I currently face just fine (every Naxx boss up to 4H), without extra consumeables and without putting the people I heal at risk. My renew ticks for 500+ now when fully buffed, as well, which I definitely like, and since I'm one of those priests that sometimes gets gibbed on trash, I even like the 6pc bonus, too. I'm sure I will swap out three items for the optimal Faith/Trans regen superset in some isolated cases, but for my day to day I keep the Faith on.

All the Trans bonuses were well thought out -- 3 piece of course is amazing, the 5 piece is useful for all trash and more than a few boss fights, and having 1 or 2 priests with the 8/8 is great as well. Most of Faith's bonuses just seem rather lackluster, and as I wrote in a previous thread, the 8 piece bonus really needed to be a permanent effect in order to even consider breaking up 3 piece Trans.

As for me, I will probably wear the belt/pants/boots for the 3 pc as it stands -- I have Bracelets of Royal Redemption over the Trans bracers. Right now I still wear the Halo and Shoulders as well to get the 5 piece.

If you don't use Greater Heal alot, then obviously 8pc Transcendence isn't very useful. With +943 heal, I find myself using Greater Heal at least 60% of the time (SWStats is great for tracking this), so I'm still getting alot of mileage from the 8pc bonus. I'm typically in the top 3 (usually at the top) for effective healing. What do you think the cutoff is (in terms of % of Greater Heals cast) for 8pc Trans to be retired as a default gear setup and move on to Faith/misc high +heal items?

Don't get me wrong, I personally LOVE the 8/8 trans bonus. There's nothing quite like looking at the top right of your screen and seeing the Regrowth DOT, Rejuv, the Gheal DOT and Renew on you all at the same time as a warlock ;)

But, how long would you keep that 8/8 bonus before you decide that the upgrade in stats in more readily available gear will benefit you more? We've got Mages that have FINALLY realised how crappy the 8/8 Netherwind bonus is for PvE (I guess they're just bored of it for PvP as well ;)) and are focussing on getting gear with better stats.

Its the curse of the full-set bonus, I guess. Eventually you're just going to have the discard it on day-to-day occasions and only rip it out of the bank only on the rare occasion where its necessary. Trouble is, with TBC looming over the horizon, even the Tier3 8pc bonuses will probably be scrapped pretty damn quick for better individual pieces.

As a Horde warlock, I can't justify breaking 8pc Nemesis until I a.) get 5-pc Doomcaller; or b.) get paladins.

It's an utterly fantastic situation to be in, to be sure. :rolleyes:

Could you imagine Plagueheart, with the 8 pc Felheart bonus? Delicious ...

In AQ40 and Naxx, it's mostly the trash. And Huhuran as well, but in that case I will break the 8pc Nemesis and go for pure +damage gear regardless.

And I don't have a Fetish, as I've only seen one of them drop. We get the Totem every kill though. =/

I hope you mean, "netherwind 8/8 is particularly 'meh,' especially for fire mages"

Frosties get better use of 8/8 NW, and for them it's still only 4% dmg, which can be easily obtained by wearing Nef or pre-Nef assorted gear.

Fire mages love scorch, and 8/8 NW is useless with scorch.

I really don't think there's a place where you -wouldn't- want to have an 8/8 Trans Priest in favor of a maxed out +healing/spirit/mp5, whatever one. That extra HoT is just ridiculous. There's a thread somewhere debating 8/8 over non-set, but that was obv before Faith stuff came out. You lose out on a lot of +healing between different pieces (Grasp of the Old God, Bracelets of Royal Redemption, and Robes of the Guardian Saint, just for a few examples) and it sucks even worse if you've had bad luck with the cross-over stuff (Trinkets, Rings, etc), but I think in the end it was decided that the two were very close, so even with all the Faith jazz out there I do think you'll want to keep one (any more than that is gimping your healing crew) GHeal bitch.

You don't consider 4% higher damage a good set bonus?

This is a little off topic, but i don't want to start a whole new thread just for this one small question. I was looking at the "wish list" earlier in the thread, and i noticed he had +55 healing on his one-hander. I was wondering if at some point, say +1000 or so healing, +20 spirt would be better than +55 healing? My thinking is that once you downrank to a ceritain point wouldn't +healing lose some of it's effectiveness because you are no longer able to downrank so you are only simply making your heals slightly larger.

I don't think there is such a theoretical point... there's no cap or diminishing returns on +healing AFAIK and the mana costs are fixed (at least independant of either +healing or spirit) so every bit of extra +healing would still count toward increased efficiency.

There's no "point" but it's true that healing and regen interact in a nonlinear way.



Whoever is responsible for healer spells is in a tight spot. People are already using sub-L50 spells (H2, GH1) way more than anything. What spells are you going to give us to make that better? Due to spike damage, GH6,7,8 are going to be worthless. That also means that +healing gradually tapers off in efficiency as you cannot continue to downrank. At some point, we'll have enough +healing that the best way to improve yourself is to revert to flash heals, and that will mean that regen starts to predominate again.

Netherwind does not have a single point of +hit. Think about that.

The set itself is bad, but the original request was for good 8/8 bonuses, not sets actually worth wearing 8/8 of. The pre-T3 sets worth wearing 8/8 of are pretty much just Giantstalker's, Dragonstalker's, Transcendence and Wrath (and Stormrage?).

Why would you wear 8/8 wrath? Do you mean 8/8 the minute you've killed Nef or for any period of time?

5 Faith and 3 Trans for most Bosses
5 Trans and 3 Faith for Zerg encounters like Gluth or Hiegan's Tunnel (I'm alliance, so BoS pretty much takes care of aggro problems)

When I complete the set I will probably wear 9/9 Faith everywhere I don't need the extra regen. (Raw HPS > regen on trash) When I get Warmth of Forgiveness I may not need to wear 3 Trans in most boss encounters either.