I’m a little foggy but I definitely remember thinking it was a decent system for gearing all around.
Wouldn’t mind something close to that coming back.
In fact, and totally off topic, but there are SO damned many thing that Blizz previously got right that they took away later…
It’s like they forgot that made a good game…
Maybe it’s just different generations of development over time each trying to iterate their own ideas into the game, enjoyable gameplay be damned…
the next question that comes to mind is, if you get a pvp item and covert it to a tier item, is it the pvp or pve ilvl that the tier item becomes?
So Wowhead just did a preview of the tints for the different Pally set pieces and these are apparently the six designations:
Mythic, Heroic, Normal, LFR, PvP, and Elite.
Based on those descriptions, doesn’t seem like solo players will be able to get them outside of LFR.
What about PVP with Honor points? That’s all I usually get.
I wouldn’t expect to get anything useful with Honor points this expansion.
With the help of the Shadow Community we would like to provide some rough feedback on the set bonuses that have appeared in the 9.2 PTR. The following is mostly focused on feedback for how the playstyle of these bonuses might work out, rather than tuning. Once we get access to the PTR and play with it we will make a follow up post with more hands-on experience based feedback.
Initially after reading the set bonus we are immediately concerned with the playstyle around Dark Thoughts. Since it is the central aspect of the set bonus a lot of our feedback is centered around issues this mechanic has and potential problems with getting more procs. One of the biggest red flags is the fact that Dark Thoughts only has a single charge. This effectively removes our ability to play around procs in a more meaningful way with the game effectively expecting us to use the proc ASAP. This becomes a challenge since to do optimal damage we usually want to be casting Mind Flay while consuming that proc. In a world where it had multiple charges we could use the 2pc increase proc chance to instead bank up charges for when we need them, rather than potentially just losing more charges. In order for the set bonus to thrive we need more charges of Dark Thoughts.
The other big problem with getting more Dark Thought procs is that depending on tuning of the 4 set bonus and other spells we could end up dropping casting Mind Blast on cooldown/when we do NOT have a Dark Thought proc. Right now during our cooldowns, casting Mind Flay is our lowest priority action. However with this change Mind Flay effectively stops being a filler and becomes a vessel for proccing more Dark Thoughts and therefore more 4 set uptime. This is also quite dangerous because it means we have less buffer to handle mechanics or move while fighting than we did previously, which is not a fun thing for a tier set to enable. While these problems are not necessarily directly related to the set bonus, since they buff Dark Thoughts, these problems are definitely concerning.
Regardless of tuning, another issue this magnifies is Voidform complexity. As we mentioned in our previous feedback post: Voidform is becoming increasingly overwhelming. Adding an additional layer to this already Insanity overloaded cooldown window with Dark Thoughts/Mind Flay weaving will make the spec harder to play optimally and make things even more chaotic. This set bonus actually gives Mind Flay + Dark Thoughts the exact same problem we mentioned in that feedback post with Mind Sear + Searing Nightmare. While Dark Thoughts does not have the same hard requirement, it effectively does when talking about optimal damage and all of those same problems get attached to it, especially with this set bonus with more procs and extra damage tied to those procs with the 4 set. Pending tuning this could end up with the player having to make decisions on whether to cap Insanity, delay Void Bolt, or use their Dark Thought proc which is not a fun choice to make.
In addition to general gameplay issues with buffing Dark Thoughts, this also has direct implications to our Covenant choice and Covenant balancing. Specifically this impacts Kyrian and Night Fae choices, for similar reasons. As a Kyrian Ascended Blast replaces Mind Flay, which because of these set bonuses is no longer simply a filler spell. Because of this Kyrian effectively gets less value from the set bonus compared to other Covenants. Comparing this to Necrolord specifically you lose between 5-7 globals of Mind Flay during cooldowns, which equates to roughly 3-4 T28 4-set spawns on Average.
Night Fae has a slightly similar problem but instead with Insanity gain per second. Due to the Wrathful Faerie, Night Fae’s naturally generate more Insanity during cooldowns than other Covenants. This in turn causes us to be overloaded with Insanity and we already have issues getting ahead of this, which typically results in choosing between capping Insanity or dropping important spells like Void Bolt. Giving players more things to do as Night Fae with more Dark Thoughts will either reduce the value of the Covenant choice, or reduce the value of the tier set bonus, neither of which is a good choice to make.
Moving on specifically to the 4 set bonus, since we are not quite sure how this works most of this feedback is more hand wavey until we get all the details. The big question for this is what happens when you consume a Dark Thought while the pet is already active. Does it spawn an additional pet, or does it simply extend the duration of the existing one? If it simply extends the duration of the existing pet we could be further incentivized to fish for more Dark Thought procs to make sure we keep it active as long as possible, which does not bode well for casting Mind Blast on cooldown. Furthermore based on scaling this could cause the player to get more procs than the boss will live for. What we don’t want to see is the player being forced to choose between fishing for procs, or ignoring them based on how long this pet lasts for in potential scenarios where we can infinitely stack this pet. This problem is even worse in AoE scenarios where we generally get more procs than we want to spend to begin with, effectively turning the set bonus into a maintenance buff rather than a fun interactive proc.
Speaking of AoE, we want to mention specifically that we are a bit disappointed that our set bonus has no interaction on AoE, especially considering so many other specs have set bonuses that do have single and multi-target components attached to them. This was by far our biggest issue we discussed in the feedback post and we were really hoping that our set bonus would have some interaction in AoE or even spread cleave to make the spec more desirable in those situations. This is actually a similar problem that we had with our Eternal Call to the Void legendary. That Legendary was tweaked to cast Mind Sear instead if you got a proc in AoE. An AoE component attached to this legendary would at least make it feel better in AoE, or maybe revisit how it works all together.
Overall without playing with the set bonus we are a bit saddened that it revolves around a mechanic that already has its own issues and does not provide us with any additional AoE or Cleave. If the interactions with Dark Thoughts and the rest of our kit get ironed out and there is some AoE component another pet based proc could be interesting to add to our existing pet-based cooldowns.
In the meantime we’ll hold off on numbers and more concrete feedback until we do some play testing.
I actually like a lot of the Covenant/Torghast themed stuff in SL. I use at least some pieces from a lot of the new sets in my mogs. I’m just not a big fan of the generic, Oribosian stuff–which unfortunately is what they chose to base the tier sets on.
And it’s not really fair to compare anything to Legion, ever. They pretty much hit the class/spec fantasy out of the park on almost everything in that expac. Which, big HINT for Blizzard, is one of the big reasons why people remember it so fondly.
As a mythic raider, this set feels terrible, even if it is extremely overpowered (The 50%~ proc on each tick of mind flay), long channeled ability is fine once in a while, but definitely not something that should be casted constantly, for example, void torrent is an amazing ability, asking you to find an opportunity to stand still for 3 second for full value every 30 seconds, or the sun king’s blessing legendary/pyroclasm talent from fire mage, asking you to find an opportunity to hard cast 4s of pyroblast for full effect. But having a filler, with a cast time in general just feels terrible. I personally hate using mind flay as a filler spell already, this tier bonus is just making it much worse.
Some rough ideas on how to make a good tier set, something with shadow word: pain, it is the only dot that is available to shadow priest during aoe, one of the most spammed spell during movements in raids, and used quite a bit in pvp when kiting. Perhaps 2pc casting sw:p on a target already afflicted with sw:p will do a percent of remaining damage left on the sw:p, this will be very unnoticeable in patchwerk, but help a ton in movement, pvp, and especially aoe m+. With that, the 4pc should be single target focused, almost anything works.
General shadow priest aoe changes, please take searing nightmare out of the talent, or change the talent, having to stand still, spend 2 gcd to do 1000-2000 damage aoe is not okay. Either make it a normal aoe spender, similar to epidemic, does static damage to enemies afflicted by sw:p, with another skill to fit the talent slot that applies vt and sw:p on a cooldown. Or make mind flay and mind sear be able to channel on the move.
VT application is also a problem in aoe, suggestion is to make void eruption apply vt and sw:p to all target near the impact, or the above, a talent similar to dark void in bfa, a cooldown that applies aoe vt sw:p.
Another petition to revert the Devouring plague nerf, main spender feels flimsy and somehow making it worse damage wise in 3 target scenario compared to searing nightmare. One of the reason the insanity cap problem is so insane is due to how weak the main spender is, there are more incentive to cast void bolt, void torrent, into another void bolt and cap on insanity for a few seconds rather then spending the insanity on devouring plague.
Some thoughts and feedback on the Frost and Unholy sets from myself and the rest of the DK community:
Frost 2pc:
Frost 4pc:
Unholy set:
Greetings,
while not really published by you yet, the following Tier bonuses were datamined for Elemental Shaman.
Fireheart (2-Set) While your Storm Elemental or Fire Elemental is active, your Lava Burst deals 20% additional damage and you gain Lava Surge every 8 sec.
Fireheart (4-Set) Casting Lava Burst extends the duration of your Storm Elemental and Fire Elemental by 1.5 sec. If your Storm Elemental or Fire Elemental is not active, spending Maelstrom has a 20% chance to reduce its remaining cooldown by 10 sec instead.
These bonuses are counter-intuitive for Storm Elemental. Empowering Lava Burst during a Cooldown that wants us to spam Lightning Bolt is strange. Right now the bonuses seem to want us to basically ignore the Storm Elementals specific Wind Gust buff (empowered Lightning Bolt) and stick to our basic priority list. Which means we’ll only cast Lightning Bolt if nothing else is going on.
About that 4-Set bonus: Is a Cooldown still a Cooldown if it reaches 100% uptime? We have a Conduit to extend the duration of our Elemental. We have a Covenant Legendary to reduce the CD of our Elemental. These already extend the uptime significantly. Now adding the first half of the 4-Set bonus will let us borderline 100% uptime. Making the second half worthless. It’s strange.
(No, 100% uptime of Storm Elemental is not as powerful as many probably think it would be.)
Yours sincerely,
Bloodmallet(EU)
I’ll just start a reply thread with my response here and shorten up Bloody’s post a bit.
First off, I LOVE the direction that this set seems to be taking. With letting us gain more indirect power gains from our elementals this could lead to more intricate fight planning and higher payoff for uptime. We always wanted our elementals to either be absolutely passive and ignorable, or incredibly powerful and impactful. For years we have had something sort of watered down and it fell somewhere in-between. The only change of pace in your rotation would occur if you were talented into Storm Elemental. So, I’m really liking the shift here.
Now I’d like to share a few opinions that are more ignorable or technical that wont really be worth noting until sims/testing have been done.
Something in us broke over the past few years as Storm Elemental incentivized us to only want to cast lightning bolt or chain lightning to build wind gust stacks. So any time our APL’s told us to stop casting any other spell after a certain amount of stacks ended up requiring us to dynamically shift our rotations based on possible stack count. Things like haste procs, bloodlust/heroism, or any active haste gains would make the first half of the duration feel a lot smoother.
So any time any of these haste sources got delayed inside of your Storm Elemental window we would often not even reach an amount of stacks to where wind gust would sort of feed off of itself. Ending a full duration Storm Elemental and only having 9 to 11 stacks would feel pretty terrible gameplay wise.
Why it’s worth mentioning:
With this current series of bonuses we are incentivized (with almost no downside) to cast Lava Burst either hard cast or through Lava Surge procs. This may feel awkward for the majority as from what was said above.
Why I love/hate it:
I love the idea of being able to cast our entire kit during Storm Elemental. Currently, while Fire Elemental is up we gain a faster flame shock tick rate and a longer duration. So our passive for Storm Elemental was only accessible if we mostly ignored parts of our kit and that lead to some increasingly degenerate rotations. These bonuses will bypass the need to ignore the kit and still benefit from both elementals equally.
Something in this current iteration of Icefury that has been a known issue is the massive amount of GCD (Global Cooldown) bloat required to play the rotation properly. By “properly” I mean utilizing the often paired talents Master of the Elements and Stormkeeper with the Legendary Windkeeper’s Lava Resurgence. You’re trying to empower as many of the charges from both talents as possible while not wasting surge procs from the legendary. There is a tight window to use all of your Icefury stacks, maelstrom, lava surges, and stormkeeper charges efficiently.
Why it’s worth mentioning:
As it stands, this set bonus granting extra lava surges every 8 seconds on top of the incredible amount of GCD bloat and with a very short window to spend charges. I don’t want to get into balancing, or talent fixes in this post because I could go on forever, but I do feel like this is worth mentioning when it comes to set bonus design. This could very well end the need for Icefury’s high mobility access on certain encounters and would allow us to explore new builds, but the population that love Icefury’s playstyle will definitely be impacted in some way.
Why I love/hate it:
I don’t particularly care if Icefury goes away for a while outside of niche scenarios due to the direction of the bonuses. There have been long drawn out periods of time where we are “stuck” with a certain build in all scenarios Single target or Cleave and this talent has often been the best performing.
Stormkeeper, on the other hand, would be nice to also be able to finally see niche play. Currently, Stormkeeper has so much versatility that it’s almost never wrong to pick. So, like Icefury, it has been the default over a few years. Everything about these bonuses point towards Ascendance getting a higher value than normal due to it getting benefits from both bonuses directly. This could incentivize new builds or even forbidden talent combinations.
Hopefully once the PTR gets up we can have some vendors setup like in BETA in order to actively test out each set bonus on pre-made characters in order to get more direct input for the testing population. I also would like to mention how cool it would be to have some sort of Torghast testing dummy (instanced of course) with access to anima powers so we could actively test certain secondary stat thresholds and the set bonus interactions inside of Torghast.
Thank you so much if you have read this far. I look forward to trying everything out and playing with all of our new toys.
TLDR: I love the bonuses so far and the direction blizzard is going with bringing sets back making them impactful. I hope to see more direct feedback for each class/specs set bonuses (especially elemental 
)
Is it just me or are all those armor sets pretty ugly. I would never transmog any of those.
Regarding the Restoration Shaman set bonus that has been data mined -
I will make a thread with a much more detailed post covering this set when the PTR forum is available, however I wanted to start giving feedback on this set as soon as possible.
Here is the 2p and 4p bonus as datamined-
2-set: Heal the Soul - Chain Heal critical hits reduce the remaining cooldown of Spirit Link Totem by 2 sec.
4-set: Heal the Soul - Chain Heal’s critical hit chance is increased by 30% on all targets it hits when cast on a target affected by your Riptide.
To put it bluntly both set bonuses need to be completely reworked. This is a bold claim and I want to go more in depth on a separate thread but I will keep the main issues concise for this reply:
Regarding the 2p set bonus- Attaching a random amount of cooldown reduction to a CD that requires a raid or party to stack will only lead to frustrating gameplay where the user will not be able to guarantee that Spirit Link Totem will be off cooldown in time for a scheduled damage event. Even if this set bonus was changed to be more static, there will still be raid fights where having any CDR on spirit link at all will still be useless (see Kel’Thuzad from the current raid tier).
Regarding the 4p set bonus- The requirement to heal a target with riptide already applied makes this set bonus both overly restrictive and counter-intuitive to core Restoration Shaman gameplay loops. If a party or raid is taking even amounts of damage, it is extremely likely that any players that have been healed by riptide will have higher than average health or be fully healed. Using any shaman direct healing spell (Chain heal or otherwise) on a raid/party member that has higher than average health plays directly counter to how deep healing mastery works. Chain heal in particular also suffers from a myriad of restrictions such as high mana cost, target must be in bounce range of others, and a long cast time. Adding the additional restriction of requiring the target to already have riptide on them seems unnecessary.
Thanks for reading, I would recommend any other concerned Resto Shamans to also provide feedback because it makes it more likely that the Devs will gives this set attention.
People remember it so fondly because it was sandwiched between WoD and BFA.
At least the mail armor doesn’t have candles on the shoulder pads. Kobold disappointment 
The amount of mental gymnastics people jump through to justify "Ion Bad’ is crazy; people can’t accept Legion is good or else that means their wack-a-doodle theory that Ion is the sole cause of WoW’s decline is debunked. Some people seem to cling to this theory even though WoW lost subs in MoP, whereas the WoW playerbase has grown every expansion since Ion took the helm).
Cool. But when are you going to get rid of the Authenticator restrictions on game play? Or actually start banning people for advertisements? I report the same people, every. Day. Multiple. Times. A. Day.
They were clearly able to authenticate. Yet there still here advertising. Meanwhile I can write ‘need lusts’ in my groups or , ‘can take breaks or dps’ because I don’t have a valid number according to blizzard. SMH. The state of the game is just sad. Returning was a big disappointmentment. I wish I only bought one month instead of three. What a waste of money.
I think the only one with Ion on the brain is you mate; I didn’t even mention him.
I am completely blown away at how bad these armor sets look. I’m a big fan of the Leigon tier sets, I loved the detail they had, I think they all look phenomenal. But these 9.2 tier sets look grossly uncreative.
My advice, take more time making the gear look more class specific……I don’t get paid to tell you how, that’s on you.
Sincerely Your Father, TheDotFather
I am kinda okay with the Demon Hunter Set. Yet part of me feels like this whole new area looks too much like the Asura starting zone in Guild Wars 2…