What is Blizzard Smoking?

In my last post I talked a little about the new set bonuses. This was my reaction to the first 4T9 set bonus of 5% Crit chance to Starfire.

I'm sure my first reaction was the same as most of yours when I saw the 4T9 set bonus. "That sucks." It's obviously worse then 4T7, and there is no way it can compete with 2T8 with the change to Eclipse. If this goes live no moonkin is going to wear 4 pieces of T9 gear.

My second reaction was "This has to be a place holder." Its not uncommon for Blizzard to put old information in tooltips in early versions of the patches. You may remember that early versions
of the Idol of the Crying Wind had the same tooltip as as our current SF idol. Since the 4T8 set bonus is so obviously underpowered and an exact copy of the 4T6 set bonus, the 4T9 set bonus has to be a place holder.

Well, as you probably already know, the speculation that the original 4T9 was a place holder was correct. However, the new set bonus is equally lame.

Balance
4 piece - Increases the critical strike chance of your Starfire and Wrath spells by 3%.

What the heck is Blizzard smoking?

Seriously! Who thought this set bonus was a good idea?

This is just wrong in so many ways, I'm having a really hard time knowing where to begin.

I don't assume that creating set bonuses is easy. It's got to be difficult to continually come up with new ideas, that have a significant impact, but that is similar in strength to other tier bonuses. However, this set bonus is just lazy and stupid. Lets look at the T7 set bonus for comparison.

4T7 - Your Wrath and Starfire spells gain an additional 5% critical strike chance.

I don't really have a problem with Blizzard recycling an old set bonus. We all loved 4T7, but what sense does it make to put a nerfed 4T7 set bonus on a higher level of gear?

Also, I've never used a lore argument before, but what sense does this make from a lore perspective. Are you telling me that the Ardent Crusade can't equal the craftsmanship of the Kirin Tor, let alone improve on it? If this goes through it will make the Ardent Crusade look like a bunch of wimps that want to play with sticks by a cliff.

My guess is that Blizzard thinks that T7 as a whole was too good for the ilevel, and that with T8 and T9 they have been trying to scale it back. I will also say that blizzard is somewhat shackled by the quality of 2T8. Assuming that it is not nerfed, that is a hard set bonus to beat with the changes to Eclipse.

I think I understand the difficulties of the situation, but I also think they are making more mistakes in the ways they are trying to deal with these issues. If you make an early set bonus two powerful, the best way to handle it is to hold line or maybe slight nerfs. In this case 3% crit to Wrath and Starfire is a HUGE nerf. I haven't done the math yet, but I doubt you will people wearing 4T9. If they do it will only be with the highest iLevel gear, because that is the only level at which the stats have an opportunity to over come the set bonus nerf.

One other suggestion before I move on to another topic. If our going to copy a set bonus, take another look at 4T5. Every one loved that set bonus. If you expanded it to have a relationship with IS and Wrath also, I think everyone would be happy.

Please Give Feedback:
Convenently Ghostcrawler has given us a place to comment on the set bonuses. I strongly encourgage everyone to go to this thread and express your feelings on the new set bonuses. I assume that most (if not all of you) will be saying something negative about the 4T9 set bonus. That is great and I agree with you. However, I want to remind everyone to be polite, constructive, and possibly say something nice about the 2T9 set bonus.

Tier 9 Costs:
It looks like they are changing the way you build your tier set. Currently tokens drop off of specific bosses for a specific armor slot. (ie Yogg 25 drops the shoulder token). Well, it looks like they are changing this in a couple of ways. The first change is that the first two levels of Tier 9 gear will be completely purchasable using Emblems of Triumph, and there doesn't appear to be another way to pick up this gear. The top level of tier gear will still use the token system, but the tokens won't be tied to a specific armor slot. It looks like they will still be tied to a set of classes.

I have a couple of reactions to this. On the positive side the token change is a good idea. It will make the tokens more useful, and few of them will go to off specs or shards soon after the patch.

On the flip side, I have a big problem with the lower to levels of tier sets being purchase able with emblems. First of all whats the incentive to buy the 232 iLevel tier set when the 245 ilevel tier set costs just 50% more? When you get enough Emblems to buy the first level of gear you will have a choice. To I spend all the badges now and wait 3 weeks to upgrade, or do I wait a week and get even better gear?

Obviously we don't complete know how the system will work, but there are a lot of potential problems. If the Tier tokens are to easy to get, the emblem tiers will be almost completely ignored. If the tier tokes are to hard to get then it will take a really long time to build a set. Finally as I said above there is no real incentive to go for the 232 iLevel set.

I think they need to scale it back to a little more like the current system. Have the top level tokes drop off of 25 man raids. Have a lower level token drop off of 10 man raids, and I think it would be a great idea to have the lowest level tier be purchasable with emblems. That way all three levels have some level of desirability.

Other Changes:

• You may have seen this quite from Neth:
  

  We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance.

  This is very interesting in a lot of ways, and I think it will cause a lot of headaches for who ever is in charge of designing it. For instance, what do you do about quests? If you level to 80 as Alliance, do you have all the horde specific quests still available? Also what about reputations? If I'm exalted with all of the Alliance reputations do I be come exalted with all of the Horde reputations? What if I'm only exalted with half of them?
  
  See, it poses a lot of questions but it will also give Blizzard some new tools. I think the real reason Blizzard is doing it is to try and balance the factions on some servers. Take my server for instance. We are very Alliance dominated. I think once this service becomes available Blizzard will open up free faction transfers to try and get some of the guilds to switch over. This may be particularly useful on a sever like EU-Magtherdon that is completely Horde dominated.
  
  
• Expendable Raid Lockouts: Blizzard hasn't announced this yet but it is popping up on the PTR. With this new feature you will be able to extend your raid lock out for another weeks. Some of you may be wondering why anyone would want to do this, but I think it is a big boost for guilds with lighter raid schedules.
  
  Let me use my own guild as an example as to why this as big bonus. My 10man group is currently working on Mimiron Hard mode and will focus on General and Yogg after that. Last night we had several sub 5 percent wipes, and are very close to killing him. The problem is that because the instance resets tonight we have to fight through 4 bosses just to attempt him again. If we get him down quickly then we have to kill another 3 bosses to work on General. The gear isn't a big concern for us, so we probably wouldn't mind extending last weeks raid ID. What we would lose in gear we would be more than made up for in time.
  
  This obviously won't matter to the guilds with really high activity, but for guilds like my that can't play that much this will help.