Are Blizzard’s ideas for cool set bonuses running out? That’s what many think about the new tier sets in World of Warcraft.
Slowly but surely, the first season of The War Within in World of Warcraft is coming to an end. It will still be a few weeks before the next major patch is released, but you can already test the Update 11.1 Undermine(d) on the PTR. This also gives you a look at the new tier sets. However, the opinions from the community are somewhat mixed. Many feel that Blizzard has become “lazy” with the tier sets.
Currently, WoW fans are still hanging out on Siren’s Isle:
What is the problem with the tier sets? The central point of the new raid “The Liberation of Lorenhall” is a casino of the goblin cartels. Accordingly, the tier sets also have some effects that are thematically related to chance and gambling. But there is another commonality: The 2-piece set bonus for all specializations within a role is very similar. This means that there are basically only 4 different 2-piece bonuses (one each for tank, healer, ranged DPS, and melee DPS).
As an example of the similarity, here are the bonuses for fire mages, shadow priests, and marksmanship hunters:
- (Fire Mage) Your damage spells have a chance to hit the jackpot, reducing the cooldown of Incinerate by 3 seconds. Casting Incinerate guarantees a jackpot with 200% effectiveness.
- (Shadow Priest) Your damage spells have a chance to hit the jackpot, firing a Void Bolt at an enemy with 200% effectiveness instantly. Casting Dark Ascension or Void Eruption always triggers a jackpot.
- (Marksmanship Hunter) Your damage spells have a chance to hit the jackpot, increasing the damage of your automatic attacks by 600% for 10 seconds and reducing the time between automatic attacks by 2 seconds. Casting Aimed Shot always triggers a jackpot.
Note that this is still information from the PTR and details may change before the release.
Why is Blizzard doing this? Blizzard wants to create sets that fit thematically well together and convey the same feeling to everyone. Therefore, there are various key terms in the set bonuses (such as “Jackpot!” for ranged characters or “Winning Streak” for melee characters).
The fact that all set bonuses seem a bit “boring” also makes it easier to play secondary characters, as the underlying mechanics behind the key terms are always very similar.
What other criticisms are there? Another highly discussed point of criticism can be seen in the set bonuses for tanks. While healers and DPS can generally cope well with random triggers of their set bonuses, this is often a problem for tanks. For tanks, the bonus is only randomly triggered – with a fixed chance when they take damage. This is impractical.
This is because strong defensive abilities are needed at very specific moments – and not just “randomly” at any time. This significantly diminishes the benefit for tanks, who are correspondingly disappointed and hope that improvements will be made.
Whether Blizzard really had “no ideas” left or simply wanted to try something that thematically fits well together and therefore runs similarly for all classes, everyone must ultimately decide for themselves. How do you like the idea of “shared” set bonuses? A cool, thematically fitting thing or just plain lazy?
However, the new raid has many solutions for all the problems that always exist in raids!
