Post updated 1:42 AM
MMO Champion’s got the goods on the next level of tier 8 bonuses. Let’s check it out and do some quick analysis shall we?
Priest
- Priest T8 Healer 2P Bonus — Increases the critical heal chance of your Prayer of Healing by 10%.
- Priest T8 Healer 4P Bonus — Casting Power Word: Shield also
grants you 15 spell power for until cancelled.Increases spell power by 250 for 5 sec. (Source: Thottbot)
I’m not the most thrilled with the 2 piece. It’s not bad but it’s not that great, I don’t think. Although let’s not forget that Prayer of Healing is no longer restricted to the Priest’s current party. You definitely want to consider coupling this with the Prayer of Healing glyph. Having the extra crit chance means there’s a higher chance the glyph portion should tick for more.
Now the 4 piece is a real eyebrow raiser. I’m almost certain that’s a typo. More than likely, it’ll grant 150 spell power instead of 15. The second typo is towards the end. It sounds to me that either a) There’s going to be a duration on it. Probably 9 or 15 seconds. b) Until the Shield wears off of a target. This is a bonus that seems targeted towards Disc Priests. With talents like Soul Warding (Reduced cooldown of PW: Shield by 4 seconds and reduces the mana cost by 30%), I can see myself throwing shields around. It’d be mana inefficient, to be sure. But I’m chain casting it to maintain a spellpower boost. Of course, with the mana regeneration changes this might not be the most smartest idea. Anyway, I don’t think they’re quite finished with this set bonus yet guys.
Paladin
- Paladin T8 Holy 2P Bonus — Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock’s heal amount over 9 sec.
- Paladin T8 Holy 4P Bonus — Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%.
Any Paladins want to weigh in on these bonuses? How do these look to you guys?
Shaman
- Shaman T8 Restoration 2P Bonus — Reduces the cooldown on Riptide by 1 sec.
- Shaman T8 Restoration 4P Bonus — Reduces the cast time of Chain Heal by 0.2 sec.
That Shaman 4 piece makes me go wa wa wee wa. Assuming haste, could we possible see 2 second Chain Heals?
And for the Druids, don’t forget that Syd’s got a nice writeup for the Druid bonuses that were released earlier in the week.
The Priest 2pc bonus can be good, if you factor in targetable PoH and the decreased cast time ala Serendipity. Not great, but good. The 4pc bonus, assuming they fix their wording, is definitely geared towards disc priests. Overall very underwhelming.
Our shamans are drooling over the resto shaman bonuses. They loves them some haste.
OMG, that 4-piece bonus would be awesome. But, yeah. It looks like a huge typo. We’ll see what goes with this.
Honestly, they need separate sets for Disc and Holy priests. The style of healing is just too different, they each use a very different spellset. Like, the current T7/7.5 gear for healing has crappy bonuses and crappy stats for Disc Priests. I find myself wearing the shadow gear.
Re: Paladin stuff…
2 piece – I would say this is nice, but ultimately fairly useless. Even a crit holy shock only heals for 6-7k… 1k healing over 9 seconds is worse than the herbalism HOT or gift of the naaru. They would have to raise the HOT amount for this to be anything more than a nice-to-have.
4 piece – it’s always nice to have an extra 10%… it’s good, but it’s not going to change anything.
What do other paladins think?
My gut reaction on the paladin changes is that they’re good. Obviously they’re not a “ZOMG” kinda thing, but I think Blizzard has said that they don’t want them to be super must haves. Having a hot for holy shock is a nice thing, as I am often using them to hit people up in raid healing situations, and for main tank healing hots are nice for smoothing out the spikes.
Someone datamined a bit and found out those are not the correct bonuses for priest. For holy it’s +250 spellpower after casting a PWS for 5s: http://thottbot.com/test/s64911
for shadow it’s 240 haste after MB cast for 4s: http://thottbot.com/test/s64907
Pretty unimpressed on the paladin set bonuses; my full reaction is here, but in short:
– 2pc: the HoT is so tiny as to be irrelevant. With 2k spellpower that’s an average of about 930 healing, total, over 9 seconds. Woo. No, really.
– 4pc: better than the 2pc; if you get full use out of a SS it’s equivalent to about 1k damage absorption (assuming a baseline of 2k spellpower again). A nice bonus, to be sure, but hardly that impressive for a 4pc bonus.
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I’m not impressed, at all. It’s sad to see that we get a non functional 2P bonus on a spell we will not be spamming every minute. Compare that to the Shaman bonus who gets improvements accross his most commonly used spells. Crit is uncontrollable, the benefit from it limited and the spell on which it applies as well. The bright side of it being that I won’t have any reason not to upgrade to T9 😉
I’m curious what the 4P bonus will be, when the text is complete. It will have to make up for a lot to be worth the set.
All in all, the set is not ‘bad’. It’s just underwhelming.
I like the 4p-Bonus of the T8 😉 This makes our shields even better. On the other hand, you have to wear 4 out of 5 pieces. And that’s the point about which i am a little sceptic.
Because for a disc spirit means nothing and so i am looking for haste, crit and spellpower. there comes in my mind that i like the shadow set (at most the head-piece).
it’s a tricky question if i just get the set for the bonus or if i head for the stats of other items … (maybe i can get more than the 250 spellpower)
i have to do some sheets about that…
* Paladin T8 Holy 2P Bonus  Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock’s heal amount over 9 sec.
* Paladin T8 Holy 4P Bonus  Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%.
Well thats amazingly underwhelming. When Holy Shock crits you’ll be lucky to see it hit 8/9k, so thats a small HoT that will probably be completely useless.
The Sacred Shield one isn’t bad, but as of 3.1 we can only shield one target at a time anyways, that one seems more like a 2 Piece bonus for me rather than a decent 4 piece that makes taking the tier worthwhile.
Doubling the shield duration, increasing crit rate of a spell or lowering mana costs would be nice, as it stands I dont think I’m going to aim for either of those set bonuses.
The 4pc bonus imo – stinks. It forces your every 3rd spell, if they are all instant cast, be a PW:S to keep up the bonus. They need to make it closer to a 15s duration. I think a better idea would be to attach the bonus to either Penance or CoH – the 2 defining spells of priesting.
If its too overpowered, change the SP bonus to be something lower.
2-piece is lackluster to say the least. My biggest problem with the 4-piece (beyond being a holy priest and not shielding that much) is it prevents you from using the T7 2-piece, which is an AWESOME set bonus for either spec. The other downside is holy priests, if they have a Discipline priest in the raid, are actively discouraged from using shield, so this bonus will totally exclude them. I’ve never been terribly enthralled with collecting sets, Ulduar makes me less-so.
(My shammy and druid drool for those bonuses, though. Resto druid bonus is dead awesome, and resto shammy almost as good, though I wish there was a bit more haste and less crit.)
Shaman: 2pcT8 is very weak for a raiding shaman, we can glyph and lick riptide all we want, even -1s cooldown doesn’t change the fact that riptide is a decent spell if on the move (oh wait it is the only instant cast as well) but apart from that pretty useless. If a shaman can stand still more often than not chainheal is the better solution, or even a hastened LHW.
Riptide just isn’t really fun yet. Tidal waves buff is up most of the time anyways because we still use chainheal pretty often. The instant healing part is decent but still very small, and you’ll always have to consider that casting a hastened LHW will heal for much much more just 1 second later. And the synergy with chainheal is a good idea but in a raid situation it doesn’t really make sense to check who has a fading riptide hot to buff your chainheal, chainheal goes to the person with need of healing anyways.
4pcT8 will make other healers cry.
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I agree with Lil’. They need to separate disc and holy set, otherwise it’s quite impossible to make both holy and disc priests happy with their bonus set =/
I reallly like my 7.5 2p bonus, and I liked that 2p t8 bonus, so, lets see ^^
I am unimpressed with the Paladin set bonus to say the least.
Thanks for the update. The new 4p Priest set looks interesting. A bit weird… but fun. I can imagine this will lead to interesting theorycrafts and spell cycles to maximize the power from it. Still… 5 seconds isn’t much.
In short: it looks like fun.
i know we’re all healers here, but that 4pT8 for Chicken form Druids seems very OP, depending on how often it procs.
Random instant cast starfires as long as you manage to keep your insect swarm up.
And Shaman get -0.2s off chain heal? does that mean they are promoting chain heal spam? Right now our shaman healers have 90%+ chain heals.
I’m not too amazed by the 4 item set bonus tbh… (for priests) It’s decent but not WOW. What’s the meaning by this? Keep a shield on all the magic dps/healers? =/
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Reading thottbot now, you’ll find the +15 spell power bonus on the 4p bonus for priests =/
http://thottbot.com/test/?set=833
I really hope that there’s a mistake there. 15 is almost nothing ><
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I think the Paladin 2 piece is nice. Added little hot, not much, maybe a little over 1000 extra healing.
But I think the 4 piece is a slap in the face after the Sacred Shield nerf. It might have been a little something something were shield staying as is — I currently drop SS on raid members in advance of AOEs and this bonus would be nice for that job. But now this is essentially essentially its an extra, what 250 damage mitigated OVER 30 SECONDS on ONE TARGET? Seriously? Whoopty frigging do. This must have been designed pre-nerf, and tuned when they were worried about how to fix how awesome SS was. Well, they fixed SS for good, now they gotta go
I think the T8 2 together with the T7 2 piece might be the best combination. 10% more Shock crit, and a 15% hot on crits. Nice.
It looks like they REALLY want us to use PoH in 3.1.
1) It can be cast on any target
2) The mana cost is reduced
3) Serendipity decreases the cast time
4) There’s a 2 PC set bonus to increase the crit%
Granted I use PoH somewhat today, when the situation warrants it, but with the increased output of CoH and the new mana regen changes, is it really going to be efficient? I’m not a math major, so I’m not going to spout a bunch of equations to prove a point, but even with the reduced mana cost I don’t know if PoH is going to be something that will be in my top 3 spells cast in a given fight. If it’s not in my top 3, do I really care about having a 10% crit bonus vs. better stats on another piece of non-tier gear. It would appear as though Blizzard thinks it will be something we’ll be casting quite a bit… which is a little cause for concern as I don’t think I’ll last too long in a fight if PoH is a top 3 spell for me.
The four piece bonus is just… meh. The 250sp is nice, but I don’t cast a ton of PW:S right now to be really excited. It honestly sounds like a Disc bonus rather than a holy one.
Ever the optimist…If these are the holy bonuses, I will have a lot more flexibility with my gear, as I won’t worry about keeping 2 pieces of tier gear (except in my Ark Inventory “Collectible” category).
Ever the skeptic… Maybe Blizz just throws stuff in for Hex miners to post, so people will QQ and they can laugh int heir morning meetings the next day.
Paladin T8 Holy 2P Bonus  Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock’s heal amount over 9 sec.
* Paladin T8 Holy 4P Bonus  Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%.
my reaction: tons of emo all caps yelling in guild chat for about 15 minutes. these bonuses are not only week, they are worthless.
2pb: in most raiding situation paladins are called on to MT heal. if we do our job and keep our tank capped there isn’t much need for a shock. we can help with a really low raider but that’s about it. basically this bonus fails for 3 reasons: 1) we don’t use holy shock often enough while raiding (which in and of itself doesn’t mean a bonus can’t be built around the spell- 10% extra crit on T7 was solid) 2) the bonus requires us to actually crit with our shock (once again, in and of itself not terrible but it does take a spell we rarely use and then cuts the times the bonus will be procced by about 50%) By now you would expect an amazing bonus per proc but it ends up being: 3) a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock’s heal amount over 9 sec? really? a HoT that will tick for ~1k hp over 9 seconds? sure it’s “better than nothing” but when main tanks are getting hit for 25k-30k per hit in ulduar this is almost and ends up virtually being nothing for pvp. however, if you are big into pvp this bonus isn’t too bad. if you have enough resil from offset pieces it might not be a bad idea to throw this on for arena b/c you pretty much shock on cd.
4pb: Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%. the amount your shield absorbed is 500 dmg + 75% of current spell power. raid buffed i’m at about 2400. this means my shield will absorb ~2300 dmg. 10% of this is an additional 230 absorbed every 6 seconds. divide 230 by 6 and i’m mitigating a whopping 39 damage per second or 2340 dmg per minute. given the fact that blizz made it so we can only shield 1 target at a time, it makes sense that they would make our shield better, but this is not an improvement.
long story short: if blizz doesn’t retool the set bonuses there is no reason a pally should bother about getting T8 gear. pick out what the gear that is best in slot and hold on to your 4pb from from T7 as long as possible. also i haven’t looked through all the gear but i did notice a several of the T8 pieces have haste and mp5. this is incredibly fail itemization and i’m sure there is better out there. find the pieces that have highest int/crit/haste.
I actually don’t mind the 2P set bonus for Holy Priests…I use PoH a LOT, and will be using a lot more (we rarely have 5 Holy Priests in the raid :p). However…the 4P bonus? /gag and /retch: USELESS for Holy Priests. If you’re casting that many PW:S, then it’s time to respec to Disc. Sorry, but throwing out our wimpy shield is NOT the best use of mana.
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Have to agree with the lackluster nature of the pally bonuses. Currently the main use of holy shock is to proc infusion of light for a 0.6 sec Holy Light bomb (which the current 2p T7 bonus – 10% crit – supports). With the changes to infusion of light I see holy shock being used less and less. Its hard to see any real benefit in a proc based, weak HoT.
I am also highly unethused by Sacred Shield generally, given that it is a weak single target, proc-based shield. I just can’t see the mitigation being worth it. Currently, the 4p T7 bonus is equivalent to (if you assume a very conservative 2 holy light casts per 5 secs) more than 150mp5. Again, its a massive step back.
I am not too concerned – I honestly can’t see the current pally bonuses going live as they are. I do think that there may be a lot more competition for shammy mail come 3.1 though.
be nice if you actually gave the set names so people could look them up directly from here & not have to look around on other sites. directing traffic AWAY from your page isn’t usually the idea.
@jeez: At the time this post was published, there were no set names and no links.