In light of the paradigm shift where neither Tailoring or Leatherworking creates Bind on Pickup epics, here’s help deciding between the additional benefits of these two production tradeskills.
PTR Report: 4-Piece Set Bonus Changes
Published on February 15, 2008 by Phaelia 
Blue, Patches, PvP 
9 Comments
Update at 2008-02-15 2:01 CST: Community Manager Nethaera has posted concerning the set bonus change for both Feral and Restoration:
The Restoration 4-piece Gladiator set bonus has been changed in the next PTR build. It is now the old Stormrage set-bonus, which is -0.2 seconds off Regrowth. In addition, the speed bonus to Cheetah will remain on the Feral 4-piece Gladiator set bonus.
Oh well, at least I can remember using Regrowth in Arenas.
World of Raids is reporting as yet unannounced changes to all three Druid 4-piece set bonuses from Arena Gear from its current value:
4: Increases your movement speed by 15% while in Bear, Cat, or Travel Form. Only active outdoors.
to three distinct set bonuses for the Balance, Feral, and Restoration sets. The new 4-piece bonuses being reported from the PTR are:
- Balance: Your Wrath casts have a chance to reduce the cast time on your next Starfire by 1.5 sec.
- Feral:
Increases your movement speed by 15% while in Bear Form or Cat Form. Only active outdoors.The Feral 4-piece set bonus will remain as listed above. - Restoration: The casting time on your Healing Touch spell is reduced by 0.25 sec.
The change to the Restoration set bonus is devastating. As Runycat stated on an earlier post, “I can’t remember the last time I ever cast Healing Touch in an Arena match.” I cast them all the time in Arenas … but only in conjunction with Nature’s Swiftness! This one single change could topple Druids in 2v2 Arenas, while nothing is being done to help improve their standings in 5v5. The Feral change is plainly a nerf and an unnecessary one at that; admittedly, I am not very familiar with Feral Arena PvP, but I don’t think they use Travel Form very often. The Balance change (either one) is the only one I would consider positive, especially the occassional reduction on cast time for Starfire. That might actually be a nice PvE bonus (so too might the HT bonus, at least for Dreamstate healers).
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The wowhead one is actually older than the 15% movement speed bonus and hopelessly out of date. Once upon a time (at the start of S2) the bonus from season 1 was different from season 2 (so you could get 2 +35 resielence bonuses (boni?) and upon hearing outcries blizzard made all the different season pieces stack for the same set bonus (made to be 15% movement for all 3 sets).
The feral change is not a devastating one, but in all honesty it was never much good anyway. Feral specced, your cat already has a 20(30?) percent speed increase and I’m fairly cure the effect doesn’t stack, and as a bear you’re generally not chasing opponents around (if you are, you just feral charge). Travel form doesn’t see much use as far as I know, so, whereas this is a feral nerf as much as it’s a resto nerf, the nerf isn’t going to be particularly important to us.
Twalkins, the Arena 4piece speedincrease stack with Feral Swiftness, it’s damn nice to be able to Prowl at 105% speed.
And yes, BIG nerf to resto arena set. I’m a unhappy arena healer now.
For a feral travel form is the most mana efficient way to SS out of a snare/poly. The Feral/Resto set bonus pales in comparison with the Balance.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4665558770&pageNo=14&sid=1#276
It’s been changed.
@Bovisrex: Interesting! Thanks for clearing that up. I’ve edited the original post so there isn’t any risk of confusion.
@Twalkins: I think we’ll probably see more Druids who already dip into Feral picking up Feline Swiftness after this change. I still don’t understand why OUR speed increase doesn’t work indoors but Rogues’ do! I swear if I ever play another MMO, I will at all costs avoid a class with ANY environmentally-specific abilities. >.< @Nicksti: Good point. But if a Feral is using Travel Form to break a snare, wouldn’t she just shift right back to her combat form?
@Crythia: Yeah yeah yeah. It was edited before you posted.
Go raid ZA or something! And get Auryann to come, too!
Having reached the 15% bonus yesterday, I have to say it makes an impact in my playingstyle. I see, that nerfs had to be done, but… this is critical, seriously. I think this might change when I reach a higher resielience rating, but at the moment, without 15% cheater-form I would be screwed!
@Kaymoo
I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m certainly not the best resto PvP druid, but I can’t imagine that the loss of the 15% movement speed will be critical. As the veritable swing-man of my guild (feral gone resto gone feral gone resto), I never actually had the four piece bonus–I’m stuck with 3 Merciless Dragonhide pieces and three Vengeful Kodohide pieces. The bad situations I’ve gotten myself into during arena matches hardly would have been fixed with a quick LOL and a hop into travel form. Regardless though, I see this as less of a “nerf” and more of adding insult to injury. We lose something that was, at least, occasionally useful, and gain a healing “bonus” instead–one that we never use. While I was initially perplexed as to why any half-way intelligent designer at Blizzard would make that change, the message is more than clear: we don’t want this class to have any more advantages and, more importantly, we don’t care what they think about it.
I’d rather have the Gladiator bonus, to be honest. Playing a druid in arena isn’t just binding every key to Lifebloom and rolling your face on the keyboard–there are so many tips, tricks, and oh shits! that I’d argue it’s hard to play a druid “well”. Harder than say an MS Warrior (I speak from experience; it’s two macros, spamstring, and keeping mortal strike on anything that moves). I’d also argue that anymore druid “nerfs” to PvP viability will, eventually, create a new breed of arena druids who are incredibly creative and resilient. Blizzard made us Swiss Army Knives; now they’ve got to deal with it.
@Phaelia
This is sort of a reply to your comment in the other thread, but yeah, I honestly rely more on MMO Champion rather than World of Raids–my boyfriend (an avid WoW theorycrafter) actually pointed it out to me first. And yes, I see that you’ve seen the skeleton outline of my blog, and it’s coming along slowly (as I plod through help pages and pick my friends’ brains for help). My goal was to have it content ready by the end of the weekend, but now I think I’m shooting more toward the end of next week >_>.
@Runycat: For the Arena Druids who really threw themselves into it wholeheartedly, carefully selecting their partner and playing hours and hours to reach 2000+ ratings, the speed bonus was really huge. I know the week that I got mine, we probably jumped 100 points (we were quite up and down, however; I don’t make the pretense that I was one of the aforementioned uber-Druids). It’s going to have a tremendous impact on the Druids who were at the top since their strategy involves a lot of running around.
I also prefer MMO-Champion; they seem more professional. But I’m not shy about checking both for information!
I can’t wait to see the ready-for-writing product (they’re never “finished”) for your blog.