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The T8 gear is out on the PTR. For both 10 man and 25 man. There's also a new idol of terror that drops from General Vezax (the 3rd to last boss in Ulduar) in 25-man only:
Druid T8 Feral Relic -- Your Mangle ability has a chance to grant 153 agility for 12 sec.
That's just a direct upgrade from Idol of Terror, and that's awesome...but it's a drop? And only from 25 man? Ugh. Maybe it'll be BoE or something. Yeah, right.
Onto the T8. The set bonuses are at best very lackluster for tanking. Clearcasting procs on bleeds are not particularly important for bears given bear rage generation normally. And 8 seconds of extra time on a 5-minute cooldown is not particularly interesting either, especially given how you would normally use 30% extra health. 30% extra health for 28 seconds sounds like a lot - but when do you actually use it for that whole length of time? It's very disappointing.
What isn't disappointing is the actual overall values of the T8 gear compared to the T7. In what's going to be screamed about for a bit, the T8 bonus is best for cats but the gear itself is likely much better for bears overall because of stat allocation. Here's the comparison between the full T7 and full T8:
Agi: +93
Stam: +64
Armor:+50
AP: -22
crit: +11
hit: +49
haste: +46
armor pen: +15
Expertise: -34
Yeah, 93 extra agi for the whole set, not counting socket bonuses (which in two cases are on red sockets and are a total of +14 agi too). That's a big gain in overall value. AP has been itemized so much less that it's actually worse than T7. Small amounts of crit and armor pen. A bit more haste than I'd like. And less expertise, which is probably good given how easy it is to get expertise.
Just great stats for bears.
For cats? Not so much. The expertise loss is welcome, but not much crit doesn't help. Hit is nice to see, and more agi over stam is good - but my suspicion is that it'll be easier to get those non-set pieces for cats and get better stats.
If of course the set bonuses could be ignored, which they really can't. Sigh.
What's interesting is that the new T8.10 set follows this pattern almost more (compared to T7.25)
agi: 58
stam: 25
armor: 24
AP: -68
crit: -9
hit: 45
haste: 39
armor pen: 8
expertise: -38
Again, a huge bump in Agi compared to all other stats, way less AP, less expertise, less crit, and a good chunk of hit. The T8.10 chest is going to be quite good just for that big hit bonus, as will the T8.25 chest.
What's really interesting to me is comparing T8.10 to T8.25:
agi: 35
stam: 39
armor: 26
AP: 46
crit: 20
hit:4
haste:7
armor pen: 7
expertise:4
That's right - the item budget is almost entirely devoted to stat boosts. That's one reason that the T8.25 is going to be so good for bears from a gear perspective - the stats on them are insane.
As always, I'll do a more exhaustive analysis of what to look for when we get better ideas of loot tables and whatnot.
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