Patch 4.3: Tier 13 set bonus changes announced
by Anne Stickney 
Sep 29th 2011 at 5:30PM
Not entirely happy with the upcoming set bonuses for tier 13 in patch 4.3? It's all right, they're still in the process of being tweaked. Community Manager Zarhym just posted some changes that will be going into affect for both two-piece and four-piece T13 set bonuses for the druid, hunter, mage, paladin, priest, shaman, warlock and warrior classes.
- For feral druids, Pulverize now also grants your Bear Form Mangle critical strikes a 100% chance to trigger Savage Defense.
- For shadow priests, Shadow Word: Death deals an additional 55% damage, but it also reduces the damage you take from your own SW:D when the target fails to die by 95%.
- For DPS warriors, your Raging Blow and Mortal Strike abilities have a 13% chance to apply the Colossus Smash effect on your target for 6 seconds.
Follow after the break for the full list of changes.
Druid
Mage
Paladin
Priest
Warlock
Warrior
- Balance, 4P -- Reduces the cooldown of Starsurge by 5 sec.
- Feral, 2P -- Pulverize now also grants your Mangle (Bear) critical strikes a 100% chance to trigger Savage Defense, and your Blood in the Water talent now causes Ferocious Bite to refresh the duration of your Rip on targets with 60% or less health.
- Feral, 4P -- Frenzied Regeneration also affects all raid and party members. This effect cannot be triggered if you have been in Bear Form for less than 15 sec. In addition, your Stampede talent now grants two charges after using Feral Charge (Cat).
- 4P -- Your Arcane Shot ability has a chance to grant 30% haste to you and your pet for 10 sec.
Mage
- 2P -- Your Arcane Blast has a 100% chance, and your Fireball and Frostbolt spells have a 50% chance to grant Stolen Time, increasing your haste rating by 50 for 30 sec and stacking up to 10 times. When Arcane Power, Combustion, or Icy Veins expires, all stacks of Stolen Time are lost.
- 4P -- Each stack of Stolen Time also reduces the cooldown of Arcane Power by 7 sec, Combustion by 4 sec, and Icy Veins by 6 sec.
Paladin
- Protection, 2P -- Your Judgement ability now also grants a physical absorb shield equal to 25% of the damage it dealt.
- Retribution, 2P -- Your Judgement ability now also generates 1 Holy Power.
Priest
- Healer, 2P -- After using Power Infusion or Divine Hymn, the mana cost of your healing spells is reduced by 25% for [10|23] sec. (10 sec for Discipline, 23 for non-Discipline.)
- Healer, 4P -- Your Power Word: Shield has a 10% chance to absorb 100% additional damage and increase the mana granted by Rapture by 100%, and the duration of your Holy Word abilities is increased by 20%.
- Shadow, 2P -- Shadow Word: Death deals an additional 55% damage, and reduces the damage you take from your own Shadow Word: Death when the target fails to die by 95%.
- Elemental, 2P -- Elemental Mastery also grants you 2000 mastery rating 15 sec.
- Elemental, 4P -- Each time Elemental Overload triggers, you gain 250 haste rating for 4 sec, stacking up to 3 times.
Warlock
- 2P -- The duration of your Doomguard and Infernal summons is increased by [20|30] sec and the cooldown of of those spells is reduced by 4 min. (20 for Demonology, 30 for non-Demonology.)
- 4P -- Soulburn grants a 10% increase to your spell power for 10 sec, and Soul Fire cast with Soulburn active now grants a Soul Shard.
Warrior
- DPS, 4P -- Your Raging Blow and Mortal Strike abilities have a 13% chance to apply the Colossus Smash effect on your target for 6 sec.
Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!
Filed under: News items, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
tobiasmoller Sep 29th 2011 5:34PM
Paladin 2p !! AT LAST !!!!!!
Ixistant Sep 29th 2011 6:06PM
It's... it's just so beautiful!
='D
Thereone Sep 29th 2011 7:56PM
The Ret 2p bonus? Awesome. More HP finishers make me happy. The prot 2p bonus? Nerfed from 30% to 25%. It's not a very hard-hitting spell to begin with, even glyphed. Still, as someone posted before: free mitigation is free.
Shyster Sep 30th 2011 11:52AM
I had a substantial "BOOOOYAAAAH" moment when i read that, good stuff.
InvincibleGod Sep 29th 2011 5:34PM
So warlocks will spam soulburn -> soulfire -> (soul shard returned) -> repeat?
Malyse Sep 29th 2011 5:39PM
Not so much... there's a cooldown on soulburn to begin with.
Carune Sep 29th 2011 5:44PM
Every 45 seconds or so for destro and demo since it will be the only way to regen soul shards without drain soul or soul burn for those specs.
Daedalus Sep 29th 2011 5:56PM
I mostly play affliction, but if I'm not mistaken, destro and demo would be doing soulburn-> soulfire whenever soulburn was off cooldown anyway; an instant soulfire is almost always a dps-upper.
This means they won't run out of soul shards a minute and a half in; personally, I like it.
Also glad they reversed the durations for demo/non demo on the 2 piece. I'd honestly thought it was a typo before, as it didn't seem to make sense giving demo a bigger bonus to the guardians when they already got one through talents.
Revynn Sep 29th 2011 6:05PM
Yes, in that we can freely use SB:SF to trigger the Spell Power increase without worrying about running out of shards.
No, in that there's still a 45 second CD on SB and SF's DPET still sucks outside of Decimation so it's not like we'll be spamming SF endlessly.
It does, however, make for a nice little mini CD to stack with Pots and Bloodlust, something Affliction and Destro needed badly. Demo has plenty of CD's to manage, but DS+Meta+Pot+SD:SF+Bloodlust = ZOMG
Just remember to hit SB:SF -after- you pot to maximize your gains.
radicaster Oct 3rd 2011 7:53PM
I don't like the reversing myself, I would rather see equal durations from the set bonus, not depending on the spec you use, as demonologys talents "only" give a 20 second buff, and with the set bonus that diminishes to a 10 second advantage for demonology, who spend talent points for it, and the spec is partly balanced around.
But of course, as it's still early PTR we don't know how/if/when warlocks will change, and how this will play with possible changes
Shirubia Sep 29th 2011 5:36PM
While the change on the 2P bonus for the mage set was REALLY welcome... I still remain unconvinced about the 4P one... looks kinda lackluster =/
Argojax Sep 30th 2011 10:03AM
Well 2p means stacking haste buff that maxes out at 500. I don't see why they are tryingto get us to cast arcane power more. It's like 2p gives us the ability to pump out spells faster, 4p allows us to make them gradually weaker. Not to mention given our limited mana return options, I don't see it working at all. Now maybe if they attached it to our improved mana gem buff expiration and the 4p decreased our gem cooldown...
ugoticedbro Sep 29th 2011 6:02PM
That's a little better for warriors!
Natsumi Sep 30th 2011 9:27AM
Not sure how much better it is for Arms, Sudden Death keeps CS up quite often, but it is definitely a big increase over what we had previously :p
Ilmyrn Sep 29th 2011 5:39PM
I like these changes a LOT more. Less RNG for Ret is always nice. I'm still not terribly wild about Ret's four piece; we're already pretty bursty, but I can live with it.
Turtell Sep 29th 2011 5:41PM
Thank god at least one of the DPS warrior bonuses is decent now.
rojslade Sep 29th 2011 5:45PM
Arms gonna have fun with a near 100% armor pen uptime. They already have a talent that has a chance to refresh the cooldown on normal Colossus Smash, this is just the frosting on face-smashin cake.
Fury on the other hand might not see too much benefit. From personal SMF experience, Raging Blow is one of the least used moves in my rotation.
Dont get me wrong, I welcome this bonus way more than the previous bonus. I just would like to see Bloodthirst applying this rather than Raging Blow.
loop_not_defined Sep 29th 2011 6:06PM
Yeah, Raging Blow isn't exactly Fury's equivalent to Mortal Strike. Definitely doesn't help SMF as much as TG, too.
Talelon Sep 30th 2011 3:10AM
well if you're not using it on cd seconds then something's wrong.
personally I try to open with it so my starting rotation will hit harder, sometimes I remember, sometimes I forget.
at least with this 4pc both SMF and TG should be able to have some really decent up time on the CS debuff, now if only they fixed the 2pc
loop_not_defined Sep 30th 2011 7:11AM
You use Raging Blow on cooldown with TG, but it's a lower priority for SMF.