A Look at Tier 10 Set Bonuses for Bears

Fairly short post today...

Thanks to the kind folks over at the Daily Druid for the current T10 set bonuses from the PTR...  For reference here are all of them:

Druid T10 Restoration

• 2P Bonus – The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
• 4P Bonus (Rejuvenation) – Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.

Druid T10 Balance

• 2P Bonus – When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 10% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 sec.
• 4P Bonus – Reduces the cooldown on your Eclipse talent by 6 seconds.

Druid T10 Feral

• 2P Bonus – Your Swipe (Bear) and Lacerate abilities deal 20% additional damage and the cost of your Rip ability is reduced by 10 energy.
• 4P Bonus – Your Enrage ability no longer decreases your armor and instead decreases all damage taken by 12%, and the periodic damage done by your Rake ability can now be a critical strike.

For now I'll just take a gander at the feral bonuses from a bear perspective.  Later I'll throw some thoughts out there on the Restoration set.

The 2-piece bonus seems pretty solid.  The damage bonus to Swipe should enable us to have an easier time maintaining AOE aggro.  Adding damage to Lacerate helps a little bit on single-target aggro.  We shouldn't have had problems already, but this will help ease any tensions if we have to stop our threat rotation (i.e. if someone pulls a secondary mob off us....)  All in all, I think it's a nice little 2-piece bonus, but nothing to write home about.

When I first saw the 4-piece bonus, my eyes nearly popped out of my head.  After some further thought, I'm not quite as stoked about it as I was, but I'm still excited.  The first half is rather innocuous - removing the armor penalty from Enrage just means we can use it without fear of overwhelming our healers.  But since we shouldn't be having rage issues anyway (unless our silly healers are shielding us too often), that's not really all that big a deal, in my eyes.  The second part, however, means that we'll use enrage pretty much as often as we can.  Free rage plus damage reduction... where can I sign up?

It makes Enrage useful in a number of ways that it couldn't dream about before.  If I get to the point that I have this bonus, Enrage will get added to the list of abilities macro'd into my emergency button.  Rather than being a rage generator with a drawback, it's an actively good ability with rage generation tacked on for free.  I already use Barkskin at semi-regular intervals during most fights.  While not quite as effective as Barkskin, the new and improved Enrage will give you a similar effect.  I will probably be using Enrage as often as possible during fights, and instead of stacking Barkskin on top of it, I will use Barkskin once the Enrage bonus has ended and it's on cooldown.

I like it, and I think it's a solid bonus to look at as an upgrade from the T9 sets.

Tune in soon for some thoughts on fandom by the WoW developers, and my primer for the OTHER role I play as a druid - tree!