No Tier Sets in Battle for Azeroth

In a rather shocking move, Blizzard has announced that there will be no tier sets - to be clear, no sets gained in the expansion's major raids that have 2- and 4-piece set bonuses designed for specific classes.

This has been a feature of the game since vanilla, and has been a rather defining trait of how raiding works in WoW. So what does it all mean?

First off: we don't have all the details yet. Philosophically, the developers said that the decision was made primarily because of the way that tier sets lock a character's gearing possibilities: you might get a really great new chest piece, but if it breaks your tier bonus, you'd have to ignore it. Or, during Legion, you might have a great legendary in, say, your helmet slot, and thus even if you get that last piece to complete the set, if it's a helmet, you're out of luck.

Now, I think a very reasonable argument could be made that making such decisions gives the game some depth. If we see a strict progression of item levels, the game of putting together your kit is kind of negated.

However, that's not what I'm worried about:

One of the most noticeable aspects of the tier set tradition is that we get gear that fits with each class. Rogue sets are dark and stealthy (or in the case of the latest one, fancy and decadent.) Paladin sets make their wearers look like beacons of light in a dangerous world, while Death Knight sets give their bearers an aura of dread.

One of the highlights of seeing a new raid tier come out has been getting to see the new designs for class-themed armor, and how that class is interpreted either through the lens of the raid (such as in Ulduar, Icecrown Citadel, or Firelands) or as a new take on the general class theme (such as in Black Temple, Nighthold, or Antorus.)

To be clear, we don't know for a fact that class appearances are going away, but with the absence of the mechanical distinction, I worry that this is what we'll be seeing.

One of the other ways in which tier sets have defined the game is the way in which they have imbued certain raids as particularly important. Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor, for example, are raids, but they don't hold the gravity of Nighthold, Tomb of Sargeras, or Antorus (though I'd argue you could have easily made Emerald Nightmare a tier raid, and that it maybe deserved to be.)

One of the oddities of Vanilla is that there were, officially, three raid tiers, despite the fact that there really should have been four. Molten Core is tier 1, Blackwing Lair tier 2, and then we got Ahn Qiraj, which was a pair of raids, one of which was a full-blown 40-player raid. While the small (or what was considered small at the time) 20-player raids like Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn Qiraj reasonably were kept out of the raid tier designation, as was the one-boss instance of Onyxia's Lair (if you're a new player, you might not realize that Onyxia's Lair was a vanilla raid and was revamped for level 80 as a celebration of the 5-year anniversary of the game during Wrath.) But it never really made sense to me why Temple of Ahn Qiraj wasn't tier 3 and Naxxramas tier 4 - except for the fact that AQ40 didn't have a tier set.

Which is funny, because it kind of did. In fact, there were sets that each class could collect using items from bosses in there, but they were only recolors of each other - all the plate sets looked the same, etc.

Of course, then, Trial of the Crusader could have easily been designated a "non tier" raid, with ICC becoming tier 9, especially given that the tier 9 sets wound up having models based on faction instead of class (with just different colors for each class within a faction.)

So what does all this rambling tell us? Well, the fact is that raid tiers have always been kind of messed up.

To me, the only huge downside to getting rid of the tier sets is that I think we're likely to see just one kind of armor for each armor class in each raid, which means that your Druid and your Demon Hunter are going to be wearing the exact same stuff. To be clear, we don't know that's the case, but that's my interpretation.

On the bright side, the gear that I saw in the brief demos at Blizzcon show that even the green questing gear in Battle for Azeroth looks incredible. We have yet to see what this gear will look like, and I hope to be pleasantly surprised (not that I'm expecting it to be bad.)

The other thing to note is that they specifically said (as I mentioned above) that they want to have gear themed around the actual instance. That could turn out really cool, actually. So far we only know of two raids, one that is a run-down Titan facility (and generally the Titan aesthetic has been really cool,) and the other with us facing Azshara, which I expect will mean a major nautical theme.

This is a bold step, but I'm going to wait for more details before I really come down hard on one side of the issue or the other.