World of Warcraft Tier Armor Raid Sets - Part II, Burning Crusade

Submitted by Rolf - Tue, 4 Oct 2011

The biggest update to raiding in The Burning Crusade was the change from 40-man to 25-man. This had quite a big impact on many raiding guilds. Including ours. We kind of split up and skidded to a halt. Half of the guild had always been more hardcore and progressive than the other half and it was the hardcore half that left us and moved on. Me? I was loyal and stayed.

After I leveled to 70, I changed from hunter to shaman, a class that was no longer restricted to horde. Horde, in turn, got access to our paladin class. Since I hated the look of the male version of the new race Draenei, I chose to play a female. Horde's new race was blood elf, supposedly to give them a 'pretty race', as opposed to all the bulky and evil-looking races they had had up to then.

Since we were left with only a few handful of casual players, all we could manage was 10-man Karazhan. We struggled even there. I swear it wasn't me, but the lazy keyboard-turners that couldn't manage to outdamage the tanks back in Molten Core because they were "on curse duty".

Tier 4 - Karazhan, Magtheridon, Gruul's Lair

Another change to raiding, was that the raid sets now only consisted of 5 pieces instead of 8. Two parts of the first tier were obtainable in Karazhan, luckily for us, since we couldn't gather 25 people for Gruul and Magtheridon. Later on in this patch, we teamed up again with one of the old guilds of our Molten Core alliance who were in pretty much the same boat as we were, to conquer the 25-man raids and the outdoor bosses Kazzak and Doomwalker.

I probably obtained atleast 4 out of 5 pieces of my tier set. I am not a fan of gear that removes your little individuality (hair and face) so usually I have my helm set to hidden. Unfortunately this sometimes means hiding a cool looking, matching helmet. But tier 4 wasn't particularly pretty, nor ugly. Best looking class of this tier was probably the mage.

Tier 5 - Serpentshrine Cavern, The Eye

During this patch we decided to merge our two half-guilds into 1 new guild to defeat the new raids in Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep with me as one of the two guildmasters. Halfway through, I got too annoyed with 'the other half' so I retired to retain my mood.

I hadn't gathered much of this tier 5 with my draenei shaman. This tier had some very sweet designs, like the priest's and warlock's. But also a few ugly ones, like the rogue's and hunter's and obviously that of the paladin.

Tier 6 - Black Temple, Hyjal Summit, Sunwell Plateau

Shortly after abandoning my draenei shaman, I started a troll shaman on a different server, finally accepting my college friend's invitation to join them. While resisting the habit to run into alliance towns, I leveled to 70, gathered some pvp epics and joined my new guild's raids. They were halfway in Black Temple and from then on, I continued my perfect raid attendance and participated.

I built this shaman to be enhancement, the coolest spec if you ask me, and was sporting non-tier epics, resembling the hunter tier with the cool shoulders, much cooler than the shaman tier shoulders. Pretty much all class sets of this tier were awesome, in my opinion. Even the paladin looked okay. I was jealous of the warlock's shoulder animation (or was it the helmet?) but again, the priest's tier was the prettiest.

Although first consisting of 5 pieces, when the last patch came out, Blizzard added 3 more parts of the set that dropped in Sunwell Plateau. These belt, bracers and boots had a higher item level obviously. By the time we had almost dropped the second boss, I had become a bit ill and had trouble attending. Since I didn't miss playing at all, I decided to retire from the game.

Around this time, my girlfriend joined the guild and became a raider, but I quit the game before I got to know her...

ť Part I - Vanilla
ť Part II - The Burning Crusade
ť Part III - Wrath of the Lich King
ť Part IV - Cataclysm