What am I grinding for again?

Wa-hey, another rant. This time it's about armour, and more specifically the sets of armour a Hunter can obtain going through the various raid instances.

We'll start with my favourite: Giantstalker. Giantstalker armour peices were some of the first pieces of Epic-level gear Wulf ever got, and they were a massive upgrade to the armour Wulf wore up to that point. The set bonuses were kinda questionable, however. If you wore three peices, you could heal your pet better. Not that big a deal, but hey, I'm getting nice stats from all this stuff anyway, so who cares. Then at five pieces, we get a buff to your pet's stamina and resistances. OK, once again, not that big a deal since my pet's normally out of harms way, but like the three-piece, it helps me when I'm grinding. Finally, we get to the eight-piece, and we get the real money shot: +15% damage to my Multi-Shot and Volley skills. Finally, a bonus that actually buffs my damage, and it only took me eight months of grinding the place to get it.

Meanwhile, I've started collecting Dragonstalker armour as well, since that's the next big upgrade. But wait, the stats aren't that much better than Giantstalker, ah well, the bonuses might compensate. Three piece is +20% Ranged Attack Power to my Aspect of The Hawk buff. Doesn't sound bad, but it only really equates to 1 extra Damage Per Second, as opposed to the approximately 7 DPS buff my 8pc Gianstalker gives me. Wonder which one I'll be wearing? Then the five-piece bonus which is a buffed version of the Giantstalker five-piece, nice, but once again, not enough to break up my five-piece. Finally we get to the eight piece and again, we get the good buff: A chance to boost the Ranged Attack Power of the entire group by 450 (32 DPS) for 7 seconds. Shame I have to get a drop from Ragnaros, one from Onyxia and then six from Blackwing Lair to get it. Given the fact that we've had five sets of the leggings drop in six months of Ragnaros kills makes it unlikely I'll ever complete that set.

The we get onto Ahn'Qiraj and take a look at the set there. It's only a five-piece this time, so you can keep that oh-so-uber three-piece set bonus from Dragonstalker if you wish. Stats are nice as well, no +hit but I've got that covered. Shame about the dodgy spell damage on it. The we get to the set bonuses. The three piece reduces the cost of my Arcane Shot (which only gets used in kiting or PVP) by 10% (around 20 mana saved, woo!), and again the full set bonus is utterly uber (Rapid Fire every 3 minutes rather than 5, gimme!).

And this is my problem. The only truly worthwhile/useful set bonuses from the Hunter sets from MC-AQ40 are the end bonuses. I don't expect the lower tier bonuses to be as useful, but it would be nice if there was a genuine advantage to wearing anything less than the full set.

Amusingly enough though, the set from Naxxramas reverses this trend. In the Naxx set, the two,four, and six-piece bonuses are all pretty respectable, but the eight-piece one's a joke.

What's prompted this post is CD's retiral of MC from our regular raids to focus on AQ40. With that gone, I'll never manage to get my 8-pc Dragonstalker set (although I might just get the shoulders for coolness and wear five pieces of DS). As for the AQ set, it's a sad joke before the 5-pc bonus. So it looks like I'll be sticking with 8/8 GS until the expansion comes and we kiss goodbye to BWL and Naxx in favour of what the lvl 70 raidholes have to offer. If Blizzard can be bothered to fix the Hunter class by then.