No Tier Set Bonuses in B4A.. BfA... Battle... the New Expansion

As of yesterday, Blizzard let us know there would no longer be set bonuses in whatever the next expansion is going to be called.  I have fairly mixed feelings about it.

A lot of my most popular articles on here, over the years have been dissecting new set bonuses, whether mathematically looking into how they work, or giving suggestions on how to optimize your play to take advantage of them.  And that's certainly something I look forward to doing every tier, as otherwise theorycrafting in general can get a bit stale, as I really have no interest in looking into endlessly optimizing BiS lists...

However, it does seem like the old formulas for set bonuses have gotten quite stale.  It's proven too hard to balance interesting tier sets, so we end up with somewhat vanilla, meaningless bonuses in a lot of occasions (such as a buff to Raptor Strike for SV Hunters...) or the same buff that we had just a couple tiers ago (signature ability is buffed, or signature ability provides a buff).

Ghostcrawler used to swear that they did not balance classes around their tier bonuses; that all classes should be viable without the tier bonuses, and then they should again be balanced with the tier bonuses, but that simply hasn't been the case, pretty much ever, aside from possibly a couple of tiers in MoP.  So we often end up in an occasion where a spec is quite dull without it's current set bonus, which means we keep onto that bonus even when the gear is drastically lower than the rest of our gear, which I suppose is the primary thing Blizzard is trying to combat with this system.

Because Blizz is committed to the Titanforged idea, tier sets just don't make sense.  If you can get randomly really high ilvl gear from the previous tiers with a better set bonus, then it takes away too much of the enjoyment of getting new gear in a new raid.

So in the end, I'm fine with the removal of the set bonuses. Put those same changes into a the new artifact mechanic (whatever slots they're in) and hopefully they can keep the specs interesting that way.

Meh...