To be frank, Nordrassil Harness is a PvP and soloing bonus and nothing more. Sure, you could whip out that raid-saving spot heal, but odds are you’re going to be too focused on doing your job (DPS) to notice someone moments away from death in time to heal them before the actual healers do. And even if you do get heal off first, you’re going to heal what, maybe 1800 if you specced Nurturing Instinct? Odds are, if you really need to pop out to help the healers out, you’re going to need to throw more than one spell, and ultimately, all this bonus does is cuts half of second off of the effective casting time for Re-growth, since the global cool-down delays you for 1.5 of the 2 seconds you thought you just saved.
In short, T4’s bonuses are made of epic win. T5’s bonuses are the dregs from the bottom of Blizzard’s Tea (though the swipe damage boost is a rather tasty looking dreg). Crit immunity was something only the ignorant Ferals strove for before Survival of the Fittest. Raid viability was when your healing set was good enough to overcome the fact that your spec sucked. And while it didn’t set in for a while, those who are fortunate enough to at least be killing Prince Malchezaar on a regular basis got one more system shock: Feral Set Bonuses.
It is a fact that Tier 4 has some extremely good set bonuses on it, bonuses which quite frankly dwarf T5 and T6. This, unfortunately, means it is very hard for us to upgrade beyond our first feral set into the higher tiers (mind you, for some of us, there are other conditions keeping us from Tier 6 gear as well). And we want to take a look at our raid set bonuses, from the ungodly two-piece T4 bonus for cats, to the utterly craptacular two-piece T5 bonus.
Malore Harness is such a strong cat bonus that many people keep two pieces of tier four all the way up to four pieces tier six. It should because it’s essentially a second Omen of Clarity for Feral Druids. At a procrate of 4% per hit, combined with an average of about 5 attacks every 4 seconds in catform, the set bonus alone will give the average cat Druid 1-2 more shreds per minute, which could easily yield an extra 20-30 DPS! Bears don’t necessarily get as much benefit from this, getting only about 2 procs per minute, but that should still be enough for one more maul.
Four-piece Bonus is a fairly decent buff for catform which give us about 80 attack power with raid buffs. But let’s face it, strength as a set bonus is kind of boring. Though, for bears that 1400 armor is nice. It makes sure that set bonus is not affected by the bear modifier. Much like the two piece bonus for cats, bears hold on to their four piece malorne bonus until they start picking up T6 pieces. However, while this is a significant chunk of armor, the overall stat upgrades on T5 can easily overtake the benefit of this bonus, especially when you factor in T5 bonuses.