I speculated that the Paladin T10 2-piece bonus was too good, but had only anecdotal evidence from heroic dungeon runs to back that opinion up at the time. Pulling 9-11k in heroics is not exactly the best evidence, but last night I ran my first raid (TOC-25) as Ret and can unequivocally say that yes, that 2-piece set bonus is OP. Despite the fact my gear score puts me at 19 out of 25 in the raid, I came in first on the damage meters on all fights except for the faction champs where I came in at number four. Two DK's, who were spreading their diseases like mad, and a hunter came in ahead of me on that fight.
Yet I would have expected these same players to have beat me on all fights, as they had done for weeks in TOC. After all, they all out gear me by as much as 400-500 points and are very good players. The fact that I rank as number 19 out of 25 in gear says quite a lot. I've had Bryntroll for two weeks and still wasn't topping the meters, though I had gone up considerably on the charts. The only difference in the past week is that I picked up my second piece of T10, which gave me the bonus. I did pick up the 7th Legion boots off Anub, but wasn't wearing them during the raid, so the only answer to the question of how all that happened last night is the set bonus. There are others in the raid who have their 2-piece set bonus as well, but perhaps not new ICC weapons so I will watch individual progress with great interest in the next 2-3 weeks to see how it levels out. As I should be wearing Shadow's Edge shortly myself, I'd expect my personal numbers to edge up a bit though.
I'm wondering just how much internal testing Blizzard did on the bonuses before releasing them to live. When Paladins that are still wearing 4 pieces of 226 gear, and a good weapon can pull off 9k-11k in heroic dungeons while the rest of the group is doing 2-4k that can not but serve as an example that others can't miss. And when a Paladin wearing the same gear can out DPS everyone, regardless of how well geared they are that simply screams for balance. In as much as I love being the god on the block right now that set bonus probably needs to be adjusted down to 30% proc rate if not perhaps a bit lower. As the "problem" really comes to light most notably in multi-target fights, I might even go so far as to say Blizzard needs to redesign the 2-piece bonus and change it to something that would be more even in single-target and multi-target fights.
Can you imagine what the set bonus will mean to the Paladin that does eventually gain Shadowmourne? The combination of that set bonus and Shadowmourne's proc will be utterly devastating in raids. Add in the 4-piece Paladin T10 set bonus to that.
