Two things came to mind when I saw this set...

1. Hellfire FTW

2. Blizzard phails

Honestly, if you want more survivability (This referring to the armor), then get more +Damage. Stamina and armor are great and all, but if you're a caster, and you have a mob right up in your face, odds are you're taking a beating.. Even with the armor the set gives, you'd still get the crap beat out of you.

More +Damage would allow for faster killing, and would be even easier to obtain (Expecially if you go for green ""Of XXX Wrath"" items), saving you the trouble of running instances to find these half-crap pieces...

Stamina + Armor = BG, yes, but it doesn't equal killing efficiency... I'll say that now.

I'd say the real problem with the set is that the work involved in getting it outpaces the value of it all together. Several of the pieces ONLY drop off bosses that are part of the dungeon tier upgrade quest (the belt, the cowl, the gloves, the mantle, the pants, and the robe), and aren't guarenteed to drop off any of them.

When doing that series, you kill two of about four that specifically drop Ironweave, for a quest item, so on a single pass, it's not possible to get all the parts (and it's not guarenteed you'll get ANY, either way). You do recieve an item at the end of the series that allows you to summon any of the bosses you've killed (or any you've missed) any time you want.

However, this does pretty much put a requirement on obtaining the whole set of having at least someone who's completed the entire Dungeon Tier series. While somewhat reasonable pre expansion, the amount of work and unlikelyhood that very many people would, or will bother to complete a set vastly outdated, and then work to help someone get a set that's of dubious value to begin with... Well, let's say the odds aren't that great this set's going to be pretty exclusive barring bored level 70s doing it for kicks.

The set is too far out of the way with the expansion. You might still do UBRS, Scholo, Strath, etc., while leveling through, just to upgrade some gear, but this set, while unique so far, just takes too much work for pieces that aren't even level 60.

The majority of the items in the Ironweave set drop from the bosses Blizzard implemented to the Tier 0 instances for the Tier 0.5 upgrade questline, then some parts drop from existing bosses.

I guess Blizzard added this as an alternate set some casters would collect parts here and there of to have a PvP gear set-up. In a PvE environment, the 3 clothies were better off sticking with Devout, Magister's and Dreadmist.

Com'on guys, this set was supposed to be good ONLY prior to TBC.. like other T0-3 sets or lvl 60 sets, they are not meant to be compared to the TBC gears...

Anyway for those of you who actually enjoyed the lvl 60 end-game contents before TBC, this set might mean something to you, especially you went through the path of upgrading T0-T0.5...

IMO best pvp set up to lvl 60 :) insane armor, tons of stamina an intelect. same with sX armors, less dmg,crit and haste than raiding amors but lots of survivability stats... but in the same time i need to get that set il lvlup to 65 and this set wont be anything good.

This set was boss pre-bc.

My shadow priest had 7/8 of the pieces, but could never get the last piece :( .
The way Spriests were prebc, this set, with full raid buffs, gave as much damage reduction as a t3 shaman/hunter. And easily any entry level tank.

I was successful (maybe not the first) in being a Shadow Tank in AQ20, UBRS, Ony, and a few bosses in ZG,

This set brings back a lot of memories. :)

Strangely enough, this set with the 8pc bonus had 25 more armor than the 25 man heroic t10 cloth sets pre-shattering. http://cata.aowow.org/?compare?items=51280:51281:51282:51283:51284;51260:51261:51262:51263:51264;... Only in Cataclysm , was this set's armor superiority is finally toppled.

EDIT: Got rid of the double comparison links since the old t10 armor values no longer show up.

In fact it's not, I d love to hear how you summoned jarien and sothos as they have been removed from stratholme entirely. While didn't checked at for the whole set, many pieces are indeed still attainable, the main chest piece is not.

This set was implemented to give something extra to groupies who were helping grind the t0.5 set for other toons. You would often see groups made for 1 person who needed a pre raid set (if you don't know what t0.5 is, then you wont understand this sets concept). You would run strat/scholo/ubrs-lbrs so many times your eyes would bleed. Often not even getting any of your dungeon set pieces to drop, so these drops would ease the pain somewhat. This set also had good stats for pvp back then (battlemage HOOO!). It was a good idea to get someone who completed the t0.5 quest chain to help you farm this and use this set until you had a rank to get marshal's/warlord's gear. I don't expect anyone to really read and understand where I'm comming from though, since most of the wowhead members here never played pre-bc, so they don't see the use this set had. -nostalgist -hardcore vanilla player

For a mage there are 2 lower level armor sets obtainable from scholomance and stratholme

https://vanillawowdb.com/?itemset=81"">(Item Set #81) from stratholme

https://vanillawowdb.com/?itemset=122"">(Item Set #122) from scholomance

EDIT: Was supposed to be a reply to mikegnewsman's comment, sorry for being a rookie in using the site