Pictures of 0.5 sets: http://vnboards.ign.com/wow_general_board/b19789/95453349/p1/?30
Just new colors. I think the “Darkmantle” looks cool, but other than that, meh–I’m so used to these patterns going with the old colors that the new ones just look wrong. I looked around on the test server for a while–the quest (for all classes) starts at a new NPC in the IF throne room (dunno where for horde), and the first thing you must bring is your set bracers, 50g (or was it 30g?), and 15 “blood” (quest item) off of a cat or bear in Winterspring. I picked up the quest and traipsed along to northern Kalimdor only to find that every bear and wintersaber was dead and there were like 600 people camping all the spawn points. I killed maybe 10 and got no quest drops (and other people complained loudly on /general of the same), so clearly it’s going to be a “time > skill” kind of thing, like all farming endeavors (reputation farming comes to mind). At least some parts of the chain are soloable, which is what many people want. To upgrade for the epic pieces of the new 0.5 set, 5manning Strat/Scholo (part of the quest even has a 45 minute timer on your Baron run) and 10manning UBRS will be required–and they’re making the level caps 5 for those 58-60 instances and 10 for BRS anyway, which is interesting. I heard that they made these instances way easier, too–people on the test servers have reported that PUGs had no problems. So these are some pretty big solo-friendly changes.