Perfect kit here..

As for the VCS3 shocks- they're SLIGHTLY easier to build (not that the old ones were hard..), but they didn't feel any smoother than my TC5 shocks, so I don't really consider them to be THAT big of an improvement. Associated shocks have always been easy to build and felt smooth for me, so my opinion probably won't be worth $.02..

That being said, my only real gripe about the shocks is the pistons. They didn't come on the molded tree like they used to. They were already separated, and I had to clean up the flashing on every one of them. With the older pistons, you could usually pull downward on the pistons to snap them off the tree and about 90% of the time there was no flashing (the instructions even demonstrated the proper method for doing this). It was also nice to keep the unused pistons on the tree so that you could grab the size you needed as fit, rather than dig through a pile of individual pistons to find the correct numbers. Petty gripe, but still an annoyance. Just a note to AE- don't try to fix what never was broken.