Jhrisnc

I'm wondering if anyone could give me some numbers on the difference in dps for warlocks, mages, rogues, and hunters (and perhaps also fury warriors), assuming optimal play, between the best available gear to a BWL clearing guild and an AQ40 clearing guild, on a stationary target like Patchwerk. (Assume that no dps classes have access to Thunderfury) I'm in a raid organization that is currently farming BWL, and is able to clear AQ40 through Huhuran. In addition, we've managed to kill Anub'rekhan and Razuvious, though we're unable to reliably one-shot either of these bosses. My impression is that a good number of the later Naxxramas fights require, or at least are made much easier, by having lots of dps. The issue is, we don't clear AQ on a regular basis, since most of the team wants to spend time in Naxxramas, and so we aren't getting our hands on any of the better AQ40 dps gear. I'm interested in getting some numbers from more experienced raiders to back up the claim that AQ40 gear really is worth it, in the long run.

To give an idea of our current dps, when we run damage meters vs Ebonroc, we're around 6500dps - our mages are mostly fire spec, so that hurts them, but the fact that the fight is shorter than Patchwerk allows all mana-using classes to sustain slightly higher dps for the duration of the fight. Would it be correct to say that most of the fights in Naxxramas are possible in BWL gear, but would require a substantially (or in some cases, extremely) better level of play than a team in AQ40 gear? Do you think that AQ40 dps gear makes Naxxramas fights substantially easier?

 

Chupa

I'd say it would be possible but extremely difficult. Not to be an elitist jerk, but if your guild can't even handle the Twin Emps, I don't think most Naxx fights will be doable in sub-par gear.

 

Savos

Maintain 10000 DPS for ~7 minutes and you can do Patchwerk.

Although you are probably going to need off-tanks for Patchwerk in at least a few pieces of Conquerors for the absurd armor to not get destroyed by Hateful Strikes.

 

Fermion

5/5 doomcaller set bonus makes a pretty big difference for warlocks, especially on patchwerk. having fewer pieces of the set doesn't upgrade dps much.

http://wow.tachyonsix.com.nyud.net:8...37576PeFvM.png

 

Mosh

Do AQ40 first and pray for our luck. 3 Death's Sting in 4 C'thun kills and we haven't even tried Patchwerk yet.

 

Auphi

My guild began one-shotting Anub, Instructor, and Noth before we killed the Huhuran, so AQ gear is not an absolute necessity for those encounters. That being said:
Better gear will certainly make the encounters easier, but I don't think the effect is as pronounced on Anub'rekhan and Instructor because those fights can be sustained for a good length of time. Noth (and beyond) is a completely different story, the encounter gets much harder if you can't kill Noth before the third balcony stage. AQ gear would make a marked difference, I'm positive that we had a much steeper learning curve than a C'thun farming guild would have had.

As for numbers. Having 5/5 Doomcaller would have increased my DPS a good 7%, throw in non-set pieces and a C'thun farming Warlock would be doing ~13% more sustained DPS. It differs for other classes (due to the power of the 5/5 bonus), but the benefit is there. Keep in mind that farming AQ40 up to Huhuran is a little counter-productive. It's only after Huhuran that the upgrades really begin to make a difference. The gem of the instance, C'thun, is only one boss away from you, and drops loot on par with the best of Naxx. (For casters at least)

 

Torael_7

Sounds like us, except for us it's 2 DS, 1 DEoI and the caster weapon in 5 kills.

Content edit: Rogues gain a DPS upgrade. Deathdealer's is better than anything obtainable in BWL barring maybe DD boots versus Boots of the Shadowflame, and you get good off-set pieces for the rest of the slots (Qiraji Execution Bracers, Belt of Neverending Agony, etc), as well as new weapons. AQ40 is pretty kind to DPS warriors as well (Breastplate and Gauntlets of Annihilation, etc).

 

sp00n

According to the rogue spreadsheet, the difference between a MC&BWL equipped and an AQ equipped rogue is about 65 DPS, which is an increase of 10%.
This includes full Deathdealer and Death's Sting.

 

Phantim

You make me cry, we have killed c'thun 10+ times. We have yet to get a weapon drop, we have a ton of offensive warrior gloves, its really to bad that we only have 2 offensive warriors that raid on a regular basis nothing like gearing up your tanks in offensive gear.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...de/phantim.gif
Richard Needham:
Strong people make as many mistakes as weak people. Difference is that strong people admit their mistakes, laugh at them, learn from them. That is how they become strong.

 

Sticks

At least it should help on Loatheb, depending on your strat/guild size. I'm one of my guilds 2 main tanks, and I spec fury every week for loatheb (I have a fair bit of gold to burn and the gold I spend on it is peanuts compared to the total consumable bill for the kill). I've only ever taken de dps gear but I still have a pretty reasonable setup, not top of the line but still respectable. With the gear and spec, I still manage to get top 5-10 or so (loatheb is rediculously fury warrior friendly and Im human with tf+maladath) and around 100k more than I would be If I hadn't picked up the gear and wasn't prepared to respec for it (which is why I let the other mt we have tank loatheb). If you don't have a large roster (especially of dps warriors) to call on, its not as bad as it could be having so much dps loot going to tanks. Then again, I do feel your pain. We get those gloves every week as well, along with the damn mage cloak. We've killed him as much as anyone (15+ now? cant remember) and never even seen a mark of cthun, mage belt or caster belt.

As far as dps upgrades in aq go, there are many many upgrades in there for all classes. All our rogues, locks, mages and even hunters have 5+ pieces and often alot more. Our fury warriors have 4 pieces at least. This together with a bunch of non set healing upgrades for priests, druids and to a lesser extent pallys means that aq40 is well worth it in terms of gear. I don't have hard numbers for you but some of the later encounters require huge dps and missing out on a whole instance worth of gear each week will hurt you in the long term.

 

Boevis

I can't speak for warriors, but looking at the spreadsheet for rogues (as horde)
8/8 BF, Perditions, Veiled Shadows set, Ony Neck, Strikers Mark, Master Dragonslayers, DFT, HoJ: 643 DPS
5/5 DD, Gloves of Enforcement, Execution Bracers, Never-ending agony, Deaths Sting, Pugio, Barbed Choker, Strikers Mark, Qiraji Fury, Master Dragonslayers, Concentrated Hatred, DFT, HoJ: 726 DPS.

I would say that yes, 83 DPS is significant enough to make AQ worthwhile. That's not even looking at the healing gear.

Simply put: Killing C'thun will put you far better off in terms of gear for progression than farming Anub/Noth/Rav/Widow even if you aren't lucky enough to get his weapon drops. The rewards from his eye (guaranteed drop) won't be replaced in Naxx.

 

xarg

Bear in mind that patchwerk is going to be about the 5th boss 6th boss you take on, generally. Behind anub, razuvious, noth, faerlina and maexxna. You'll get some pretty decent upgrades there as well. It's be pretty early for you to start worrying about patchwerk. If you have the gear from those 5 bosses and then find your raid dps struggles, then maybe you could make the decision?

For my guild, as much as we wanted to get c'thun down, it was just too hard to conjure interest for. When you do a naxx raid everything (almost!) is new and interesting. When we kill huhu, the officers just get bombarded with "gtg out for dinner" "gtg work early tomorrow" "afk dinner" etc. Some weeks we don't even bother killing emps, much less clearing the extensive trash after them as well. We're now focusing on naxx simply because it was too hard to get the interest for c'thun.

 

dojke

Patchwerk dps requirements are actaully fairly flexible. Most guilds go in with 16 healers, but if you're fully (I mean fully) in t2, you can drop down to 15, and you gain 5% dps there. Drop down to 2 warlocks and replace the rest with rog/mages and you can gain another 2-3% dps. This bridges most of the dps gap.

However, whether you have the gear to tank and burn maexxna or even live through faerlina rof's, that's much more questionable. The hp gains from aqgear is quite underestimated imo.

 

◊ chalon

Screw you people that have multiple Death's Stings in a few kills.

6500 DPS on Ebonroc means you aren't going to be able to kill Patchwerk with your current gear, I'd venture to say.

 

Elendril

yeah, we finally got our second death's sting a week or two ago. zero dark edge so far, and we've been killing c'thun every week since he was possible. we do have 3 scepters, though, which is nice. it's just been hard to convince some people that it's worth clearing AQ more or less just for c'thun each week when we always get cloth belts :-P

 

◊ Praetorian

I really don't see DPS as being the limiting factor on Patchwerk, provided that you truly are BWL-geared and not just "hey guys we just killed Nef let's try Patchwerk."

You can always buff more, or stack the raid a bit more (drop warlocks/hunters for fury warriors and combat daggers rogues), if DPS is your problem. Unless you're bringing 18+ healers or something. Really, the question is more whether you have enough tanks with the gear to handle Patchwerk's damage output. You can have your healers all use Distilled Wisdom, pop Runes, and use every other consumable out there. You can get the Onyxia buff or whatever. But if Patchwerk is HSing your tanks for 90% of their HP, you are going to wipe, and some buffs won't help fix that.

 

Urascrubmage

Rahkida u r a scrub priest stop polluting other ppl's forums with stupid questions that you can easily answer urself.

 

◊ Praetorian

Why am I not surprised that you're an AOL user.

 

• Nemesis

i was thinking the same thing, throw alot of money at the problem (consumables) and you are probably a long way towards killing these bosses
perhaps people will get bored/broke of this rather fast but you could make it very clear thats the situation they are looking at
a) spend time in AQ40 and get upgrades before going to naxx
b) spend alot of money on naxx to make attempts viable and see how far we get

all in all i think you are better off going to AQ first, at least for a bunch of weeks
after that you can use the T3/naxx drops to patch the holes still in your raids gear which probably makes for faster progression than having to upgrade everyone with naxx drops to achieve the same level of progression

or do both, make sure twin emps and beyond become the major target for your guild but do take one night/week out for anub and razuv, but nothing more

 

◊ chalon

Yes, we've killed C'Thun every week since he was possible as well...except for one week where we decided to really focus on Naxx and skipped him. 15 kills. 1 DEoI. 1 Scepter. 0 Death's Stings :(.

I agree with you to a degree that generally DPS is not a big problem on Patchwerk, for people that are geared for the fight. But I'd be inclined to say that a guild that hasn't killed Twin Emps probably isn't geared for the fight.

But yeah, the big thing is tanking gear. Do you have 4 tanks with 8/8 Wrath or Equivalent, good rings, trinkets, and either an Elementium Reinforced Bulwark or Qiraji Shield...pretty much everything best of slot at that gear level? You can reduce this number to 3 if you use a 2 OT strategy. If the answer to this question is no, then no you aren't ready for Patchwerk.