I've also heard if you spend 35 shards to summon one of the 4 dragons, they have a higher chance to drop the badges. Get a group for them though. 2+ atleast (and the 2 is pushing it)

Depleted badge (BOE) is what gets powered up with the crystals. It supposedly drops from any of the mobs in the new quest areas in Blade's Edge (far north and far west). As a rough rule of thumb it seems like if it can drop the crystals it could drop the badge. Some people have reported substantially better drop rates off some of the summoned elites (5 man, take 35 crystal shards) however there's so little data out there so far it's all got a fair bit of guesswork in it.

Stats are 308 AC and a use: +150 agi for 20 seconds on a 2 minute cooldown.

I've farmed enough time there to have over 150 Apexis Shards, but I haven't gotten a single Depleted item, let alone the badge... Wouldn't be surprised if the PTR had boosted drop rates, since that's the only way item feedback could be gathered.

Hmmm. We just had one drop but stats are very different; maybe there are two of them. We got the pattern for Belt of Deep Shadow from Tidewalker, a dps belt.

227 armor, 32 agi, 14 sta, 2x blue socket with +3agi bonus, +18 hit, +66 AP
Requires 2 nether vortex, 10 primal air, 10 primal shadow

Edit: Ah, you must be referring to Belt of Natural Power.

Been reading through these and I cant find it but is there an armor cap for us? My druid is still up and coming but after speaking with one of our main druids they mentioned we had an armor cap. By this I mean we can only achieve 75% mitigation and not any more. So at that point, instead of stacking armor we should stack agility and stam. What is the armor cap to reach 75% mitigation?

It depends on the mobs level. But for lvl 70(not 73) mobs it's a bit below 32k armor.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Armor

Yeah, those were all pre-2.1; it looks like I may need to get my hands on a pair of Heavy Clefthoof legs (and Purple Hat, forgot all about that). I avoided the set like the plague since it was all +Sta, +Def, and barely any 'real' armor (aside from the boots, which weren't really all that worse than any other pair pre-2.1) but it's actually quite good now. I could probably also do with some more heroic runs in order to get my hands on a Tree Mender's but that's about it right now.

As far as our current progression goes, we killed Maulgar for the first time this past week and I picked up the offtanking hat (high armor / stam rogue hat, really, but good for OTing one mob and then DPSing in cat afterwards) but we haven't quite gotten Gruul and will probably need an additional reset before he goes down--while we had him at 3% (more people need to l2Potion), we're losing two major sources of damage to the guild member shuffle that is constantly going on on low-ish pop servers; however, with the gear changes we were able to blow past curator in two weakens last night so it's possible that Gruul could just die earlier than I expect.

In any case, I'm looking at shooting for a Purple Hat (+20 Sta / +23 Agi / -YM Sockets), Clefthoof Legs (+2 Sta / -16 Agi / +RBB Sockets), and a Necklace of the Deep (+7 Agi / -3 Sta / +RR Sockets) in the short term and looking at +12 Stam Gems, Tree Mender's Belt, and Malorne sometime in the near-ish future.

Any other suggestions?

Camp blade's edge plateau or the ah for http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32658


@Ulfgar. That's correct. My mistake.

Well, I'm sure we can get to 45k armor with Inspiration.

vs Level 73 mobs, 80% DR would require 47900 armor. Assuming imp Devotion, Mark, Defense Potion (550), and ~300 Agi ... you'd need 37500 counting those buffs to get to 80% with Imp Lay on Hands.

Interesting, I didn't realize 80% would go all the way up to ~45k. Now, do you think there's anything to my claim that 75% is too limiting, or do you think we'll just be shifting to dodge and it won't affect our effectiveness?

IE: Is the 75% cap a problem?

It is a "problem" from a certain perspective, however it is there for an extremely good reason.

If you plot the survivability gain from percentage damage reduction on a graph, you will see that 75-80% is where the curve really starts taking off dramatically. If it was possible to get up to 80% reduction (potentially stacked with other ways of reducing damage) incoming damage could easily be reduced to trivial amounts.

Consider it this way, going from 75 to 80% would be taking your existing damage intake of 25% and reducing it by 20%. With a base damage of 10000, instead of being hit for 2500, you are getting hit for 2000. That is a simply massive leap in surviability.

My guess would be that the Blizzard designers learned an important lesson from other MMOs in which percentage modification was never capped, and the tanking issues it presents at the high end of gameplay. (The game I played last, Anarchy Online, was a huge victim to this at the high end, as stack "Reflect" shield allowed tanks to get up to the meaty part of the survivability curve and raise their survival time to crazy levels.)

So, I wouldn't expect the 75% cap to go anywhere any time soon. It's kinda the border before the curve takes off.