You need to balance around 4pc Tier 7 unless they nerf that bonus or buff the T8 bonuses.
According to a post on the unholy thread though if you can get two pieces of 239 ilevel plate DPS items it's better then 4pc T7.5. I haven't done the math on this myself since we don't even know if there are gloves/shoulders or chest that are that high. But if so what would the stats have to roughly equal out to so we can get rid of 4pc T7.5 for the helm + shoulders/chest/gloves with figuring at least one of the later three are ilevel 239 and the other two are 226?
You have to consider Algalon has at least plate shoulders since as it's been pointed out there are only one pair besides set shoulders.
Thanks for the kind reply. The reason i chose t8 leggings was for the reasonable 4set bonus which seems worth getting (yeye i know its worse than t7 but what ya gonna do?) and the dps loss from swapping out leggings was LOWER than the swapping the helm. Though apparently the stats have been changed on the warhelm so im not sure about this. As for the neck, Frigid Strength of Hodir has a lot of hit rating which is *wasted*, and when you count hit rating as 0 dps, Insurmountable Fervor becomes higher dps.
The one thing i would perhaps change now is to replace the Cloak with the one from General Vezax10 hard mode, which has 2 gem slots - Drape of the Faceless General.
Paine, another thing to consider (since so far your setup is the one I prefer among the ones listed) is that gearing for different speccs will end us up with massively different sets compared to what happened with T7 gear.
Not just the usual ArP considerations - for example at the moment I'm playing frost, and I'm finding moving from PS IT rotation to HB glyph rotations a dps increase in most fights, so I'm essentially running with one disease only. If double diseases don't win out for Frost the T8 setbonus may fade out as a necessity.
I think your setup is undoubtely the best I've seen for Unholy and the one I prefer for Frost. However, I'm gonna try to see if with 1 disease only it's not beneficial to replace some T8 with better pieces with a custom Frost set.
Paine, another thing to consider (since so far your setup is the one I prefer among the ones listed) is that gearing for different speccs will end us up with massively different sets compared to what happened with T7 gear.
Not just the usual ArP considerations - for example at the moment I'm playing frost, and I'm finding moving from PS IT rotation to HB glyph rotations a dps increase in most fights, so I'm essentially running with one disease only. If double diseases don't win out for Frost the T8 setbonus may fade out as a necessity.
I think your setup is undoubtely the best I've seen for Unholy and the one I prefer for Frost. However, I'm gonna try to see if with 1 disease only it's not beneficial to replace some T8 with better pieces with a custom Frost set.
Yeh im afraid im guilty of "tunnelvision" in regard to an Unholy-favoured set. When i calculated the DPS rating for each piece i used Unholy dps ratings (taken from the Unholy DPS thread) and its quite likely if you put in different stats for blood or frost you may come out with different items topping.
And if indeed 1 disease is a dps increase for your frost build, it would make total sense replacing the leggings with the pretty sick legs from Flame Leviathan HC-hard mode.
I haven't seen any mention of the PVP weapons here, but they seem to be rather good with slower speeds, although they do seem to lack in useful PVE stats. They do have 2 sockets and respectable AP + crit numbers. I think for sure they are the best tanking weapons, but they would seem to be a decent upgrade from BoH for pve as well (assuming you don't get a Voldrethar for a LONG time).
was about to say, the Furious Gladiator weapons are very nice until Voldrethar. Not to mention they give you the needed expertise if you are lacking it from racials.
Seems its a pretty neat item to get hit from since it basically has 20 more strength than any other ring (more with prismatic gem). If you really want to cap expertise you could just gem for it...
How good is wraithstone in comparison to the other trinkets? Wouldn't an on-demand ap buff be better than mirror?
It depends, personally I'm a little lazy when it comes to turning on my trinkets and such, I prefer them to auto cast. Only reason is because I feel like I might lose DPS if I forget to turn them on unless I macro. If you prefer to macro/micro (If you can check the cool down consistently) then go ahead and look for a trinket which suits you.
Seems its a pretty neat item to get hit from since it basically has 20 more strength than any other ring (more with prismatic gem). If you really want to cap expertise you could just gem for it...
Good point - that could definitely be fitted into the Unholy set at the expense of the Algalon quest reward cloak, which seems to have been glossed over when they re-jigged all the excess stamina and as such is a bit lacklustre.
edit: There is a problem though in that the two ring slots are rare opportunities to fit in some expertise gear. Hmm...
Personally, I've found Lushen's post to be the most in line with what I am looking for in BiS Blood Itemization.
This is how I've broken it down for options on items. These include the hard mode items from 10 or 25 man, and it is meant to directly compare equivalent slot items. I've added a few different things for comparison as well.
Trinket #2: [Grim Toll] (hit) vs [Mjolnir Runestone] (crit) The proc on these have been told to stack, and so it is player call on whether or not they would want to use both of these or Greatness depending on how the proc works.
That's the list as far as I have compiled and seen various options. I still need to go through the math and figure out what combination will give the highest overall, thanks to everyone who has posted the groundwork, and hope this direct comparison helps.
Further to some discussions that have been going on in the Blood thread about the value of hit and expertise, I'm considering changing the OP to have two sets for each spec.
One would be the highest 'theoretical' DPS set, which would almost be a pure 'Best in Slot' list that wasn't concerned with capping hit and expertise, and instead focused purely on maximising the highest stat weights.
The other set would be for those who might prefer to take a slight overall hit on average damage done in order to ensure their expertise and hit are capped so that their rotation is more predictable and their damage is less 'streaky'. I've seen a few posts in this thread complaining about a lack of expertise or hit capping in suggested gearsets, so I do think this might perhaps be a worthwhile exercise for those individuals who value the safer, more predictable option of hitting less hard, more often, even if in theory it will be a DPS loss over time.
Further to some discussions that have been going on in the Blood thread about the value of hit and expertise, I'm considering changing the OP to have two sets for each spec.
One would be the highest 'theoretical' DPS set, which would almost be a pure 'Best in Slot' list that wasn't concerned with capping hit and expertise, and instead focused purely on maximising the highest stat weights.
The other set would be for those who might prefer to take a slight overall hit on average damage done in order to ensure their expertise and hit are capped so that their rotation is more predictable and their damage is less 'streaky'. I've seen a few posts in this thread complaining about a lack of expertise or hit capping in suggested gearsets, so I do think this might perhaps be a worthwhile exercise for those individuals who value the safer, more predictable option of hitting less hard, more often, even if in theory it will be a DPS loss over time.
Well that is just wrong because in theory not having enough hit or expertise is a DPS loss! At least reaching the HIT cap is needed to reach the max dps.
GC had made a post regarding ArP and while he was not 100% accurate according to some members of the community, he was close enough to give us an idea of where the ArP "cap" is. There are several people reporting that even at 100% the boss simply goes to negative armor, however, I was wondering if someone had some hard data or a spreadsheet/somewhat accurate model to place this equation into while calculating Blood's BiS dps gear. It would give us a fairly good idea when we get everything from Ulduar 10 and 25, what we're looking at for choices. Personally, I like having the idea so that when I do get a piece of BiS gear from a boss drop, I know what I'm going to do with it or replace with it.
There are a plethora of different theories floating out there, but what I would like to know specifically is this:
1) What will our BiS gear generate for hit and expertise cap
2) Where are we going to be with respect to the "cap" in ArP (I'm assuming this cap simply means a significant drop in AEP)
3) What is going to scale once we get up to that level
I have read that Ghoul/Garg/DRW do not benefit from our ArP but do benefit from effects such as sunder/expose armor. I do not know how accurate that is or if it is a pre-cast thing (much how you can pop a trinket prior to DRW summon which will allow you to summon it with a higher AP base).
In the next minor content patch that just went up on the PTRs, the T7 4 set bonus is being cut in half, and the T8 2 set bonus is being bumped up to 8% crit. This will more than likely make breaking T7 viable for Frost and Unholy.
In the next minor content patch that just went up on the PTRs, the T7 4 set bonus is being cut in half, and the T8 2 set bonus is being bumped up to 8% crit. This will more than likely make breaking T7 viable for Frost and Unholy.
Nerfing T7 isn't at all surprising, although slightly buffing T8 is. Now the question becomes: How do unholy/frost deal with this? Two pieces each of T7 and T8? Only 2 T7 or T8? Or ignore tier gear altogether?
Bloody Hell.
There is likely no one that didn't see this coming. T8 is officially an upgrade now though still not by much at all. T7 bonuses are still technically better but the set bonuses on T8 plus the overall stat upgrades mean about a 1% upgrade for Unholy and more for Blood and Frost. So basically Unholy will want T8 just to get back the damage we'll lose on patch day. A+
as frost, i'm thinking 2 of each tier would be best, as a large majority of my dmg is FS/oblit (honestly, 4x t7 being BiS in t8 raids? ofc blizz would change that, that's a redundant idea to make the previous tier better), but it might be that harder hitting OB/BS is better than 5% crit to OB as it already sees 70-80% crit chance
here's a list i feel would be BiS for frost, since i dont see a whole lot of lovin for it here =(
any confirmation of whether ArPen affects frost strike damage? i wasn't able to find any in the frost forums
with these items, assuming tundra stalker's 5 expertise, you would be expertise capped and spell hit capped w/virulence + spriest (i would prefer if my rime'd HB and icy touch always hits my target instead of potentially screwing up my rotation, which assuming 4x t8 i'd be in BP and there's little room for a miss/dodge).
04/28/09, 6:56 AM
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