Tha mail girdle has 18 more spellpower than the cloth in base stats. 2 Gems with 19 SP = 38. 38-19= 20. What I originally said was correct. You aren't getting the socket bonus or if you do it will cost you one with another item. You are going to use your three prismatics on the helm, chest, and legs for a total of 23 SP from socket bonuses.

Remember you want to leave yourself enough below the hitcap to be able to use three yellow socket bonuses, (Neck, Chest and Cloak).

My gearing setup has 293 hit, with all gear getting the set bonuses without sacrificing anything.

The mail belt is also guaranteed the first drop. Sure you could get the cloth belt too if you want it, but it would help your guild out more to give it to them first and you take the belt only you can use. I'd rather "spend" whatever gives me loot on things I HAVE to fight with other people for, like Flare of the Heavens or Guiding Star.

Can you send me per private mail your itemlist? I want to compare my list with your in order to look whats better.

The Cloth girdle is not a problem because its a pattern. You need 10 Spellweave and 10 Shadowweave and 6 orbs they you can buy at vendors for Ulduar Raid emblems.

True getting the cloth belt may not be an issue at all, I'm just saying we have little options when chosing *other* gear that doesn't include either hit, MP5, or spirit, and as I said ultimately filling yellow slots with SP/Hit gems to reach cap would be preferable to hit our yellow socket bonuses, not using hit gems leaves us with inferior choices for yellows.

Item List

I also would like to bring up the Tailoring change, I haven't seen anyone mention it so far but it deserves merit.

Basically they change Lightweave to a 250 SP proc with a 45 second internal cooldown and a 50% proc chance which makes it worst case 75 Spellpower over our normal 23 Haste Enchant.

I'm going to drop Enchanting for Tailoring if this goes live as it is, because ultimately I want to keep my haste levels as low as possible so I don't have to worry about "wait times" on lava burst.

I don't see why everyone bases they're haste levels on tank & spank fights like patchwerk, come Ulduar there are going to be fights where your actually mobile from what im seeing so haste doesn't lose its value even at black zones like bink was talking about.

There are still going to be burn periods, whether it be on adds or the boss, where we need to maximize our dps in any way possible, and if the math shows that there are black zones for haste in certain areas, then avoiding bink's black zones is one of those ways. Shaving off an extra 3% to 4% of 2 second cast while running around is not going to increase your dps enough to warrant gaps in a burn phase, assuming it increases your dps at all.

Big Thx man, the only mistake i found you used the old t8 set with higher stats on it. Now i have to something to go on with my gear. =)

I'm still thinking about weapon. Someone said the best combo should be Voice of Reason (74) + Guiding Star (550) + Enchant (63), thats 687 SP. But I'm thinking about taking Staff of Endless Winter (587) + Enchant (81) so thats 668.
But Staff has aslo 2x blue sockets, so if you socket it with 2x 19 SP gem so you have 706 SP. With new Flametongue enchant (Bonus damage from spell power now based on weapon speed. Slower weapons will benefit more from spell power) which should add (just my tip) around +20 SP compares to Guiding Star.
I believe Staff of Endeless Winter is the winner.

p.s. Also if you are JC, it would be best slot where to put Prismatic gems (+32 SP) together with Helmet (both has Socket bonus +9 SP)

Yeah my fault sry again -.-

The damage from Flametongue based on speed is for attacks made with that weapon (ie for enhancement shaman) and will not effect elemental at all. So the advantage of the staff over the mace/shield is +21 SP, +58 crit and +5 int at the cost of 80 haste (and 15 MP5). Fairly close but the 1H and shield is better in my opinion.

Also bear in mind that it takes 2 blue gems to get the +9 SP socket bonus, so only 4.5 SP per gem - you can get more by putting them elsewhere. For example the kilt will give +7 spell power and only use one of your prismatics and you can get another +5 SP from the wrist socket bonus. So that is +12 SP from sockets as opposed to your +9,

Uldar Gear Selections

This is the spread sheet I've come up with to help figure out some questions I had about what my end-game setup would look like after Ulduar. I apologize for the VERY poor setup, so I'll explain it very quickly. The top set of gear was my first crack at what my Ulduar gear would look like, and the 2nd set below it is my current gear. The comparison after my current gear is the difference in stats from my current gear to that first Uldar gear set. The third set was my 2nd crack at an Ulduar gear set where I switched to the crafted cloth belt and switched from the Frozen Loop to the Pyrelight Circle (Signet of Manifested Pain has slightly more int but all the other damage stats are the same so I chose it over Pyrelight).

The comparion at the very bottom of the spread sheet is a comparison between the 2 Ulduar gear sets. While both sets are extremely close, I'm leaning towards the cloth belt/Pyrelight combo over the mail belt/Frozen Loop combo. A 22 spellpower gain (gemming the way I did) while losing 13 haste 3 crit and 3 hit definitely feels worth it.

The only real change I'm considering here is not putting Reckless Monarch Topazes in the neck/back and just putting Runed Scarlet Rubies there instead. As Ezareth pointed out earlier, I'm worried about Lava Burst wait times. Although I'm not sure the wait time on a Lava Burst would outweigh the gain on a further hasted Lightning Bolt.


Another thing I was thinking of, how will the T8 2 piece bonus affect crit scaling while we have that bonus equipped? I imagine the dps value of haste and crit will be a bit closer when taking that bonus into consideration.

The 2 Piece bonus will increase our DPS 1.5-2%, more if we work on shocking multiple targets during our rotations(God that will throw a monkey wrench into things).

Overall adding crits to our flameshock dots doesn't make crit too much more useful, especially since it can't proc clearcasting or elemental oath and from all I've seen it is not even affected by our meta gem.

I haven't seen too many options in BIS gear where I have the choice to chose between haste or crit, usually it is spellpower at the cost of anything/everything else but hit.

Because hit is now such an easy thing to max I think our #1 focus when gearing for BIS will be trying not to overshoot hit while maximizing spellpower, satisfying those two rules leaves us little other manuevering room in respect to gemming/gearing of haste/crit.

While it would be quite the task to keep track of, it's something that shadow priests and affliction locks have been doing for years. My only problem with a multi-target shocking method is a fight where every inch of dps is required on a target to kill it before something happens. In that situation, switching away from your main target to increase overall dps instead of your current target dps would not be a good idea. However, the game just doesn't seem hard enough to have something like that in it anymore if you're in a high end guild.

I hadn't heard/seen anything about this yet. Can this be confirmed?

Interesting ! do you know how long this buff will last ? I deleted the ptr from my computer so I can't check. I guess it's 12 or 15 seconds.
sure it will be great reason to change into tailoring if it really goes like that.

At the moment I'm expecting ~140 dps from 2pc, ~353 from 4pc, and the resulting EP values are SP: 1.409, Haste: 1.457, Crit 1.016 (which makes those new resto boots worth less than the ele/moonkin t7 boots)

Bink, when you came up with those EP values, were you using current gear? Or Ulduar gear? I'm basically in BiS gear right now and my EP values are closer to 1.2, 1.0 and 0.6 based on your latest spreadsheet.

Ulduar gear (my own selection however), with the T8 options switched on (although I am using r12 atm, not r11 which you'll have)

I'm getting similar results from my spreadsheet : SP = 1.44, Haste = 1.46, Crit = 0.88. I need to find out why my crit value is lower but point for point, it appears Haste and SP will be extremely close.

Fairly certain. It's a minute difference, and it's still better to gem for spellpower, but given the fact that SP is a fairly static figure, and haste is not.
It's also probably because I'm expecting 3200+ spellpower at that point too.

Does anyone know if they limited the EE taunt to non-boss mobs only (like AotD) or would it still taunt bosses?

Seems like popping EE on cooldown would be a decent boost to DPS as long as someone else covers imp SoE.

As most have expected since the CL change never made it live on PTR, GC confirmed today that they are not changing CL in 3.1

Its not something I have seen discussed much here, but somewhere along the way I have also noticed Haste going from being "a bit better than crit" on a point-for-point basis to "almost as good as SP". I thought I had made some awful error in my own spreadsheet when I first got the result, so I was very relieved when SEIC showed the same thing.

The 3.08 buffs would have a lot to do with it, as would gear improvements, however its certainly time to update the mantra of spellpower being miles better than any other stat.

Certainly, as SP increases it seems to lose some of it's advantage over the the other stats - much like it did in TBC (though then crit was obviously a bigger thing). If we look at why haste and crit were/are less significant, it is because they have less impact on a significant portion of our rotation. Haste doesn't allow you to cast significantly more LvBs or FSs and crit doesn't have the same impact on those spells as it does on our lighting spells. As haste increases however, the length of our rotation stays the same but the time spent casting those spells reduces. Therefore the proportion of our time spent casting spells that are poorly affected by haste and crit reduces.

In 3.1 this is exaggerated by the loss of the T7 4pc bonus which emphasised LvB (though not much), and the gaining of the T8 2&4pc bonuses. This has the effect of reducing the advantage that LvB had over the other spells and therefore reducing further the the impact of the portion of the rotation that is poorly affected by haste and crit. Similarly the FS T8 bonus does a simlar thing there.

It appears from Bink's spreadsheets (and mine) that by the time we get to BiS Ulduar gear that haste will be starting to overtake SP on a point for point basis (though not in item budget terms) and we will need to readjust our thinking a little.

However, I think it has a practical implication that we need to look at before then.

In Ulduar, gear tends to have larger socket bonuses and even early on, it might be beneficial to socket haste gems to get a good SP socket bonus. For example, the Pendant of Fiery Havoc has a yellow socket with a +5 SP socket bonus. Is 19 SP > 16 Haste + 5 SP or does 14 SP + 8 Haste win the day? Using Bink's EP values (because I've got more faith in his numbers than mine):

In full Ulduar gear:

19 SP = 27.36 EP
5 SP + 16 Haste = 30.56 EP
14 SP + 8 Haste = 31.84 EP

The orange gem becomes the best one for the socket and a pure SP gem is the worst of the three.

With current EP values for BiS from SEIC, we get the following:

19 SP = 24.23 EP
5 SP + 16 Haste = 18.903 EP
14 SP + 8 Haste = 24.11 EP

The SP is only marginally better than the orange gem if the socket bonus is +5 SP.

So there is going to be a point fairly early in 3.1 at which we need to swing from a purely "gem for SP" approach to something a little more sophisticated. Is that point when we hit a certain SP, a certain haste, a certain set bonus or, as is most likely, a combination of these? At the moment I don't know - I need to do more work on that.