We are also losing 66 hit going from T9 Triumphant battlegear to equiv T10 gear. Not huge but tough to gem for that when you have all your gems slots stuffed with expertise.

The thing to keep in mind is that the amounts of any stat get larger with every tier of gear and both expertise and hit are "cap"-able stats.

There is already a ring with 60 expertise on it, what if there is say a nice 2.6 speed axe with another 50. That would mean, as an Orc, I am already over the expertise cap with just those 2 pieces of gear and effectively wasting item budget.

Wait till all the gear is seen before complaining about the stat breakdown. If we are incapable of meeting the necessary caps then people can start complaining but we don't have enough information yet so just settle down for now.

I don't mean it as doom and gloom, just that i really like to feel some kind of freedom when choosing gear, and seemingly loosing that flexibility is annoying :-P

Also it is easier to just test stat stacking with regems than having to rely on raid drops, as i am sure that we all have found on the bad end of "random is random", so having higher flexibility on those = preferable IMHO.

If there was too much on the tier pieces you get just as locked out of loot as too little except then it would be even worse. What if they put 67 expertise on the gloves? Then as an orc I can't use that ring because it puts me way over the cap and the additional expertise would be wasted. With how they are now I can use my T9 gloves as an offset piece until I get that ring or another upgrade that has an equivalent amount of expertise and then upgrade my gloves to T10 without any real issues.

I'm actually more worried about the lack of hit on the tier pieces since we need a lot more of that to reach the spell hit cap, especially if we want to be capped without the 3% raid buff for 10 mans, but there is no need to fret about a loss of freedom until we see more of what will be available.

Given that, between the Ashen Verdict, updated Dalaran Ring, and at least two rings so far in the instance itself, there will be lots of options to fill those slots it strikes me as rather limiting to point to the ring as an excuse to limit the flexibility of the other 3 races that need 140 points of Exp just so Orcs don't go over cap. Especially when Orcs could, just as easily, replace at least one piece of Exp toting tier gear with an off set piece to use the ring as well.

Additionally, the argument also runs on the assumption that the BiS weapon(s) for us in the instance won't be Maces, either because Black Bruise truly proves to be as bad as expected, they don't itemize an axe at the 262 lvl, or they do another 1 iLvL boost off of Arthas drops similar to Kel in Naxx.

I was looking forward to going back at 85 to get a Shadowmourne.

Yes (even more so than on live).

I'm not too sure what to think about the lack of Expertise on our gear. Last I checked the MMOC drop lists (which should be noted that they aren't complete), none of the leather physical DPS gear had Expertise on it either, so it seems that ring is one of our few options apart from lots of gemming. I mean, to my knowledge, the whole reason Blizzard put Expertise on our gear is because Hunters don't need it, so the chance for a non-set mail piece to have Expertise is slim to none.

Oh well, if we have to gem it, then we'll do what we have to do .

I have a Hunter and a Shaman on separate accounts, so I was able to use my own hunter to check this. Just using Beast Lore, I was able to view the damage range of my wolves via my Hunter.

Without using Kibler's Bits, I had a damage range of 471 to 596. With using Kibler's Bits, I had a damage range of 476 to 600. But there's one thing to note, it seems that you can only buff a single wolf with the pet food.

Looks like we've got a matched set of fists in ICC25; the aforementioned Black Bruise, and the recently found Keleseth's Seducer. Given that there's the Bloodvenom Blade to service DW Death Knights, it won't surprise me if that will likely be it baring potential end of instance weapons on Arthas.

If Bruise can't perform, we'll likely be fishing in the ICC10 pool.

Using EP values to attempt to quantify what we need the proc to be worth it would have to be worth ~175.33 dps to be equal to the 278.3EP stat value difference between the fist and that sword.

The proc says "your weapon hits" so lets work off the assumption that all weapon hits (not just mainhand hits) can proc it at the 1% rate. Over a 5 minute 4 second Jaraxxus-25H kill, I had 466 melee hits that should qualify under the conditions listed for the proc. That would be a hit every 0.65 seconds or approximately 1 proc every 65 seconds. Giving it an uptime of 10/65 or 15.4%. The melee component of my dps on that encounter worked out to 3565.8 dps so the 9% additional shadow damage would be 321 dps while active and with a 15.4% uptime that would be 49.4 dps.

If the proc's damage is affected by CoE and can crit separately then it would be worth 434.6 dps or 66.9 dps with the 15.4% uptime. Which pretty much matches Levva's conclusions from a page or so ago. So unless there is something we are missing that weapon is not going to be an upgrade when compared to either the 10 man ICC options or the current options from ToC.

I haven't seen a mention yet of "Shawl of Nerubian Silk." It drops of Marrowgar in 10man.

In its 10man normal (iLevel 251) version, it has 56 expertise, along with 41 hit, 122 attack power, 72 agi, and a red socket with a 4 agi bonus.

With the heroic version of this cloak (likely 60ish expertise), as well as the ring, you only need one expertise gem (unless you're taking advantage of your racial).

Since this comes from a fairly simple (from what I've read) boss in 10man heroic, it won't be hard to obtain once heroics are available.

Seems to me like there isn't any reason to be worried about our lack of expertise.

Are you going to lose all the expertise on your current gear when you zone into IC? No, you will gradually lose it over that same period as you replace pieces of your current tier set. You will then be forced to gem expertise to make up for these losses until you eventually acquire the coveted gear with actual expertise on it. Sure, this is less than optimal, but I don't see a real problem with it either.

That cloak drops off the very first boss in Icecrown on normal mode. Gating has got nothing to do with it. I'd be surprised if several of us aren't wearing that on Tues (US)/Wed (EU) next week when patch 3.3 hits.

See http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=904 for Icecrown consolidated loot lists found so far.

Thanks, Levva.

I hope a lot of people will be lucky enough to pick one up! Unfortunately, it's not really much of an upgrade (if any) to the easily attainable 258 cloaks in ToGC. Either way, the heroic version will be excellent for people who don't like to gem for expertise. That one, we WILL have to wait a little while for. QQ

My response was poorly worded. What I was trying to say is that with such limited options of Exp\Hit there will be a handful of almost necessary pieces, or we would have to completely regem for Exp\Hit before considering other upgrades viable, which is kind of contradictory to Blizzard's statements towards Ele Shaman on New Gear. Luckily for Enhancement there will be no Tier9 set nerfs ;p

As for what Levva said, I forgot that ICC was having loot like ToC and that there was also the same cloak from 10-man non-heroic. Yes that cloak will probably be had by a lot of people the first day ICC is out (pending glitches), but It's still a shame that our gear is itemized identically to Hunter's, when you would think them doing significantly better damage would be enough >.>

So how is this change (5 min cooldown instead of 2 min cooldown) going to affect the way we use the fire elemental? it seems that in any fight longer than 6 minutes that the fire elemental glyph would still win out over say the windfury glyph for example in dps. as the windfury glyph seems to have a marginal ~80-85 dps increase for me using the SIM. has anyone else done any Sim testing or math since the official change? (and in good news, 5 minute cooldown is at least slightly better than expected if not precisely desired)

You say that you're taking a weighted average between the single target and multi-target fights. What sort of weights are you assigning to each fight?

From your post in the EnhSim thread, I used the second option. 62% boss+2 adds, 38% single target. I simply simmed with 100% uptime for each fight, then used the % time you showed.

It may be better to break it down even further, i.e. assuming all 4 fights (I am excluding faction champions) last an equal amount of time (I know they don't): 36% single target, 45% boss+1 add, 19% boss+4 adds.

Ah, no that should be fine. I just wasn't clear that is what you were doing.

The numbers I worked up (the 62% uptime for 2 adds) takes into account fight length for the 4 relevant fights in the zone. It's part of the reason that the number is so high, because the Anub'arak fight is so long (also because it has 4 adds).

Yeah, that makes much more sense now.


On that topic, I noticed that you used a fight length of 7 minutes with a RNG of 35%. The average fight length that I came up with for the zone was just over 5 minutes. Not sure how big a difference that will make.

When considering the RNG value, I know there has been a lot of discussion about it. I was kind of thought that if you just picked a middle (or median) fight length, and then adjusted the RNG so that the high end hits the longest fight and the low end hits the shortest fight (or something close; doesn't have to be exact).
That way, as the sim run fights of different lengths, it simulates fighting the various bosses in the zone in question each with their own duration.

I was going by our recent kills of bosses 1,2 and 4. We are still working on anub, but are getting to p3 at about 6:30, so I am going on the assumption our first kill will be ~9:00-9:30 in. I didn't want to push the RNG level too high and was also basing it on previous RNG discussion, so I settled on 35% and 7 mins, which let me go as low as 5 mins. Our fastest fight was twins, at 4:30.

As it happens 7m and 35% are the new defaults in the config.txt file, arrived at by similar reasoning

Could someone please post some info on the new Fire Nova spell, and how that fits into our rotation as Enhancement Shammies? I haven't played on the PTR, and I'm unclear about what priority to give it in the rotation. And before anyone suggests it, I can't test it in Enhsim right now because Rawr can't download my profile.

The default setting of Enhsim seems to put Fire Nova fairly far down in the rotation, but I'm not sure how that would work given that Magma Totem is a fairly short duration. It's hard to imagine having two spare GCD slots close enough together to cast MT and then FN while MT is still up.