Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Gearing Strategy - Boom/DragonSoul

DS has been around a bit, we've had time to do a bunch of tests with gear and gear sets, etc.

There are 2 things to consider when playing with gear.
1) We're on the edge of a haste breakpoint with new gear, and you can get over it with certain combinations of gear. This is huge for multi-dot fights and a slight improvement for single target fights.
2) Our 4 pc in the new tier is...rather sad. As a result, if you have heroic from prior tier, hang onto the 2pc from it (I suggest hands and chest, as they're fairly well itemized) until you can get to 4pc Heroic of the current tier. Neither tier is great for shoulders and are a lot better than what you had before if you had tier (and there really aren't other options for the new tier), or don't break your set if you had a non-tier there. The new legs and head are very well itemized, and great places to upgrade, even from heroic in the prior tier. If you are coming in with normal prior tier, I suggest not loosing the old 2 pc until you can go 4pc as well, though it is good to do this as quickly as possible, even with raidfinder gear.

Regarding the haste breakpoint, I'll simply mention the numbers around where we currently are.
With DI: 2639 will get you +5 ticks
Just with NG up: 3102 will get you +5 ticks
With DI: 3783 will get you +6 ticks (this isn't possible without a bunch of heroic t13 gear and some other item choices that would go against normal max ilvl gearing)

If you're on the edge (within 50 or so) of those breakpoints, it is worth gemming some reds to reckless orange to get over that cap, or swapping in a slightly less ilvl item that has more haste on it (as in if you have the raid finder version of the haste/mastery ring, but not the normal, and are replacing a ring without haste on it naturally, such as shanox's heroic).
If you're not on the edge of the haste cap, do as usual, go for ilvl and then reforge into haste and stay at hit cap.

Note: When getting new tier, you may find some of it hard to upgrade without swapping 2 peices, rather than just 1, since they changed where the spirit is on the gear (from legs/hands to shoulder/chest). In the end, we will want 5 tier, but the chest will likely be resto to pick up haste instead of mastery, so don't use the chest to get to 4pc.

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