Set Bonuses

First night of raids for the reset this week, and we cleared 8 bosses. Heavy nerfs on the first two wings by blizzard. Personally I'm a bit disappointed in this. I understand wanting to let more people experience these raids, but at the same time, cant they leave them challenging for a few months at least? At least keep the 25 man versions Heroic! If blizzard wants to make things so easy just eliminate the bosses and put a chest behind the trash that everyone can loot.

Ok enough complaining. I did get 2 nice upgrades last night off of Thorim. Both the Conqueror's Worldbreaker Chestguard and the Frost-bound Chain Bracers are best in slot and by decent margins currently.

Equipping the chest meant breaking up my T7 4 piece Set Bonus though. 5% haste on flurry is a pretty serious bonus.Flurry is up about 80% of the time, so in effect its virtually and extra 4% melee haste. in 3.1 it takes 25.21 haste rating to give a shaman 1% haste. so that is equal to ~101 melee haste rating. As we are almost always casting instant spells the value of haste for us in mostly in how it effects out white damage and spell haste is of little consequence to us. my current EP value for haste is 1.65 so that would give the the 4pc bonus a rough value of 167 EP, maybe a bit lower since its only melee haste, but not much lower. The 8.25 chest is a huge upgrade of 113 EP from 7.25 but losing the set bonus makes it a net loss in a straight up swap.

Now I do have some other options, being that I have all 5 pieces ofValorous Earthshatter Battlegear. I was using the gloves, legs, chest, and shoulders, along with Blue Aspect Helm Blue Aspect is worth about 78EP more than T7.25. I also have Frosted Adroit Handguards, which were in the bank since I needed the gloves for the set. The Frosted gloves are about 35EP better than the 7.25 gloves.

So I have two sets I can experiment with. I can build a set with the 8.25 chest and the 7.25 helm, gloves, shoulders , and legs, or I can punt the 4 pc bonus and drop down to only the legs and shoulders for the 2 pc bonus, along with Blue Aspect and Frosted Adroit. Using Enhsim I ran sims for both sets of gear and keeping the 4 piece bonus simmed out at about 40 dps higher, even considering that the helm and gloves are inferior gear. I guess its a nice change from TBC where the set bonuses were mediocre at best and the tier gear was suboptimal too.

Looking ahead the set bonuses on T8 are nice for both the 2 piece and the 4 piece. Looks like there is nothing to do but finish upgrading to full T8.25. :)

Ulduar Week 2

< Fire and Blood > Made some progress in week 2 of Ulduar. We are back to 4 nights of raids. Wednesday we cleared everything that we had gotten down in week 1. Friday we had some attendance issues. Not enough tanks to work on progression, so considering that, and in light of the fact we had 2 raiders who had switched classes and had recently dinged 80 we went to Naxx. We also took along several social members so all in all while it was disappointing to not progress, it was worthwhile.

Sunday saw us back in Ulduar where we downed Ignis, and one shotted Auriaya. We then spent the rest of the evening working on Thorim. Last night we decided to go for Hodir and Freya, and we did down both of them, to make it 4 new bosses this week. Not exactly tearing through the bosses, but its steady progression at least. Hopefully by this time next week, I'm posting that we are working on Yogg-Saron.

Ulduar

So one week into Ulduar and we didn't get as far as I'd hoped. I missed half the raids due to family visiting. Bad timing with that. But we did manage to get. Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, Assembly of Iron, and Kologarn.

My initial thoughts. I'm glad Ulduar is harder. It shouldnt be cleared in one week , by any but the hardest of hardcore guilds even if that. I've missed trash that couldnt just be grouped up and AoE'd down. I've missed working on bosses. I'm actually not a big fan of hard modes, but I understand why Blizzard went that route. So considering their bad players should still see all content philosophy I'm pleasently suprised at the difficulty I've seen so far.

I also got a cloak upgrade.Drape of the Lithe I need to run enhsim and get some new EP values. But my computer is on life support at the moment. It freezes up quite often when playing WoW, and I'm not sure why. It will freeze at other times but much less often. Its rapidly approaching 4 years old, so I ordered up a new core i7 rig the other day. It should be ready in the next day or so. Looking forward to running with nice video settings again. I've had to turn them all the way down since Wrath launched.

GC on ulduar weapons

Shaman (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Orc Shamans and Axe Racial
We looked at the loot table of Ulduar and were satisfied that there were sufficient slow off-hands available. However, we do think there is some validity to orc shamans not often being able to benefit from the axe racial. With so many one-handed items to make, we get much more use out of itemizing maces, fists and swords, since those can be used by more classes. (Source)

So it sounds like there is more than one slow OH, Yay! Vulmir is damn sexy, but I'll be happy if there is more than one option, as the PRT had only revealed, the Golden Saronite Dragon as a Shaman weapon and that MH only. Now Insanity's Grip had been found as well, but thats MH only also.

Ulduar

Bad luck last night trying to raid Ulduar. It was out first night so we were proceeding a bit slow, got to Flame Leviathian. pulled, and the instance went down. stayed down for about an hour or so. Got back on and took FL to 1% before wiping. Should have killed him easy. Got him down next go with ease. Moved on to Razorscale. Got 2 pulls in. People have gotten to used to trash being mindless. As we try and run after wiping the second time the Instance server grashes again. We wait for an hour or so before calling the raid for the night. :(