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. :)