Monday 3 August 2009

When to break the Enhancement 4 piece Tier 7 set bonus

Last night Kam won the Tier 8 gloves, the Valorous Worldbreaker Grips. These are a reasonable upgrade over the Tier 7 gloves, however if I equipped them, I would break my 4 piece Tier 7 bonus. I was interested to find out what effect this would have, so I set out to discover when I should break my set bonus.

To do this I used ShockAndAwe to export 4 configurations to Enhsim

  • 4 piece T7 (Gloves, Chest, Legs, Shoulders) What I already have.
  • 3 piece T7 and 1 piece T8 (Gloves) The Tier 8 gloves I won.
  • 2 piece T7 (Chest, Shoulders) and 2 piece T8 (Gloves, Legs) Legs from Hodir which we can kill.
  • 4 piece T8 (Gloves, Legs, Helm, Chest) Helm and Chest from Emblems of Conquest which will likely be my next upgrades.
I then ran the 4 simulations, for 6 minutes with all 4 totems, a flask of endless rage, replenishment and various buffs I can guarantee in the raid (mostly MotW). The rotation was my standard priority-based one - Storm Strike first, Earth Shock, Lava Lash, then ES if SS is still on the target else SS, with Lightning Bolt taking top priority as soon as Maelstrom Weapon 5 is ready. The DPS figures were:

4 piece T7 3222
2 piece T7 (1 piece T8) 3194
2 piece T7 2 piece T8 3283
4 piece T8 3481

So as I suspected, loosing the 4 piece tier 7 set bonus for just 1 bit of tier 8 is a bad thing. However dropping to 2 piece tier 7 and 2 piece tier 8 results in an overall DPS increase. Getting 4 pieces of tier 8 is just... wow a pretty amazing increase (I double-checked the figures, I could hardly believe it).

In summary I'll be keeping my 4 piece tier 7 set bonus until I can get 2 bits of tier 8. Roll on 3.2!

5 comments:

Skraps said...

Is there an equivalent theory crafting for healing? I never know when it is good to break a set.

The 10% water shield 2 piece is nice, but a 10% better riptide is way better.

I really don't now how to equate what makes better healing. Except I do know Ulduar 10 without replenishment really sucks.

Zach said...

Excellent article (and timing too since I got the same gloves a few nights ago).

Hopefully tomorrow brings 3.2 and some upgrades!

Rakhman said...

@Skraps There is something on EJ about when to swap the set bonus for resto here. I guess healing is difficult to "simulate" and so on so you just got to have a try and see.

@Zach I'm also hoping for 3.2 tomorrow, all the signs look good!

Anonymous said...

You can go into more depth with the rotation to see better results. The rotation I use for enhSim is: MW5_LB, SW (spirit wolves), ES_SS, SS, ES, MT (magma totem), LS (lightning sheld), SR (shaministic rage), then LL. ES_SS should go before SS as ES will net higher dps with the SS debuff. magma totem and lightning shield will also help out the dps, both do yield a considerable amount of dps with 3/3 imp shields and 3 pts in call of flame(iirc name). Fully raid buffed, I think you could see an increase in your simmed dps of upwards in the 4k range.

Wangari said...

I got into a similar dilemma now with 3.2...
The T8 4piece set bonus is a huge increase in dps indeed and I was psyched when I finally got it. The contribution of those faster LBs to my overall dps just reached second place on the damage meters.
But then the new chestpiece from the Northrend Beasts dropped, and I got it, and now I gotta get rid of my set bonus... damn is that hard.
It's a bigger difference in iLevel though, this new chest is 245 against the 226 of the T8, so the stat difference is pretty huge.
I gotta get to the sim still and test it out, but I think this time it will be a dps boost, even considering the broken set...
Kinda strangely sad lol.

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