Thursday 3 September 2009

Aledar's Battlestar in which slot?

I was lucky enough to get Aledar's Battlestar from Trial of the Champion last night, got it gemmed and enchanted up with Berserking. This thing is awesome, with hit, attack power, a socket and more DPS than anything from Naxxramas 10. Best of all it is one handed and not unique, which leads to me wondering which slot I should put it in.

In Kam's main hand we have Kel'Thuzad's Reach, taken from the man's cold, dead, boney Lich fingers. In Kam's off hand we have Pride bought with those retro Emblems of Heroism.

Simulation time!
To solve this, I turned to Enhsim (hey look 1.8.3.3 is just out!) and the usual rotations etc, this time I put Ghost Wolves in as a priority. I also exported two configs directly out of WoW using ShockAndAwe - one with the Battlestar in Kam's main hand, one with it in the off-hand slot. See Integrating EnhSim, Shock and Awe, and Pawn on BigHitBox.com for more details about the whole process. The results were:

Battlestar in the Off Hand: 3137 dps
Battlestar in the Main Hand: 3152 dps

So those figures are pretty close actually, and my messing up in a raid may well make them equivalent. I think I might go spend some time on a target dummy to double-check. So what are the pros and cons?

Replace Main Hand
Pro: Hit rating. With the 50 hit from Pride and the hit on Battlestar, I could dump my Malygos necklace for the superior Ancient Pendant of Arathor, and still be spell hit capped. This would also make it easy to upgrade to Wailing Night (a no hit item for another no hit item).
Pro: Better simulated DPS overall.
Con: Upgrading the better item (Reach vs Pride) feels wrong.

Replace Off Hand
Pro: Upgrading the lower level item first. I could keep my tasty Kel'thuzad's Reach.
Pro: Like it or not, WoW Heroes scores are creeping into use in the guild to judge who is ready for a particular encounter. Replacing Pride would result in an overall score increase. Probably. Although if I could start using Arathor's Pendant it might not!
Con: Worse simulated DPS.
Con: I would loose 50 hit rating and be unable to start using a better neck piece, without expensive re-gemming.

TLDR
No clear winner on this one, other than get another Aledar's Battlestar. I think I will be playing around with using it in both slots, swapping gear in and out, for a while before I make a final decision. I am heavily leaning toward replacing KT's Reach, WoW Heroes score be damned!

1 comment:

Stormcrazed said...

If you have better luck than me, by the time you're done testing and deciding which hand to put it in you'll have one for each hand.

I haven't seen it drop in 12 consecutive days now.

Out of sheer bad luck and being outbid/outrolled, I've been stuck with my fast Uld-10 trash drop expertise mace in my offhand since early June.

If Blizzard didn't screw up Shaman melee weapon itemisation in Ulduar 10 so badly, I wouldn't feel so ripped off.

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