Sunday, September 20, 2009

4t9 update

I switched to 4t9 from 2t8/2t9 earlier this week and wanted to give an update of how it's going so far.

Ulduar:
On most single target fights I noticed no significant difference between this and 2t8/2t9, dps was within the ~5% of RNG.  Hodir dps was better then expected (15k and I didn't get many crit buffs) so that was positive.
Freya3 I saw a slight improvement but not significant, YS1 I saw a decent improvement.

ToC (Heroic 25):
Northrend Beasts - no significant difference in overall dps.
Lord Jaraxxus - I managed to get RNG screwed on both portals this week and couldn't get Eclipse up for either, which made me feel better about switching to 4t9.  It's doubtful that extra bit of starfire dps made the difference, but you never know - portal dps is usually very close and 2t8 wouldn't have helped at all.
Faction Champions - N/A, since I spend most of my time CCing.
Twins - dps went up slightly.  I suspect most moonkins would have seen a dps decrease here, but our strat requires me to move a lot and play catcher.  So more damage from DoTs and lower Eclipse uptime means the stats/bonus from 4t9 showed up.
Anub'arak - Comparing to last week I saw roughly a 5-6% dps increase.  About 1% of this is from switching to the Starfall Glyph, but most of it is from extra damage to the boss - lots of haste/SP means adds die faster and I switch back to the boss quicker, which adds up.  Eclipse uptime is also a little lower here then normal, because I either AOE during Eclipse or during time I should be proccing Eclipse.

Overall:
I'm happy with the dps increase just for Anub, that's the fight we're really working on this week so anything I can do to increase damage there I consider a good thing.  The higher mana pool seems to help for Anub as well, since AOE is so heavy.

3 comments:

  1. Hey Smo, nice blog!

    Couple of question, first off with your current gear your haste is a bit above 500. Would 2/3 CF instead of 2/3 IIS be less of a dps loss for you? Since your gear provides added haste.

    Secondly, due to the fact I have decent dps my guild is gearing lower dps with trophies to bring everyone up. So I've been able to get my hands on 1 trophy and bought the 232 helm for the little stat increase and 2set. Now that my 10m group can kill Anub Heroic I should have access to more trophies. So question is should I get Shoulders / Hands first for 4set and then replace the ilvl 232 helm?

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  2. Another question about glyphing for Anub 25m HM. How often are you actually increasing the duration of MF with SF, and if not often would it be better to glyph IS / MF / Starfall? Replacing Starfire with Starfall instead of IS.

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  3. 1) They're probably relatively close, but CF helps AOE, Imp IS is just single target (and a relatively small boost to single target). CF also lets me dps enraged scarabs better if I can't run.

    2) This is a bit of a tricky question. I wouldn't switch to 4t9 without the stat boost, the set bonuses is very in favor of 2t8. Helm/Chest are high itemization pieces (by which I mean you get more spell power per ilvl for a chest/helm, compared to shoulder/gloves/etc). So having the 245 chest/helm is pretty key if you are going to switch, I don't think I would for 232 gear.

    3) I can almost always increase the duration of MF with starfire, and looking at the GCDs saved I'm pretty sure it's superior to IS on almost every fight. Also, the 3% hit (while not being great) might help, who knows.

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