I've been overwhelmed with emblems, obviously. Today's Googling popped up a post over at Gray Matter from about a week and a half ago, however, that nearly ends the trouble. It's a list of 'kin raiding gear, ranked by what Graylo thinks is the appropriate DPS for each piece.
Now I realize he says...
This list is a tool, not a blue print for how to gear. I’ve never intended these lists to be the definitive guide on how to gear a raiding moonkin.
... and I get it. But I just don't have the time to do this right. Let's cherry pick from the excellent research and posting Graylo and Cowtarus have done to see what direction a part-timer should go with their emblems.
So though he says not to, I'm going to pretend that Graylo's lists are hierarchical BiS lists (BiS, I've learned, meaning "Best in Slot") so that I can save some time. I really don't have the energy to figure out how close to accurate he is. He's done better than I could by miles and miles, and I'm happy enough as is.
I'm taking Graylo's list and only including items that fit one of these "part-timer accessible" categories.
Bought with emblems that you can grab from 5-man dungeons.
Craftables that aren't BoC (ie, items you could find in the AH)
Fall from a 5-man instance, heroic or normal.
Rep rewards (though I think the ICC (Icecrown Citadel) rep is beyond us).
The Kirin Tor will sell it to you for enough gold to buy most of Shattrath.
EoT items are in bold. I'll try to clean up the html at some point.
This is an interesting slot, as Graylo explains that if you can get this to drop, from the top of the list, that you, as a boomkin, shouldn't have too much competition for the piece. Bad in that there's nothing on this list that's from EoT or EoF. The Bejeweled Bracers look like about it, as I think you could swipe a crafted pair from the AH.
There's also limited evidence that you can bag the Bracers for playing Bejeweled, or at could at one point (man, that'd be nice, but I don't see it corroborated anywhere). Note also that the mats for those gloves require 60 EoT themselves! (15 EoT times four Crusader Orbs).
Disclaimer: I urge you to view the trinkets with some level of skepticism. A lot of the trinkets have proc with unknown rates and cooldowns. Additionally, the trinkets that proc mobs to fight for you are hard to evaluate.
Fun to see that I've already got the Blood Boil Lancet. I'm on the list!
Idol
From Graylo:
At this point you should only be thinking about two idols. The [Idol of Lunar Eclipse] is the best and it is purchasable with Emblems of Frost. However, you may be saving your Emblems for your Tier Set or another item. In such a case you should at least have the [Idol of Lunar Fury]. It is purchase able with Emblems of Triumph. Since it is incredibly easy to farm EoTs at the moment, using anything less then the Idol of Lunar Fury is pretty stupid.
Wow. Graylo's list is wonderful. And I'm also able to quit irrationally leaving out slots that I usually ignore, like rings and trinkets. So now I'm not so interested in shoulders and gloves anymore -- those are the only things I could even get enough EoF to grab at the rate I'm going. They're tabled. Although the following back item:
... is probably the first thing to grab with Frost. It's the only cloak on Graylo's list that fits part-timer accessible gear.
After some thinking, I'm down to a ring or a helm. Here's the comparison. The order shouldn't matter too much; it's the same number of emblems (duh) no matter what I buy first. Since I already have 43, the question is if I'd rather have neither for three days, max, or the ring for those three extra days and the helm later.
Ring gives me 58 Int, 39 Sta, 50 Spi, 50 Haste (1.52%), and 56 Spell Power over what I have now for 35 emblems. The helm gives me 92 Int, 56 Sta, 313 Armor, 13 Crit (0.28%), 72 Hit (2.2%), 31 Spell Power, and 1 Socket over what I have now for 50 EoTs.
I'm tempted to go helm. 92x15 mana is nice, and that's 34x15 more mana than the ring. Extra hit, a little crit, and armor is also nice. Downside is minus 15 spell power and a little haste. Yeah, I think I go helm (though I should've given idols more thought).
What a waste of time. Sheesh. How can this possibly be fun?! ;^)
Well, I"ve run a few more runs, and am up to 43 Emblems of Triumph, with two more pretty easily within reach after a run today. It's pretty much time to buy.
Here's my only question: Without WoWHead, WoW Wiki, or Thottbot, how was I supposed to figure out all the different choices for the emblems? That is, where is the in-game primer on emblems and gear? Because boy, I missed with my first swipe. Now that everyone's getting emblems thrown at them for logging on, it might be useful to include some info on them.
First, there's not just one person selling gear for emblems, there are, count 'em, at least three, and at least two are selling completely different stuff.
And one in Dalaran (the only one I'd found previously): Arcanist Miluria
And then some of these are Horde folk, and some are Alliance. Some items require battleground ratings. Some don't. Some are part of T9 and others are more expensive (and more powerful, if you don't plan to hit tier bonuses).
In any event, the state of things for n00bs like me sux0rz. I really don't have the time to sort through all this crap, and my social guild doesn't have another boomkin to give me their quick recommendation. I mean, heck, after looking through last night, my best bet appears to be to bag a ring or two. My current ring gear stinks too. But then I'll never grab even a 2t9 bonus.
Lets just say that there are options for gear upgrades that are much cheaper than I thought before, and there's no place that I've stumbled over yet that clearly explains the druid options for those who are only planning to earn enough EoTs to grab one or two pieces. /sigh
In other news, I've upgraded a few Cloth purples for Leather, got a Core Hound Pup in the mail, though I'm not sure why, ran Grundak (Heroic), and become Exalted with Sons of Hodir -- first exalted rep for Jal. Time to find another grind for my spare time.
I've been doing enough PUGging recently to be exposed to emblems. At my last post, about a week ago, I had a gear score of around 2970. A day later, it was about a hundred points more (actually, I can piece stuff from my panzer set with my boomkin and get to about 3300, but the hybrid set really isn't good for anything else; it's neither highest melee/dmg mit or highest dps). I haven't done much for my gear since then, but I have been banging out Emblems of Frost and, surprisingly to me, Emblems of Triumph with regularity. I thought once a new emblem came out, everything else was deprecated. Not true. Two emblems (Frost and Triumph, duh) are still active, giving you ins for T9 and T10 gear.
WowWiki has a pretty good graphic describing what's going on. Click the image below to see the original version, contributed by WowWiki user ShandrisForever.
The bottom line is that you can get two Emblems of Frost per day just by running a random heroic. I'm a little torn on ethics here, as I'm often the least geared schmoe in my xserver PUGs. Still, I'm putting out 1st or 2nd place dps per run, with just a little trouble from oom drinking between trash at times. That 1st or 2nd place is with the time outs for drinks, however, so I still don't feel horrible. If you're new to Heroics, don't feel bad. At a GS of 3000, I'm still contributing as a boomkin.
I'm up from 15 to 25 Emblems of Triumph somehow. You get them for running Onyxia, Ulduar bosses, Malygos, and LK heroic bosses, according to the guide linked above. It looks like I've run Drak'Tharon, Culling of Strath, Violet Hold, and Azjol-Nerub on Heroic now and a few more on standard. /shrug Running extra random heroics also bag Triumphs. (We kid because we love, Hasselhoff.)
So now that I know that my Emblems of Triumph aren't deprecated, and now that I know that I'm racking up Emblems of Triumph pretty danged quickly without really trying, I've tried to take into account what I'm currently wearing and figure out how to best upgrade to T9 and T10 pieces. There are two T10 pieces for 60 Emblems of Frost. If we want to pretend I'll eventually spend mine on anything, I have to target one of those, so I'm looking at shoulder or hands.
Let's also dismiss the mid and heroic levels of tiered gear. These mid and heroic levels of gear, btw, are where the Trophy of the Crusade (etc), a raid reward, comes into play. There seem to be three levels of each tier of gear -- base, mid, and heroic. That is, there are T9 low, T9 mid, and T9 heroic gear sets. Likewise, there are T10 low, T10 mid, and T10 heroic gear sets too. You might also see these called T9, T9.25, and T9.50 (or T10, T25.10, etc) because of their raid requirements. T10 means the lowest level, that require only emblems. T10.25 means you needed the Trophy From a 25 man raid. T10.50 means a heroic trophy is needed.
No matter which level of tier 9 is worn, all pieces count towards the same set bonuses, much like in earlier tiers of gear. Each faction has their own flavor of the items, they are functionally identical, but have different artwork and names.
Item level 245 pieces require 1.5 time as much Emblems of Triumph as the Item level 232 pieces require and they also require, in addition to the emblems, a [Trophy of the Crusade]. [that's T9 mid -Panzer].
Item level 258 pieces are, however, "purchased" with the normal loot tokens. [that's T9 heroic. Emblems are no good there. Enjoy. -Panzer]
I'm going to have a hard enough time collecting emblems for the lowest level of tiered gear. At least if we go pro soon, the WoW Wiki quote, above, says that our lowest level tiered gear will still contribute to set bonuses. I also think that you can upgrade your pieces with trophies (etc) later on, meaning that you're not wasting any time buying them now, though I'm not absolutely sure I have that right. But come on, the next expansion will be out before we get too far into piecing together a set, and then quest rewards will overpower the tiers if they pull another BC (which most say they aren't, but allow me the vent here anyway)!
Bottom line is that if you're a part-timer, I'll pretend you're not planning for raid rewards yet either. So let's go back to looking at T9 and T10 (lowest level of each) shoulder and hand gear, and compare to my current gear.
So here's the comparison. (The danged table scrolls under my blogger template here, even when I use obnoxiously small fonts. Click the previous link to see the whole thing. I'm sure the html issue is some z-value deal in CSS or some such, but I'm not tracking it down now.)
3 Int 257 Armor 44 Crit (0.96%) 44 Hit (1.34%) 16 Spell Power
35 Haste (1.07%)
1 Int 44 Sta 51 Spi 281 Armor 60 Resilience (0.73%) 34 Spell Power 1 Sockets
1 Int 44 Sta 39 Spi 207 Armor 47 Resilience (0.57%) 34 Spell Power 1 Sockets
37 Int 23 Sta 311 Armor 71 Crit (1.55%) 63 Haste (1.92%) 54 Spell Power 1 Sockets
37 Int 23 Sta 232 Armor 71 Crit (1.55%) 63 Hit (1.92%) 54 Spell Power 1 Sockets
TL:DR
Let's not kid ourselves. I just wasted a ton of time. But let's try to gain from the time I wasted and share it amongst ourselves, right? If we're running cross-server pick up groups (xserver PUGs), we're going to get a ton of emblems. If we don't play WoW all that much, we're only going to be able to target a few pieces with those emblems we do collect. What I've somewhat randomly tried to do is select the lowest hanging fruit with respect to armor. For now, I'm ignoring idols, though this same work helps us decide what to do there, too.
The first lesson is that a single piece of T10 isn't that much better than T9. Bizarre. So throw out T10 for now, though don't spend the Emblems of Frost as Emblems of Triumph (but if you're so inclined, you can find out how to downgrade your Frost emblems for Emblems of Triumph here). Also, the shoulders and hands for T9 (and the two for T10) are about the same within the tiers. That is, it's not like the T9 shoulder stats have it all over the T9 gloves, or vice versa. This means I should check out what's worse with my current gear, the shoulders or hands, and replace situationally.
For me, my gloves should stink -- though, honestly, comparing like this there's isn't nearly the separation between my current blue gloves and current purple shoulders that I expected. Other than armor (and the gloves are cloth, after all), their stats are very close. The shoulders give hit and crit and give up only haste, though, so I'll pretend I know what I'm doing and keep those. So we'll start saving up 25 more Emblems of Triumph (50 total) for the [Furious Gladiator's Kodohide Gloves].
By the time I have 50 Emblems of Triumph, I suppose I'll have a few more Frosts. I'm not sure the [Idol of the Lunar Eclipse] at 30 Frosts is all that much better than 25 Triumphs for [Idol of the Lunar Fury], however. It might be worth planning to hang onto the Frosts indefinitely, with the possibility of getting more definite after I grab my first T9 set piece. Perhaps I'll start shooting for the Triumph Idol and add some T10 shoulders?
Postscript
Anybody else get the feeling that this game is too difficult to figure out? Seriously, and this is going to be the topic of a future post, I could have easily made about $100 contracting (I do database admin and design) in the time it took to research this, much less the time it takes to gather the emblems, etc. It's amazing how much like programming WoW research and gear pursuit is at times.
Oh yeah. Happy New Year. ;^) As Gene says, our favorite holiday remains "Another Day Above Ground Day."
