BiS ListsFollow

Liar liar pants on fire.

The first post of the Feral DPS Discussion thread on ElitistJerks has a BiS list for Hardmodes and non-Hardmodes.

At the end of the day, BiS lists are of limited use. Far better to use something like Rawr to work out to how to best improve your current situation. The BiS gear may be based on certain items - if you don't have that item then the other slots may be totally different. Perfect example of this was when the feral BiS included the Mjolnir's Runestone with ArPen proc. If you didn't have that (or at least the Grim Toll) then your gearing changed totally. I did Ulduar over and over and never got the Runestone, so if I was going strictly off the BiS, I would have been gearing sub-optimally.

The BiS lists do at least give you an end point to aim for so they do have a use, it's just important to focus on the path there, not just on the destination.

Long story short

There aren't really any reliable BiS lists for Resto because:

-Each spell scales differently with different stats.
-Each Druid's spell mix is different, and can be heavily influenced by your healing partners.

That being said, I'd imagine there are some somewhere, I just wouldn't trust them. Really it's better to download the treecalcs spreadsheet from EJ, look at your spell mix on Recount/WoL, and crunch some of your own numbers.

Same idea for tanks, as a you may want to have more of x stat depending on the fight as some favor HP, avoidance or threat in varying levels. Only DPS specs have BiS. Tanks usually do have a preferred way to gain their 4 piece bonuses, for druids it is off-set chest and the rest tier and what ever other pieces you want for the fight.

Remember. Many items on a BiS list will only be upgrades if you have the rest of the items on that list, as the affect of all your stats are relative to others.

Well, I don't use coupons at the store it just seemed like a good analogy.

No, I'm just naturally hairy, it is not a costume.

Seriously, unless you visit that place every other day, it's just a pain in the butt to find stuff there. I've been less inclined to read it lately myself, there's probably 2-3 good posters and a lot of talking heads there these days.

Treecalcs is at the bottom of the first post here. Inputting your various stats will calculate a table of values for Spellpower, Haste, and Critial for each of the Druid Spells.

The 'time to OOM' can help you estimate your mana needs. Though I find, with server lag, down time in fights, etc. my mana lasts quite a bit longer then the spreadsheet suggests it would. The mana calc is rotation-based as well, so it can be fairly rigid (one of the unfortunate things about RAWR as well...). It's one of the reasons I've gone to estimating my mana usage largely from WoL files these days.

The previous spreadsheet (the one linked on our sticky), had a tab that let you put in your spell mix and calculate some average relative weightings. Unfortunately it was never updated for 3.3, so hasn't taken into account the GotEM changes. However, the idea would be to combine the numbers from your WoL/recount in a similar way, get stat weightings, and plug it all into one of those loot ranking sites or something, while keeping in mind all that soft-capping stuff.

Or just wear whatever you want, spam RJ/WG till your fingers fall off, then blame the tank healers if you wipe. That's fun too.

Horse, your analogy is way wrong.

Arpen doesn't work in that manner.

You need 1400 or 100% of what's available to you. That does not translate to 100% ignore armor; this is part of where the "too mathy" and "too confusing" comes in to play. Imagine a pie graph where roughly 80% of the pie has the potential to be affected by your arpen, but the full potential will be seen only if you have 1400 of said arpen. Anything less than 1400 arpen and you will have less of that roughly 80% slice. The other roughly 20% of the pie can never be affected by arpen on your gear or talents.

You need 1400 arpen & FFF & sunders and even then the boss will still have some armor. It's not until something like shattering throw on top of 1400 arpen, Sunders, and FFF, that you actually see a boss at basically zero armor.



There'd be no reason to gem to 1400 arpen if by doing so you made two debuffs 20 and 5% reduced armor useless to you.


You can look at this ban example on EJ to see how the confusion on the subject can get people into trouble:
http://elitistjerks.com/f34/t92582-infraction_cbgoding_arpen_sunder_stack_guys/

And you can Read posts 47 & 48 here:
http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t63774-feral_dps_discussion/p2/

Edited, Mar 26th 2010 5:10pm by Torzak

I was posting a source from both angles so people know what's wrong with a lot of the common misconceptions about arpen merely for completion's sake.

So basically, at the armor pen cap, against a target with 10k your armor pen reduces it by 8.1k (pretty sure about 81% is right) so you are hitting a target with 1.9k Armor. With sunders & FF, the mobs armor is down to 7.5k and your armor pen reduces it by 6.075k meaning you are hitting a target with 1.425k Armor.

So at cap Sunder & FF are far less effective than with no ArPen (2.5k Armor reduction versus 0.475k Armor Reduction). Still a decent increase though.