Gear Planning

I am having a lot of trouble these days planning my gear upgrades. I've been doing my dailies every day, so I can possibly get one crafted item with Primordial Saronite, however, by next Thursday I should be at (or close to) 95 Emblems of Frost, allowing me to get my 2nd piece of tier 10, the Bloodmage Hood (I believe this is the best possible upgrade at the current time. Using Rawr's Item Cost feature, it tells me the hood is the best next upgrade. So I switch out my head piece, do a quick optimization, and Rawr tells me to then swap out my Khadgar's Gauntlets of Triumph for Gloves of the Lifeless Touch (which have been sitting in my bag, ungemmed and unenchanted for ages). And also to swap my rods out (hit/haste swapping). So we'll go with that optimized setup for now...

Setting the optimizer to choose my next two emblem purchases, it quickly spits out that I should purchase the T10 Shoulders and Legs. However, it doesn't take into account that I should be able to purchase one crafted item with Primordial Saronite. If I optimize with the Leggings of Woven Death selected, it tells me to obviously get the Shoulders and Gloves. If I optimize with the Sandals of Consecration selected, it tells me to go with the T10 Shoulders and Legs. However, I don't think I can get both the crafted boots and legs, so if I have to pick one, which way do I go? I think it's the legs.

Optimized with legs, acquiring T10 Shoulders & Gloves = Rawr "Score" of 8949.536
Optimized with feet, acquiring T10 Shoulders & Legs = Rawr "Score" of 9014.053

So it's a 70 point gain I believe to get the legs crafted before the boots. However, the problem I run into is I can't accurately predict what other upgrades I might get along the way. What if I get the Plague Scientist's Boots this weekend from Festergut? Well then the Sandals are of no use. And if I get other upgrades as I work towards my 3rd piece of T10, then everything could change. I guess I'd just like to figure out what to shoot for next after acquiring the Bloodmage Hood. Rawr tells me my best next purchase is the Gloves of False Gestures, but that makes no sense with T10 gloves, so it then tells me to get the Circle of Ossus, which is a beautiful belt, but then it puts me in the position of waiting even longer for 4pcT10.

I'm still stuck, and here I thought I had it all figured out...

Making Use of Rawr's Item Cost

If you're like me, when 3.3 hit, you upgraded Rawr and started looking for ways to maximize your raid utility and at the same time, look for new and exciting gear upgrades. But now you can assign item costs to gear and easily see how to best use your shiny new Emblems of Frost you've been running all those PUGs for.

For this quick guide, I'll assume you know how to use Rawr and you already have it set up with your character imported, all gear setup, and all relevant buffs properly set. So the first thing you need to do is head over to Wowhead, search for Emblem of Frost, apply a filter, and then add a weight scale for your mage - see here. This shows you all the items you can buy with Emblems of Frost that are best suited for your mage. For some reason, this list doesn't currently have the Tier 10 items in there, so we will need to add those as well to our item costs - gloves & shoulders - 60 emblems; hood, robe & leggings - 95 emblems.

So now there's two ways to use the new item cost editor.

1) Put in all Emblem of Frost items with an "item cost" of 1.
2) Put in all Emblem of Frost items with an "item cost" of the number of emblems it takes.

The advantage of putting all item costs in at 1 is that you can see the single best upgrade with Emblems of Frost - regardless of cost. However, if you put in the item cost as the number of emblems each item costs, you can then optimize later for exactly how many emblems you actually have. I prefer the item cost of 1, so that's what I'll show in this guide.

So to edit the item costs, pull up the list of the gear slot you want to look at - in this example, shoulders. Go down to the item that you want to edit - for example, Bloodmage Shoulderpads. Right click on the item and select "Edit..."



On the bottom of the screen that pops up, right in the middle, you'll see "Cost" - put a 1 in here. (click the following picture to enlarge)



Now just rinse and repeat this for all the items you want to evaluate. So now that you've got all these item costs in, what can you do with them?

The easiest thing to do is just see which one item gives you the most bang for your buck (or badge). Go to Tools > Optimize and you'll see an option over on the left called "Additional Requirements." Click "Add" and select "Cost <= 1.00".



Now run the optimizer as usual and wait for the output. It should look something like this (click to make larger):



What the optimizer has done for me is, with just one item from Emblems of Frost, my best upgrade is the Meteor Chaser's Raiment. It shows my pants in this option because I need to change one +hit gem out for +haste for my otpimal gear setup.

So what happens if we have enough Emblems of Frost for two items? Basically, it's still telling me to take the Meteor Chaser's Raiment and now the Circle of Ossus. Now why is this? Wouldn't it be better to have two pieces of Tier 10? The short answer: No. Because we have to break 4 piece Tier 9, it doesn't make sense to get just two pieces of Tier 10. Not until we take up the "Item Cost" on the optimization to 4 does it return Tier 10 items (click to see larger):



This leaves us with a quandary. We know that four pieces of Tier 10 is absolutely amazing these days. So what do we do? The Meteor Chaser's Robe is absolutely amazing, but is it a big enough upgrade over Merlin's Robe? Similarly, right now the Belt of Omission/Circle of Ossus is the best in slot (depending on hit/haste options). So do I aim for that along with the Robe?

Short-term, the answer is yes. Those two upgrades will cost 155 Emblems of Frost. To get four pieces of Tier 10, you will need 345 emblems. With the length of time between unlock periods on Icecrown Citadel and gaining 14 emblems a week with the weekly raid/daily heroic quests, 345 really isn't unobtainable. So that's the way I'm going - saving for Tier 10.

One thing you must always remember - Rawr is strange when it comes to optimizations at time. Just always run it a few times - and if you have the time, run it with the max thoroughness. I've run it a few times, gotten different results a couple of times, but now with max thoroughness, it settles on four pieces of tier 10, so that's the way I'm going. So it shall be.

Two Pieces of Tier 8 = New Spec

So, tonight I was lucky enough to roll the highest on my new helm, the Valorous Kirin Tor Hood (which of course means I got Mimiron down - our team did it without me 2 weeks ago). Combined with the Valorous Kirin Tor Gauntlets sitting in my bags, I realized that the only way I could equip them would be to switch talent specs. The Frostfire spec is nice, but I don't need Precision when my hit rating is 428 (420 is what I need with a draenei, but I can't get it any lower).

So with this switch, like I said, I'm at 428 hit rating, and that is after I "downgraded" my weapon from Firesoul to Life and Death. Even though Life and Death has 26 less damage, it has 42 more crit and 3 more haste (the 34 hit rating is ignored because I'm over the hit cap). With this switch I also had to re-gem quite a few items, switching from Potent Monarch Topazes to Reckless Monarch Topazes. I also broke a few gem bonuses, for example, I didn't need the +4 hit on my Kirin Tor Gauntlets, so I threw a Runed Scarlet Ruby in for extra spellpower.

Now I just need to figure out how to get Rawr to work perfectly so I can figure out how I can get back to the Firesoul with the T8 chest...