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.

Another Crazy Night

It all started out innocently enough. I picked up my fishing and cooking daily quests in Dalaran and headed up to Icecrown for the Argent Tournament Dailies. They were quickly completed and I went back to Dalaran to fish in the sewers for some Corroded Jewelry. It wasn't fun as there's usually 10 to 20 other people fishing down there so you can't just listen for your own bobber. So after about 10 casts I was getting antsy and annoyed with the whole process when finally I fished up the jewelry. But what came along with the jewelry?? A Giant Sewer Rat! Finally. After spending countless hours fishing by myself down there in the sewers without any luck whatsoever, I get the rat after spending just a few minutes while looking for Jewelry! Old Ironjaw, I'm coming for you next!!

So that left me with just a cooking daily to do. I sent some cooked rhino dogs over from my banker, only to find out they were Mighty Rhino Dogs. But time had run out. It was time for Ulduar. Luckily, on the way up to the Ulduar entrance, there's quite a few rhinos out there so I quickly picked up my four rhino meat and got ready to start a new ten man raiding week.

The plan for the night was to attempt Flame Leviathan and XT-002 on hard modes. So we got assembled, got into our vehicles, and headed out. We left just one tower up and proceeded to one-shot the Flame Leviathan earning us some nice Emblems of Conquest along with some nice loot, including Firesoul for my nice new main hand weapon.

After the Flame Leviathan, it was time to start working on XT-002 in hard mode. We were able to break his heart each time when trying, but his resulting "Heartbroken" mode is quite taxing. First you have adds to finish off before you can focus on XT, then you also have to worry about void zones left by gravity bombs and light sparks left by light bombs. On top of this, his tantrum hits for more damage and he also has a short enrage timer. After a lot of attempts (probably 8-10), we were really getting the fight down - knowing when to use cooldowns, where to drop void zones, if we should kill the light sparks or not (I think you have to, but focusing DPS on them makes it tougher to get the XT-002 down before his hard enrage timer). Eventually, we abandoned the hard mode. We might not have the gear at the current time to do it or we just need a lot more practice healing through all of his various attacks. We did learn one important thing though. And welcome to Tiddly's first boss fight explanation with drawing...


So here we have XT-002's room. You enter from the south where it says "Entrance" and have four scrap piles around the room. He usually stays near the stairs at the north side of the room. What we found is that if you pull him over and tank him between two scrap piles on the side of the room, he will only spawn adds from the two scrap piles furthest away from him (denoted by the incoming red arrows). During our multiple attempts, he spawned various levels of trash. During one attempt, he spawned one group of small bots (easily killed with one Blizzard). During another attempt, all he spawned was one bomb bot. But then during one of our last attempts, he spawned 2 sets of small bots, one bomb bot, and one pummeler. So your spawns will vary from fight to fight, but he will only spawn them from the two scrap piles with arrows. Never from the two piles right next to him.

So with this information in hand, and knowing we could take the heart down to almost killing it, we set out to see if we could get Must Deconstruct Faster. And the short answer is, yes, yes you can. We killed him in 173 seconds, well under the 205 required by the achievement. With adds spawning from only two scrap piles, I was easily able to take them down on each pass with our offtank picking up the pummelers and since we were able to do so much damage to the heart, we basically chained heart spawns. If you manage to do enough damage to his heart, it will immediately take him from 75% to 50% and spawn the heart again. You can then take him from 50% to 25% and so on. So yeah, 173 seconds. Not too shabby. But unfortunately, not hard mode.

We continued on, one shot Kologarn, headed to the Iron Council and two-shot them and then went over to Auriaya where we quickly one shot her. We had about 30 minutes left so we decided against going for Mimiron's trash and went back to take on Razorscale and try and get A Quick Shave. So yeah, one shot that. Not a problem there. We got him down to 67% on his first landing and easily got him under 50% on the second landing and destroyed him after he landed. So that didn't take the 30 minutes we had left. So let's go over to Ignis.

The first time we killed Ignis we zerged him. It's not a quick zerg, but you can do it - ignore the adds and just focus fire Ignis down. This time though, we thought it'd be a good idea to kill him the correct way. And...one shot. So that pretty much ended a great Wednesday "pre-clear" night. Our Wednesday night group is new and the sole purpose is to clear out the early bosses in Ulduar so our Thursday night Gold Team run can work on new content. For example, we have everything down right now up to the Tier 8 bosses. So tonight we'll probably work on Freya and then Mimiron with Thorim or Hodir coming next week. But even though we were done in Ulduar, we weren't done for the night. Not with the Alliance controlling Wintergrasp.

Let's go get some Tier 8! So we headed over, lost one player, picked up a pug mage (drats! competition on Tier 8), and quickly one shot Emalon. Tier 8 dropped for our healy druid, Dylana and he becomes the first in the team with any pieces of Tier 8. We then played around with Archavon who is a joke these days, got an offspec piece of Tier 7 for our pug mage, and I got a PvP cloak (because you know how much I PvP...).

And thus ended our fun night of raiding. In the end, I got a few great achievements, including Three Car Garage on our Flame Leviathan Hard Mode take down and I'm sitting at 6,420 points. Tonight, Freya and Mimiron are on notice and tomorrow the 25 man Gold Team makes our first foray into Ulduar. And then Saturday, Crusader Tiddlywinks. A fun few days coming up.