Gold Challenge Modes gear optimisation

[Kaigen]

Hello everybody,

I am working slowly on getting ready to run challenge modes and I would like to know if some people did some research to find out which gear setup would be the most suited to do so (by suitable I mean, being able to survive critical points and still be able to do good DPS (Group healing by doing so) ?

With AskMrRobot, I runned an optimized build with Control/Mastery by removing every epic items to get a max iLvl of 463. I chose Control/Mastery because after running the simulations, the Control/Haste gave roughly 14% Haste, which might not be enough to see a difference... Here is the result:



So I was wondering if this would really be the optimal setup ?

Thanks!

[Fetzie]

You do know that you can wear epic items, don't you?

[Gab]

For me hit and expertise capping and then stacking haste worked quite well. I did use stamina trinkets, the DMC and Liquid Courage, for that little extra cushion and the extra CDs.

I used a mix of raid gear, ret pvp gear (avoiding pieces with pvp power/resil socket bonuses) and heroic gear.

Try to maximize the number of sockets on your gear; the chests, gloves, legs, waists, weapons etc... that you find in heroics don't have as many sockets as raid gear alternatives.

[Kaigen]

Ah, I thought that since everything was tuned down to 463 the best would be to optimize ilvl 463 gear to know exactly the stats value we would have... So I should focus on getting raid gear ?

Is there any set which would be more optimal than another ?

[Treck]

As Gab said, any gear with sockets are great.
You wont gain to much stats by having full epics compared to now cause of the scaling.
But, there are chestplates, gloves, wrists, and legs with one extra socket, and waists with 2! more sockets.
Not to mention raid weapons with Sha socket + the quest socket, gives you 7 extra sockets, and the str legendary socket.
Thats a lot of stats.

[Kaigen]

According to wowhead, the sha socket doesn't work... Nor the tier set bonus

[Fetzie]

You wont gain to much stats by having full epics compared to now cause of the scaling.

You don't get more stats from wearing epics, but you get a more optimal distribution of stats if you see what I mean.

[Kaigen]

You wont gain to much stats by having full epics compared to now cause of the scaling.

You don't get more stats from wearing epics, but you get a more optimal distribution of stats if you see what I mean.

Because of the sockets or am I missing something ?

[Fetzie]

Because of sockets (which aren't scaled down), and there are a lot of them on 5.2 gear. Some items have three!

Because there are a lot more hit/haste, hit/mastery, haste/mastery, hit/expertise items.

[Winkle]

I'd also say you want to fully optimize for DPS, survivability in CM's comes down to correct CD usage and other classes utility (such as aoe stuns).

You can pump out quite ridiculous levels of dps in CM's since you get hit so hard, and the faster that things die the better chance you have of living.

[Gab]

According to wowhead, the sha socket doesn't work...

Afaik they did work at some point and were turned off. When I was running CMs I tested it with a 483 ungemmed and a 504 gemmed, no increase to strength.

[Thels]

Also, while you're at it, go to AskMrRobot's options, and enable "Enforce Hit/Expertise Caps". While the total scoring might be better being under the cap, knowing for sure that your next holy power generator is going to hit makes a lot of difference. Plus the fact that sometimes you just need to kill something in 3 hits, and if one of your 3 swings happens to be that miss, you're screwed. Most definitely worth to cap for the minuscule DPS loss you're not going to notice ever.