zeroinitiate - A World of WarCraft Rogue Blog

I’ve been holding off on purchasing emblem gear because I want a tier piece to drop from VoA first. My goal is to get the tier 10 4-piece bonus going and see my DPS increase. I want to be able to nail one finisher after another. After two weeks of doing VoA, I’ve yet to see rogue leather drop so I haven’t had the chance to even roll on it yet. That’s been the story of gear for me for the past couple of weeks, even in ICC. Melee DPS leather simply does not drop in our runs.

Yesterday Festergut dropped Plague-Soaked Leather Leggings. I put it on my spreadsheet and saw a DPS increase. Just for fun I decided to put the tier 10 legs and hands just to check what my DPS would be if I bought those instead.

I was floored to see a DPS decrease.

I checked and re-checked but the numbers were consistent. If they were both at ilvl 251, getting the tier 10 legs and hands to complete the 4-piece bonus was going to lower my damage output. I was in denial at first, thinking for so long that the 4-piece bonus was really, really good. Well, screw that. The discovery then led to me checking out what pieces I should buy. I finally settled on the waist and trinket, with those being the biggest DPS upgrades according to the spreadsheet. I’ve yet to run ICC to see how my DPS turns out though. I’ll find out this week.

Now that 3.2 is out, emblem farming is the trendy thing to do. I know that some of you don’t like the way Blizzard is practically giving away epics, but what can we do, you know? Might as well go with the flow.

I found myself in a curious situation a couple of weeks ago before the patch came out. After doing a quick gear check, I saw that there were no upgrades available for me in terms of Conquest emblems. I was done. For someone who only raided Kara in BC, it was quite a shock. I’ve never had this much gear before.

After the surprise went down, I looked at the Triumph emblem vendor and checked what I needed to do next. Maybe that’s a question you’re also asking yourself. I mean, which gear should you get first? The answer lies in a spreadsheet. Grab one that’s ready for 3.2 and check what you should get. As much as I would like to get the 45-emblem shoulder piece, breaking the 4-piece Terrorblade set bonus hurts my DPS too much so I’ll have to settle for something else. Right now, I’m set to get the ring then the thrown weapon.

3.2 is all about upgrading your gear. Like I said, Blizzard is practically throwing them at you so run those heroics when you can. Do the daily heroic, farm heroic Trial of the Champion till you’re blue in the face. This is our chance to catch up with the content. Might as well take advantage of it.

Ding! Congratulations, you’re level 80. Now you want better gear so you can do heroic instances and 10-man raids. Here’s a gear guide to help you get there. We’ll start with the best blues you can get from quest rewards. These will be enough to get you through most if not all of the heroic 5-man dungeons. From there, we can move on to epic gear so you can become Naxx 10 ready.

What I like about quest rewards is that they’re guaranteed loot. The catch here is that most of them come from either group or dungeon quests.

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