For those who aren’t familiar with it, Be Imba is a website that will fetch your character’s stats from the Armory, and give you advice on how to improve it, as well as tell you about where your gear level is at in terms of PvE progression. It’s missing information on a few specs, and while I like the idea, more often than not I find myself going “duh” when using it. I tried showing it to a friend of mine who recently hit 70, and it told him he had some low level items (greens), and he was at the pre-Kara level. Do you really need a site to tell you that? It’s also rather annoyed at me for having the Feral Charge talent (which it considers to be a PvP talent), although I find it irreplaceable in PvE. Nevertheless, it can be quite useful in helping you realize you forgot to enchant a piece of gear, or that you forgot to replace a “placeholder” item or gem.
The reason I’m making this post though, is I’ve finally managed to achieve the Be Imba ranking of “this character is in top shape,” which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Its recommendation for where I should get gear is slightly off, but still relatively accurate. The only thing that still bothers me is that it’s convinced that my spec and gear is designed for PvP, despite the fact I have a measly 18 resilience in my tanking set.
In similar news, I have teamed up with a classmate from my college to design a website oriented to assist those who want to get a bit more out of services such as Warcrafter, Be Imba, and MaxDPS. Each brings something new and unique to the table, but each is lacking in a few aspects. For example, have you ever wanted to use Be Imba, but want to see the results for gear you don’t have yet (for planning ahead and such)? How about wanting to use MaxDPS, but rather than have you manually input your statistics, have it remember your character, with options for both armory fetching and manual building? And hey, how about something more useful than Be Imba’s “You’re not suitable for Kara yet,” but something along the lines of “Your dodge is a bit low for Kara, most recommend it be at around 30%”?
Enough ranting about that, hopefully there will be a public beta available soon that will let you guys play around and have some fun, and hopefully get me and my friend some useful feedback. Our biggest challenge at the moment is the DPS calculations, which while websites such as MaxDPS provide that, many of them assume impossible things, such as an infinite-rage situation for Warrior DPS, or ignoring the internal 3 second cooldown of Windfury for Elemental Shamans. I’ve even had one website try and convince me that I can achieve a 0.0% chance to miss my target.
For those who are interested, keep your eyes open, there’ll be a public announcement soon. And if everything goes well with that, we have a few other ideas floating around, including creating an in-game addon that will allow you to essentially achieve the same results you get with the website, but have all the calculations done completely in game!
In WoW news, my guild finally decided to take a serious attempt on Al’ar last night, and we managed to down him on our second attempt. My guild saves all the adds that spawn until the second phase, and DPS them all down then, to maximize our damage in Phase II. Unfortunately during our first attempt, our add tank during Phase I tanked them up against the bottom of the ramp, and was killed almost instantly (along with all our melee dps) during Flame Quill. The downing of Al’ar puts my guild at 6/6 SSC and 3/4 TK. Kael, you’re next! This also places us as the 5th most progressed Horde guild on our server, which is quite an achievement! Good job to all.
I’ve also picked up quite a few new add-ons, but would like to throw a special shout out to Align. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it does exactly what it says it does. For the OCD in all of us, Align will draw a grid on your screen, including highlighted vertical/horizontal center lines, to easily allow you to position your frames. That’s all it does. It doesn’t make frames draggable, or move them by itself. It simply draws a grid when you type /align, and removes it when you type it again. If it seems like something you may like, give it a whirl! I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
I was doing some theorycrafting for myself in an attempt to figure out what gear I’d be going for once my druid hits 70 (less than a bar shy of 65 now). Having a Mage who raided for a long while, I am a strong believe that PvP gear does not belong in a hardcore PvE environment. I’ve always laughed when someone applied to my guild and was sporting a full set of PvP gear and were telling me they wanted to raid in it. I always told them to go run some instances, and get some raiding gear. I went by the rule of thumb that you PvE to get gear to PvE, and you PvP to get gear to PvP. I knew that every so often one item from PvP would be really good for PvE (my mage uses [Veteran's Silk Cuffs] and [Gladiator's Silk Handguards] just because they blew away any PvE alternate until very late endgame). However, a full set of PvP gear was completely out of the question.
To help gear my Druid, I searched the WoW forums and came across a fantastic thread by Rahlar titled Gearing up for BC endgame healing, where Rahlar suggests gear that one can obtain pre-heroic, which is exactly what I’m looking for. Let’s restrict this set to only items you can obtain through PvE (instances, profesisons, etc.). Using his ideal item set, and filling in the blanks, you get the following (click for sandbox):
| +Healing* | mp5* | Spirit* | Intellect | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Hood of Primal Life] | 68 (76) | (5) | 31 (35) | 37 | - |
| [A'dal's Recovery Necklace] | 51 | - | - | - | - |
| [Vestia's Pauldrons of Inner Grace] | 48 | 8 | - | 25 | - |
| [Cloak of Scintillating Auras] | 42 (47) | (3) | 18 (20) | 16 | - |
| [Lifewarden's Breastplate] | 64 (72) | (5) | 28 (32) | 25 | - |
| [Mana Infused Wristguards] | 25 (27) | (1) | 7 (8) | 8 | - |
| [Gloves of the Living Touch] | 77 (83) | (4) | 22 (25) | 18 | - |
| [The Sleeper's Cord] | 53 (59) | (4) | 21 (24) | 24 | - |
| [Moonglade Pants] | 55 (61) | (4) | 23 (26) | 25 | - |
| [Boots of the Glade-Keeper] | 53 (58) | (3) | 20 (23) | 24 | - |
| [Cosmic Lifeband] | 57 | 7 | - | - | - |
| [Keeper's Ring of Piety] | 42 (47) | 7 (10) | 18 (20) | - | - |
| [Bangle of Endless Blessings] | - | - | - | - | - |
| [Alchemist's Stone] | (4) | (2) | 15 (17) | 15 | - |
| [Serpentcrest Life-Staff] | 227 (240) | (8) | 46 (52) | 27 | - |
| Total | 862 (926) | 22 (47) | 249 (286) | 244 | - |
| +Healing | mp5 | Spirit | Intellect | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Gladiator's Kodohide Helm] | 75 | 6 | - | 33 | Sockets: Meta, Yellow |
| [Gladiator's Kodohide Spaulders] | 46 | 4 | - | 21 | Sockets: Red, Yellow |
| [Gladiator's Kodohide Tunic] | 75 | 6 | - | 30 | Sockets: Red, Red, Yellow |
| [Gladiator's Kodohide Gloves] | 62 | 6 | - | 27 | - |
| [Gladiator's Kodohide Legguards] | 84 | 10 | - | 37 | - |
| [Gladiator's Salvation] | 375 | - | - | 18 | - |
| [Gladiator's Reprieve] | 35 | - | - | 14 | - |
| [Vindicator's Pendant of Salvation] | 51 | 6 | - | 16 | Sockets: Yellow |
| [Vindicator's Band of Salvation] | 51 | 6 | - | 20 | - |
| [Veteran's Band of Salvation] | 44 | 5 | - | 17 | - |
| [Sergeant's Heavy Cape] | 26 | - | - | 12 | - |
| [Vindicator's Kodohide Bracers] | 40 | 7 | - | 22 | Sockets: Red |
| [Vindicator's Kodohide Boots] | 75 | 9 | - | 30 | - |
| [Vindicator's Kodohide Belt] | 75 | 9 | - | 30 | - |
| [Battlemaster's Perseverance] | 88 | - | - | - | - |
| [Battlemaster's Perseverance] | 88 | - | - | - | - |
| Total | 1290 | 74 | 0 | 327 | - |
Am I missing something, or does the PvP set completely trump the PvE set (until you get into post-kara raiding)?
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