Adventures With Gear

Gear Scaling:

The best part of this super gear is having fun and a few laughs while doing lower raids with this stupid gear we have now.  This weeks weekly was Flame Leviathan and we still do the weekly every week for fun and for those people that are still leveling.  When I saw it was Flame Leviathan I thought it would be fun to do a four towers up run just for fun.

We jump in the vehicles and mine is at five and a half million.  How stupid is that?  We go straight in and straight for the boss and just burn it down like it were a heroic boss.  Heck, even heroic bosses are harder.  We completely ignored all the crap on the floors and just when into kill, kill, kill mode.

I don't remember it being like that before.  I remember it being a little bit of hell when I did that the first time.  Must admit, it was sure a hell of a lot of fun to do it like that.  Maybe we should do it again and try to see if we can get it down in less then 30 seconds.  That would be the challenge.

Have to love bosses that scale with gear like that.  Makes for some nice brainless fun.  You need that sometimes.

Item Level:

Okay, I might not be a rocket scientist or anything but if I replace a piece of 325 gear with a piece of 346 gear shouldn't my average item level equipped go up?  I was sitting at 341 (don't laugh, not my fault 90% of wow sucks so bad I can not spam heroics) and when I upgraded my gear from a 325 piece to a 346 piece my average item level went down.  I am now sitting at a 336 average.  It just makes no sense at all.

I lost 5 points by getting a piece that was 21 points higher.  Even if it counts stuff in your bag I was at 341 before I got the 346 item so the items in my bag went up too as soon as I got the 346 item.

Does Blizzard fail at math?  I'd like to present this as evidence that Blizzard does indeed fail horribly at math.

Spec, with gear:

Doing some playing over at femaledwarf with numbers and such last week I saw that as MM I would max out at a potential 8800 DPS and as SV it would be 9100 DPS.  Mind you that these are generated numbers that consider a perfect situation and does not include buffs and such.

With such a small difference I figured I would stay with my MM spec for now.  I love having silencing shot being it seems I am the only person that ever tries to interrupt things when I am in heroics and the heal from Chimera really takes a lot of pressure off healers while they are still in gearing up mode.

However, after a couple of new pieces when I test it my MM spec is up to 9200 and my SV would be up to 9800.  I am guessing that hinges more on mastery then anything else but the gap is starting to get wider.  I think once I am in all heroics gear if this rate keeps up the difference might be as high as 1500-2000 and it might leave me with no choice but to change over.

I am tempted now to switch over because it would give me a nice little boost in DPS but I am very fearful of doing that because, as I said, the silence shot and chimera heal do work wonders and so far it is still nearly impossible to clear a heroic with a complete PuG.  My other spec will always be BM however, so I can tame and use exotic beasts.  Trust me, when you are in a dungeon and someone says I wish her had a heroism they do not mind if I switch and I lose 500 DPS because my corehound and his heroism is a welcome addition.

I guess once I start completing heroics on a regular basis with PuGs then I will worry less about being helpful healing myself and silencing mobs but until that point comes I would rather do less DPS and be a team player and be more helpful to my team. 

Not to mention as I've said before, the survivability of MM right now is so much better then the other specs and in at least four occasions I needed it on trash pulls gone wrong and twice I was the last person alive on a boss fight where it would have ended as a wipe if I had not been MM.  MM is just to good to give up now with the 600 DPS difference but as that moves higher and becomes 1500-2000 difference it might be a lot harder to convince myself I am doing the right thing staying MM.

The thing is, gear sure as hell seems to play a huge part in DPS scaling for hunters.  I only moved up a few pieces of gear and they where all minor upgrades.  The increase in DPS seems to be rather large for such small upgrades.  I can only imagine how I will be doing in raid gear if this type of scaling keeps up.