Mid ToT progression to Tier 15 armor

[Aleesax 0]

I have a question for the Dk community.

I am a 2H Frost Death Knight and I am currently in the middle of ToT 25 man progression. My question is this:

Is it better to stick with 502 tier pieces for the 4 piece set bonus or go with the higher strength thunder forged items.

Here is my Wow-heroes link:

http://www.wow-heroes.com/character/us/Exodar/Aleesax/

and I have items like this in the bank:

http://www.wowhead.com/item=96023

But to not make it just about me.

The real question is:

Is the extra 10% of health you can use the soul reaper on better then the increased stats from the higher ranked armor. My gut tells me no, but I have not been able to run a good sim to check.

Thank you for your time,

[Aleesax 0]

Right after I posted this to the forums, I Found myself in a situation on Mageara where I could test this equipment out. On the first attempt I was wearing the 502 tier pieces with raid buffs and did 107 K DPS. Then on the second attempt I swapped in my 522 shoulders and legs, my dps dropped to 98 K DPS with the same rotation. So I answered my own question, lower rated tier gear for a tier set is still better then the improved stats of the higher ranked gear.

[areanu 16]

Mr. Robot is good to ask about breaking (or gaining) set bonuses.

You will not get precise toon-specific answer unless you put values for your very toon (probably obtained by SimC), but if the difference is big, even custom values will do nicely.

[Storm 426]

I'm surprised you found that much of a difference. The 4pc bonus shouldn't even make a 10% difference between similar ilvl gear. Especially on a fight like Meg, each head dies fast enough that we're talking about 1 or at most 2 extra soul reapers per head, which hits for about the same amount as obliterate, but costs 1 less rune. So essentially at best the 4pc bonus is worth 14 extra runes stretched out over the entire fight.

14 runes = 7 obliterates = 1.5mil dmg +/- = 3.5% of the 42million damage you did on your meg kill on 6/5 (or about 3.5k more dps).

I'd try it out a few more times on other fights and see if you still come out ahead with the 502. I think you probably had a case of bad RNG.

Edited June 7, 2013 by Storm

[Amicitia 8]

Typically you won't want to break the T15 4 pc bonus unless you get a much larger gear level difference, for instance I have the normal raid 4 pc but I wouldn't break it unless I get all 3 of the heroic thunderforged items: helm, gloves and shoulders, keeping the tier chest and pants. Especially after dumping some VP into upgrading. I'm UH so my replacement pieces might be slightly different than your pieces might be and which of the 5 tier pieces you keep might be different also, but basically 522 to 535 is not enough for me. I would think that it is very similar for Frost at that level too.