Gear Sets

I'm a gear hound. I have all sorts of situational gear sets. I've always been like this. I used to use ItemRack. Now it's Outfitter.

I have on my person at all times gear for; my main DPS set, my experimental DPS set (usually not hit-capped), my PvP set (currently around 800 resilience), my mana restore trinket for farming, my pet tanking set, my pet instance solo tanking set, my tuxedo set (for weddings and other formal events), my party set (dual beer mugs, nice glasses, etc) and my frost resist set. Of course my frost resist set should have a major and minor setting.

That sounds like a lot, right? Well there used to be more overlaps in sets. Now there is less. But back in the lvl 60s and 70s, I had graduated Fire, Nature, and Shadow resist sets (high and medium resist levels). I had a melee set. (Remember hug-the-Annihilators in MC?) I had mana regen sets. I had a set for raid dps. I had a set for normal instances. And then I also had party sets.

Yes, it was insane. But I could range tank stuff that only did Nature damage. Or Fire damage. It was pretty cool. People knew. People rolled their eyes. But it was actually somewhat practical. Thanks to the long-spaced in-combat pulse, I could pull all the aggro I could on the nature-damaging shaman helping High King Maulgar and range tank him. Then when he was dead, I could FD and quickly hit my ItemRack dps set, spring up and dps HKM. Most of the time that would work pretty well.

I could also tank Fire Lords back in the MC days. That was a hoot. I went back to MC early in the lvl 80 phase. I still had my Fire Resist set. I put it on and melee'd Baron Geddon and never left for his pulses. I just resisted everything.

So I tried out my current experimental raid DPS set in Ulduar last night. It was a continuation so we had some harder bosses. My experimental set has two T7.5 and one T8 and one T8.5. It also flips out a chest for a slightly better chest with less hit since the T8 has some hit. So I get the pet bonus and the serpent sting bonus. I get a little less crit. I am around +7.5% hit. I have a fair amount more AP. No, I know I'm not Marksman spec. So I wasn't expecting much from the experiment. I was monitoring it closely with Recount. Here are the results:

Non-experiemental, hit-capped, easy bosses, some movement:



Experimental, slightly less than hit-capped, harder bosses, almost constant movement:


I was not expecting them to be close. I thought the tier-8 would LOSE. Given the movement challenges, and looking at the numbers, the SrS wasn't too bad. I am tempted to see what my numbers would look like as Marksman.