I’ve heard some people talking about upgrading their endgame gear right out of the gate with Cataclysm greens. I haven’t yet seen any greens even close (though they all have more stamina), but I did get this cloak from the last boss in Blackrock Caverns which is darned close to as good as my Recovered Scarlet Onslaught Cape.
Of course, this blue cloak I just found is technically an item for level 78 characters! Who knows what’ll happen when I finally find some level 81 or higher gear.
Oh my…..now I’m underskilled and overgeared…it looks like in Cata I’ll be back to underskilled and undergeared too LoL
Well if i did see right quest rewards are stronger that ICC 25 HC or the youtube is again playin tricks on me?
do cloaks still LOOK stupid?
I replaced my ICC25 bow (Zod’s) with a blue dungeon drop..it made me sad
Slight question in regards to weapons speed. I noticed that my heroic Stakethrower (3.00 speed) gave me slightly higher dps than my heroic Zod’s (2.80 speed) in the beta. I there are still some tweaks going on but would you say that there’s a slight move back to using slowish ranged weapons?
Is that text at the bottom that tells you what you’d gain and lose part of the default UI now? I have an addon that does it now but not nearly as concise and well.
@UFTimmy
In the game right now, if you hold the shift key down when you mouse over an item it will do that with the default UI.
Fancy. I remember seeing that in the notes but I guess depended on my addon too much. Though the addon does break down all of the substats that you get from the main stats like agi and strength.
That looks like PAWN to me. I use it and love it!
It’s a item comparison option that you can turn on @ options.
I will keep my precious shinies I got from ICC. No matter how many upgrades I’ll get!
So far at 83 on beta I haven’t replaced a single piece of gear, but I’ve definitely seen a few items that were competitive with what I was wearing. Most of my gear is 277 now but I still have some 264 items. I expect anyone still sporting gear from pre-ICC will be replacing it quickly, but those in ICC gear wil replace it more slowly.
The main thing to keep in mind for quest/dungeon rewards while leveling is that often even if they’re a borderline upgrade, you’d have to enchant/gem the item to actually make it an upgrade. So generally it’s going to be hard to replace gear till the higher levels just because you usually have to have more than a slight upgrade to make it worth the effort.
I’d call that an upgrade. Very small to be sure, but an upgrade nonetheless. You’re not losing any stats, and picking up a bit of haste. The fact that it’s useable by a 78 is just icing on the cake.
AnimeL, You’re forgetting the socket on the Scarlet cape
That’s a 20 agil loss if you’re using a standard gem.
Umm..where did you get that cloak? (Recovered Scarlet Onslaught) – mine has the ArP not slow falling.
The slow fall on the cloak (plus 23 agility that isn’t shown) is from the flexweave underlay, an engineering tinker.
not an upgrade, dont forget the socket in the scarlet cape
@dd: I suspect that’s why Frost called it “close to as good as” and not an upgrade
@Kasila
DPS increase might be there because of normalized weapon damage shots: Chimera is doing 190%, Aimed 300%, Kill Shot 200% and Silencing 50%. If two weapons have the same DPS but one shoots slower, then the individual shots would be harder. I am not sure if it still works like that with hunter shots, though
Regarding item levels: crafted lvl 80 greens are lvl 298. Anything requiring lvl 81 is over ilvl 300 (crafted blues are 316) – bacause enchants are only applicable on ilvl 300+ items. At lvl 83 you can get crafted ilvl 333 greens. So pretty much everything you get at level 81 upgrades your ICC25 gear or even ICC25 HM.
If I recall correctly there is a gun reward in the first 10-15 quests of Mt. Hyjal that has better range dps (+12.2) over normal Njodnar. Has +3 Agi, +19 Crit -28 hit. That is a sizable upgrade right out of the bat.
Looking through the gear when it was first posted up over at MMO-Champ I was drooling over blues and GREENS with more top end damage than my ICC gear that are barely higher iLVL than ICC gear. This is my first XPAC that I am going into as a raider (I went from BC to wrath as a leveler, so I never got the whole “green is the new purple” thing) and it just makes me sad that my pretty purple pixels are going to be worthless soon /cry
over 300!!! I blame this on…I don’t know, someone explain to me why they have to make all the upgrades so drastic. I still have to be the best I can be, but it will undoubtedly make me angry when I replace my hard earned ICC and T10 gear with blues and greens that noobs can use…/facepalm.
The thing is, as this and the previous expansion has shown us, Blizz has a history of making hard earned end game raiding gear obsolete from one expansion to the next. The did it from Vanilla to BC, from BC to Wrath, and again from Wrath to Cata. We all know it, for the most part we aren’t too fond of it, but we accept it.
For the most part it isn’t too bad like people have pointed out above. The cost of enchanting/gemming a new blue that’s a very minor upgrade is just silly or unnecessary in some cases. I seem to recall getting to level 76 in my BC mid->high level raiding gear before I finally found something worth switching out on both my hunter and my mage. It wasn’t till the 78-80 dungeons and the heroic Wrath dungeons is when it all got swapped out.
Is it right that somebody that just leveled to 80 sporting Cata normal dungeon gear has similar stats than you? Heck no! However, we have to accept it cause that’s the way they, the programmers, want to do it. Even if we disagree it should be different, that we think the customer is always right, like our purples to be better, or that the new ilevel and stats should be lower, blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter. Either we deal with it, or quit. Those are our only real choices.
Only thing I want to know is what happened to the AP on the RSOC Frost is wearing in the Beta? I could of swore that Blizz was making stat equivalent switches for all gear. Yes, hunters and rogues are getting 2 AP per 1 Agility, but even with that the Agility should be upgraded to 97-98 to equal the amount of AP we are getting from that cape now. Where is it? The programming ate the cape’s 15 AP. The stamina boost is nice but you can’t tell me they planned the increase around a hunter talented with HvsW to squeeze out an extra 10 AP from it. BTW even with that the cape falls short of current stats. However, it is just the Beta so maybe they’ll get it right later on.
It gets a little tiresome listening to all the bitching about expansion greens and blues being almost as good as previous end-content purples. Please ditch the elitist attitude. We were ALL noobs once.
Remember, the only reason we’re running around in ICC and T10 gear is because 9 or 24 other people felt we were worth their patience, time, and effort. We had help when we needed it. Pay it forward. Don’t call someone a noob if they ask a question or fall behind in DPS. Help them out! You never know when we might need their awesomesauce later.
The gear discrepancy is only temporary. The greens and blues will only be acceptable during leveling. Eventually, we will all get back into raiding, and the rewards will once again be great.
Your old purples won’t become immediately useless. The T9 two-piece set bonus proved that. I also tend to hang onto a piece or two as trophies (yes, my elitist side rears its ugly head).
Blizzard does this for a reason – mass appeal. They have to make the first few levels as challenging, and obtainable, as possible – for as many people as possible. To do otherwise would lose them money. Which, in turn, would translate to fewer features for the gamers. We wouldn’t want that!
I’m now at level 82 and haven’t found a single upgrade — though a lot of blue gear that was very close. I’ve done every Hyjal quest except Ragnaros himself (which is bugged atm).
The new gear so far has a lot more stamina, but not quite as much dps stats. I haven’t found a ranged weapon that was even close to heroic stakethrower.
I would like to thank all of the folks that are doing the legwork and getting us all of this valuable information. You rock!
Actually, this scared me a little. I did a quest for Malfurion, and one of the rewards was this gun:
http://cata.wowhead.com/item=57293
Which was almost a disturbing upgrade from my 10 man Njorndar Bone Bow:
http://cata.wowhead.com/item=50776
Well, to be fair, that’s Njorndar Bow, which sucks. Any hunter at level 80 can stop at the AH and buy Rowan’s Rifle of Silver bullets, which is a huge upgrade. And… in Cataclysm, Rowan’s is a 345 dps weapon, far better than that quest gun
When Lich King started, if I recall correctly there were three 25 man raids available. A European guild finished all 3 within 3 days of the launch. I read they were mainly just using their Sunwell Plateau gear.
I guess my point is that your hard earned ICC gear will be probably be able to take you a long way in cataclysm.
They have thrown epics at people this expansion,if they did’nt give upgrades off the bat we would be in t10 by 85 still Blizzard would’nt want that to happen
Yeah it will help with leveling and such…forgot about that. The gear that is.
“Any hunter at level 80 can stop at the AH and buy Rowan’s Rifle of Silver bullets, which is a huge upgrade”
All my spreadsheets tests have had Njorndar as an upgrade for me with my gear over Rowan’s ever since Shandara put it in the spreadsheet. We’ve had this discussion about gear choices and how other gear affects what is an upgrade or not.
Making a generic statement like that is plain talking out your arse, and not becoming of the Dwarf hunter who advocates the use of science.
Ah, just looked it up — I was thinking of the felglacier bolter (which is factually worse than rowans in all situations). If you’re using the ICC 10 bow… sometimes it might be better, especially for trolls, but… how did that end up worse than that green gun? Did Njorndar not get the full dps increase of other ranged weapons?
Regular Njordnar is i251, but the quest green is i272. I would expect the green to be slightly better given the relative stat distributions.(+3 Agi, +2 Sta, +19 Crit and +13DPS/+91 top end damage). The rest of Njordnar’s stat distribution is in Hit, which the green doesn’t have at all.
From what I’ve played of Hyjal, it looks like the breakpoint is i264. i251 will see sidegrades and minor upgrades from greens, depending on base stats, but I haven’t found anything (even i288 quest blues) that makes me want to replace and reenchant my existing 264+ gear.
Hmm, that’s an interesting thought, particularly with the ranged weapons: perhaps they decided that only the ilvl 264 ranged would get the ICC epic ammo enhancement to their dps, and lower ilvl ranged got less of an upgrade, perhaps as if they were using lower level ammo.
Alas I don’t have a Njorndar so I can’t confirm what it’s actual ranged dps is in-game (lots of the beta stuff from data mining is wrong, so it’s hard to tell what’s accurate of the mined info).
once the beta is back up, I’ll check and update here. I’m something of a weapon hoarder, and just happen to have both ICC normal bows.
I can confirm that the green quest reward gun in game has +12.2 range dps on Njorndar (I have both) tooltips from datamined suggest +12.3. I haven’t played much because my pets are bugged out and I can’t use any of them. It gets very depressing when I see Sic’em proc. The comment I left much higher up about the relative stat differences between the gun and the bow were taken from comparing them in Beta.
Fyi it looks like the Bone Bow see’s a dps bump of 42.4 range dps from Live to Beta (to be confirmed in game later) which is less than vendor arrows. If the Bone Bow gets buffed to epic arrows it should have 316.4 range dps (or Blue ammo- 292.4) which would be much more like it.
This is very discouraging news.
I can confirm that, in build 12539, Njorndar is at 267.4 DPS, Front-Line Blunderbuss is at 279.5 DPS and Zod’s is at 294.8 DPS
I seriously do not get why so many people moan about the item reset:
“”it just makes me sad that my pretty purple pixels are going to be worthless soon /cry”"
Why would they be worthless: didn’t you have fun while getting your pretty purples and didn’t they make the next boss easier?
From the lowest 5man to the latest raid, every old purple lost its shine when you got to the next content, and I do hope to be decked out with all new shiny blue 5man drops when I hit 81
I don’t know about you, but it took me a while to get that bow, and I was very happy I did. I’m a casual raider, I don’t have 4 hours a night to argue with 25 people on vent. Way to kill a new reader… nice knowing you guys lol
Wolfofthenyght, I don’t want to drive anyone away, just expressing my opinion (new reader myself btw
)
I understand the sentimental value of items, I still have pretty much all sets from D1 through T10 on the bank with a lot of weapons (rogue) including a warglaive that I was very happy to get awarded from my guild.
I just can’t see the problem replacing old items with new ones from new content.
So a question for the complainers, how would you solve the problem within Blizzard’s constraints?
1) Every level should have a perceivable (if only barely) power increase.
2) Leveling should not be roflstomping for leet raiders.
3) Leveling should not be impossible for characters that turn 80 on expansion day.
Or alternatively, which constraint would you violate?
@Sal: Wow! Zods is only 294!? Heroic stakethrower is 343. Rowand is 345 — and those numbers make logical sense with the ammo removal.
I have to think Zod’s is an oversight that they’ll fix. Otherwise… well, sucks to use bows.
@Corwyn I wouldn’t. The Hyjal and Vashj’r content NEED to be tuned for 78s with LK quest greens/blues/purples. I wouldn’t expect 251 geared raiders to see many clear upgrades until late in the starter zones, and the same late in Deepholm for 264 geared raiders. If you’re in 277, guess what, that’s probably going to last you either into the final levelling zone OR into the first raid, JUST LIKE LK.
@Frostheim well, Zod’s is only 294, but Rowan’s hits like an anemic baby for specials (I’ve seriously seen 300 damage Arcane and auto shots from Rowan’s, presumably from armor and resistance reduction.) I can take out 81 mobs with Zod’s with an Aimed/Arcane or Aimed/Chimera combo. WIth Rowan’s, I _have_ to kite.
@Wolf – I understand your disappointment, but I suggest you continue reading. This blog is the single most informative hunter resource I’ve found. Other blogs exist, but Frost’s suggestions have contributed most to my improvement as a hunter. Hopefully, you’ll stick around.
@Frost – your comparison of Zods, Stake, and Rowans relies on your build as an ArP MM hunter. For the full picture, we need to get those weps in the hands of other hunters – MM Agility, SV Agility, and BM.
No — I’m talking about the *base* dps of the weapon in the beta.
but but but what about the gearscore. I want lots and lots of gearscore.
Seriously, thanks for all the updates Frostheim and fellow readers. At least I get to play the beta vicarously