With the second wing of Tomb of Sargeras open in LFR, chances are improving to get two and four piece set bonuses from tier gear. My guild, Învictus, isn’t able to run Tomb of Sargeras on normal yet, not enough people, so those of us who can, run Tomb on LFR. The problem is that for many of us, we already have gear with an ilevel higher than what the base level is in LFR (885). Despite this, it is still worthwhile to run Tomb on LFR for the following reasons:
- Running with your guildies. This one should be obvious.
- There is a chance to get upgraded gear. I have seen drops in LFR for Tomb of Sargeras titanforge up to 915, which is pretty danged good and likely higher than most gear any of us have other than legendaries and artifact weapon.
- Set bonuses. As I mentioned at the start, it is getting easier to get set bonuses and have more options for forming them to make the best of your gear. Even if the gear you get is a lower ilevel than what you currently have, the set bonus could make it an upgrade. For example, on my monk, I just got two pieces of her tier gear. One piece is 5 ilevels less than the gear I had equipped and the other is 15 ilevels lower. (I got unlucky on getting any sort of upgrade.) You might think that I would be taking a hit of I equipped the tier pieces, but you would be wrong. Despite the lower ilevels, the tier pieces should give me about a 1% increase in dps. (The ret spec on my paladin sees a 3% increase in dps for a similar loss in ilevels.)
You may be wondering how I can know it is a 1% increase, and that brings me to SimCraft and Raidbots. SimCraft is a program you can download that allows you to run simulations on your character to see what sort of damage you could, in theory, be doing against a given type of boss. There is also an addon that works with it that allows you to copy and paste a data string with your character data from the game into the program. This allows you to more easily run sims on different combinations of gear.
Raidbots does all the SimCraft does, but rather than being a program on your computer, which will take up system resources if you try to run the simulation while still in the game, it runs in the cloud and it runs much faster than SimCraft does on my computer. The downside, if you want to call it that, is there is sometimes a queue of folks using it (I’ve seen it as high as 150 or so) but the servers get through it pretty quickly. You can also copy and paste the output from the SimCraft addon into Raidbots to compare sets of gear easily.
Raidbots has a lot of features that are worth playing around with but don’t get too caught up in it. It is just a tool to help you pick the right gear for your character, not something to start stressing over. Always remember the game is supposed to be fun.
You can find the SimCraft addon on Twitch and you can find Raidbots at raidbots.com.