Advice on first frost badge buy

Hi anyone who's reading

Basically i need a little advice on my first frost badge buy, i currently have 61 badges on all toons but im torn between what to buy for each.

I run a feral tank, resto shaman and 3 ele's and on all my shamans i bought the triumph vendor shoulders first (dumb as fook i no as there resto shoulders lol) so im geussing that for sure the 3 ele's need to get the frost shoulders to correct my first blunder and the resto should get them aswell as the set bonus for resto is imba (if i ever get there) and all toons keep there 4 set t9 bonus but what makes me frustrated and confused is that for pure +stats the shoulders seem to be the worst upgrade and therefore seem to me as a waste of 60 badges when for instance the mail belt would be a super awsome upgrade : /
And this is the same for my feral tank, i was advised to get the shoulders with badges and me an another boxer have been 2 manning voa in hope of t10 (pants gloves i think) but for pure +stats the vengeful noose is way better of an upgrade : /
if i had the belt it would be
+57 armor
+115 stam (gemed)
+75 agility
-3 AP
+64 haste
+80 pen
-43 expertise

The loss of expertise is a little painfull but to me the gain in stam alone make it worth it to me, but who am i : /
i wont bother putting shoulder + stats on here as there no ware near as good but thats why im asking am i missing something ?
its the same with the shamans arrgghhhh!!!! i dont no what to do :(

There is a 264 belt that drops from trash in ICC. Depending on your gold that might be a good upgrade for your resto (even for dps its nice). However the belt is imo the best first upgrade from frost badges. Since other pieces can drop in VoA.

Don't go for the cape, there is a very nice pvp cape that you can buy from honor. Same for the neck. An alternative is to use the frost emblems of some slaves to buy saronite, and get you crafted items for your main dps, resto or tank (depending if you plan to raid on one).

I have a philosophy about this. Whenever I'm torn between two pieces of gear, I look at:
Which one will help me get the second one fastest?
In other words, I want the biggest upgrade that's also the cheapest. Cheapness isn't as important, because we're on a fixed income with frost badges, but it does factor in if you're trying to decide whether to buy those 264 shoulders for 45 or that 264 chestpiece for 95. Which one will help you kill @#$% faster so you can farm up the badges for the other piece? (Or in your resto's case, heal @#$% faster)

I just look for the biggest upgrade. I also tend to ignore chance-to-proc effects since I don't find them useful when mutlboxing (its no help to have 1 paladin out of 5 get a haste boost when I'm synching their spell/attack rotations).

Go to...

http://rawr.codeplex.com/

and download the latest version of rawr. It's a gear comparison tool, that will tell you, based upon your current items, how big of an upgrade certain pieces are for you. You can compare how good each piece you can buy will be for you based on theoretical dps increase, healing throughput, time to oom, pretty much anything , and make your decisions based on that. It's an incredibly useful tool that I highly recommend using to plan gear choices.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jimbobobb

Go to...

http://rawr.codeplex.com/

and download the latest version of rawr. It's a gear comparison tool, that will tell you, based upon your current items, how big of an upgrade certain pieces are for you. You can compare how good each piece you can buy will be for you based on theoretical dps increase, healing throughput, time to oom, pretty much anything , and make your decisions based on that. It's an incredibly useful tool that I highly recommend using to plan gear choices.

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Rawr is nice...but it is definitely not the answer to all. :)

Alot of people get the shoulders and gloves because they are the cheapest and can give you to the two piece T10 bonus relatively quickly. If the bonus isn't very good for you then I would suggest going for the one with the biggest stat boost.

Thank you all for your inputs, i decided to go with the belts for the tank and the 3 dps as the stat improvements were just to much to ignore and went with the t10 shoulders for the resto as she already has a great belt and getting that set bonus on my resto would be great

Depends on what else you can get. Do you pug icc10 for the first 4 bosses that many do? do you pug your team to get the weekly raid complete? In other words did it take you over a month to get those badges at 2 a day from heroics or are you pulling in 30 a week with some pugs and weekly? If so don't buy emblem gear that drops there. 2pc and 4pc set bonuses can go a LONG way to increasing dps output so some go for those asap over the offset items like boots, cloaks, belts, trinkets etc. Also what can you get that is 245 from Triumph or crafted items. Upgrading those make less sense than an item that has been sitting at i200 for the last 6 months.

Teir 10 legs and gloves drop in VOA, are you doing those? If all you're doing is heroic dungeons then I would just go with whatever is the biggest upgrade available.

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Originally Posted by Starbuck_Jones

Depends on what else you can get. Do you pug icc10 for the first 4 bosses that many do? do you pug your team to get the weekly raid complete? In other words did it take you over a month to get those badges at 2 a day from heroics or are you pulling in 30 a week with some pugs and weekly? If so don't buy emblem gear that drops there. 2pc and 4pc set bonuses can go a LONG way to increasing dps output so some go for those asap over the offset items like boots, cloaks, belts, trinkets etc. Also what can you get that is 245 from Triumph or crafted items. Upgrading those make less sense than an item that has been sitting at i200 for the last 6 months.

Teir 10 legs and gloves drop in VOA, are you doing those? If all you're doing is heroic dungeons then I would just go with whatever is the biggest upgrade available.

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i dont do pugs in icc as its hard as hell on my server to get into one without 5k+ GS and achi my toons are sat at 4.8k-4.9k GS except the resto thats at just over 5k and TBH i realy dont have the time to pug each toon solo and as a group is ofc out of the question. i do the daily and the weekly and voa for frost badges and use the tank and healers triumph for crusader orbs for gold to get crafted bits as they have nothing but pvp gear to gain from triumphs
its all pretty slow going but i think im doing ok as with some of the things i've read about peoples troubles with shaman dps struggling but my shamans do well

I am getting belts when I hit 60 on my team.

Primordial Saronite for the raiding main =p

/whips saronite slaves

Quote:

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Originally Posted by angeldeelite

i dont do pugs in icc as its hard as hell on my server to get into one without 5k+ GS and achi my toons are sat at 4.8k-4.9k GS except the resto thats at just over 5k and TBH i realy dont have the time to pug each toon solo and as a group is ofc out of the question. i do the daily and the weekly and voa for frost badges and use the tank and healers triumph for crusader orbs for gold to get crafted bits as they have nothing but pvp gear to gain from triumphs
its all pretty slow going but i think im doing ok as with some of the things i've read about peoples troubles with shaman dps struggling but my shamans do well

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I would download the add-on "Underachiever" - automatically makes it look like any achievement you link has been completed by you. That's half the battle in finding PuG groups, doesn't help you with the gear score part of it though.

The contribution to gear score was one of the first considerations I had for initial frost emblem purchases before my toons were over 5K. Helped get them into PuGs (and access to better gear) sooner. Most people are so blinded by gear score that they don't care if you have items that are better for your DPS/tanking/healing - they'd rather see you in items that cause your performance to degrade but make your gear score higher!