How to Choose Your Set Pieces!

I realized I’ve never written up a guide about set pieces for marks hunters. This is a common question: “Should I stick with 2T9, or get my 4T10 bonus?”. This also has a very simple response: “Do whatever the DPS calculators say is more DPS, because they’re usually right”.

The long version

Ok, it’s not always that simple. Firstly, femaledwarf.com and Shandara’s spreadsheet both assume that you will be stacking your 2t10 bonus onto a serpent sting, which you will keep refreshed for the whole fight. There are certain fights where this is not possible. If you are stuck on one of those fights, it doesn’t really matter how much DPS you do while you’re working your way through farm content to get to them, it is these fights that matter. Examples of this include the Lich King and Putricide.

If you want to see what your DPS would be without this, there’s a setting called “emulate known bugs” that you can disable.

So, which set bonuses?

Your choices are:

• 2t9 gives your stings the ability to crit, which “unlocks” the enormous amount of crit on our gear. Crit rating is also “saved” at the time of a marksmanship hunter’s serpent sting application as long as they can chimera shot refresh it.
• 2t10 gives you a 10% 15% damage increase proc off auto-shots, which can also be “saved” and refreshed with chimera.
• 4t10 gives you a 20% AP proc off serpent sting ticks. This is a fairly low uptime on single target fights, however increases for every additional target you can keep a sting on.

Each of these has a theoretical “paper doll” value for a single target fight, however realistically, some situations reward these differently. We can only choose two, and can’t choose 2t9 and 4t10 together. The value of 2t9 is consistently higher than 4t10, however it comes at a cost: you need to take lower iLvl gear to get it, which means less agility and less stats.

Also, before you all go get excited about increasing the value of 4t10 by stinging everything you can, remember that the total number of serpent ticks in a fight won’t be much higher if all the adds die quickly, which is the case for most encounters.

Most common setup: 2t9 and 2t10

Many hunters will want to keep their 2t9 and 2t10. If you have access to iLvl 245 tier 9 pieces and mostly 251 tier 10, this is a distinct advantage. You need to get a large increase on passive stats from gear to overtake the 2t9 bonus.

Since you’re going to be taking two pieces of ToC gear, which pieces do you want? Well, we’re already picking lower itemization gear, so we may as well at least pick the ones that offer stats we actually want. The best DPS combat stats are attack power, crit, and armor pen. The worst is haste, and the second worst is hit.

What? Hit is bad? A quick aside, if you will. Hit rating is the most DPS per itemization point short of weapon DPS for marks, however every single marks build has a bunch of non-required talent points. We usually throw them into improved steady shot, some sort of mana regen, improving our marks, or focused aim. In an ideal world where someone else is doing the mark and we never run out of mana, the only DPS increases are going to be through ISS or FA. ISS has a abysmal DPS per point spent, and that leaves us FA. If instead of using gear with hit rating, we get gear with ArP, we will need to use focused aim to keep hit capped, but in exchange are getting a lot of ArP.

Back on track: you want to avoid hit and haste on gear if you can choose something better. This means that we should be looking at the T9 head and legs, leaving chest, shoulders, and gloves for T10. Of these, two of the T10 pieces have the magic combo of AP, ArP, and crit: the chest and shoulders. The T10 gloves have hit instead of ArP. For that slot, consider using a non-set piece like the Logsplitters.

Low T9 or high T10?

Another situation I see is people with only access to the 232 T9. The lower stats on the lower set of T9 gear can quickly cost you the benefit of critting stings. In this situation, see whether going 4t10 gives you a higher final DPS number. Even the 251 T10 pieces might be enough. Alternately, if you have a lot of 25 man ICC time booked, you might have access to all 264 pieces of T10. This might even be more DPS than the 245 T9 gear in the above example.

The end result

Unless you have 258 T9 gear, eventually, you will be better off with 4t10. Once you start gemming armor pen, the damage done by your stings goes down, and the physical and bleed damage you do goes up. This mix of damage punishes you less once your stings stop critting. And, of course, if you ever get the heroic 25 man T10, you’re probably best off with that over any T9.

Too long, didn’t read:

• If you have access to 245 T9, use the head and legs. Use non-set hands, and T10 for the shoulder and chest.
• If you only have access to the 232 T9, go straight for T10, even if it’s 251 (however check this math on a sim to make sure it’s correct for you)
• If you have access to 264 or 277 T10, you can look into going 4t10. Especially if you’re able to hard cap armor penetration. Failing that, make sure that your two pieces of T9 are the head and legs.