Hello, I recently came back to the game after a break, and I will be moving from Australia to New Zealand to start university in the second semester. I decided that I may find a 25m raiding guild if I can handle uni alright, but for that I would need to work on the BiS gear set using the sources at my disposal; LFR, Valor and Crafted gear. I'm currently frost, as I was when I quit in December, but I plan to go fire when I have the crit to do so. I will link my armory, but I don't think it will be so useful at this point of time.
While I know what the guides say about stats, etc, it was gear choices and the value of the higher level mastery gear that I had questions about;
- Are the ilvl 522 VP/crafted items with mastery superior to LFR gear with nicer stats?
- Am I right in assuming that the chest on the T15 set is what I want to replace with a 522/502 with crit?
- Does the fully upgraded Relic of Yulon (Darkmoon card) compete against the other trinkets that I can get?
- What is the most practical time to Evocate with the 60 second Invoker's Energy buff?
- As far as I can tell ilvl 522 items are better than 502 from LFR due to additional INT.
- You should buy ilvl 522 chest for VP. It would've been better to get an offset 522 headpiece with crit but there's no such thing outside of normal/heroic raiding.
- For trinkets you should aim for LFR Cha-Ye and Wushoolai/Breath of Hydra.
- Evocate as soon as the buff expires if the fight won't be over in 20 seconds. If there is some kind of downtime in the next 5 seconds (head swap on Megaera, quillen swap on Iron Qon) or you have 5 seconds of Heroism/Time Warp - then go on with your rotation and evocate at the last second of TW or when there's no dps loss.
I would recommend checking out Ask Mr. Robot. You can specify which gear sets to consider for optimization based on your spec. I don't have time to raid with my guild, so if I exclude the Normal, Heroic, and Thunderforged options, it suggests mostly VP gear with trinkets and a few tier pieces from Raid Finder. Your results may vary, but it's definitely a useful tool.
Depends on your money: You can also look for the tailoring items. Stats are not really good (hit mastery), but I think still better then the 502 items. Though they can be pretty expensive because of the ghosts.
There also 496 items easily available from reputation.