So, my personal reasons for looking into this mainly come down to the Rune of the Scholar. As you’ll know, you get a bonus 10% damage from it as long as you keep your health above 90%, which, in a raid, when you’re already hitting 30k+ dps on an ele, is a big bonus. But, as anyone who plays ele will know, keeping your health that high isn’t easy, especially in a high pressure environment like a raid, where much of the damage is unavoidable. The Vale Guardian in particular comes to mind here. Having a good healer helps with that, but I still find it very difficult to maintain over 60% health, let alone 90%. So, enter Marauders gear. If you didn’t know, its one of the 4-attribute gear types introduced with HoT, and it has Power and Precision as majors attributes, and Vitality and Ferocity as minors. I think you see where this is going.
For each of the comparisons, effective power was simply calculated as Power * Crit Chance * Crit Dmg. If this is in fact a grossly inaccurate way to compare gear, by all means let me know :P The base build used was the textbook Staff DPS build. I should note that D/W Fresh Air, the other popular ele build for PvE, will actually give slightly different results, due to it having more precision and less power, but I won’t cover that here. If you use fresh air more than staff, then feel free to look into that yourself. The results were all taken with the build editor set to 25 might, but that didn’t appear to persist when I copied the links, so w/e. The percentage differences between the different builds is the same with no might as it is with 25, since its just a flat power increase.
Pure Zerkers
Health – 11645
Power – 3657
Crit Chance – 68.62%
Crit Damage – 231%
Effective Power – 5796
Zerkers w/ Assassins Earrings
Health – 11645
Power – 3585
Crit Chance – 72.05%
Crit Damage – 231.33%
Effective Power – 5975
Marauders w/ Zerkers Trinkets & Assassins Earrings
Health – 14895
Power – 3499
Crit Chance – 76.67%
Crit Damage – 220.53%
Effective Power – 5916
Marauders w/ Assassins Earrings
Health – 16725
Power – 3379
Crit Chance – 77.95%
Crit Damage – 211.6%
Effective Power – 5573
Pure Marauders
Health – 17705
Power – 3419
Crit Chance – 76.24%
Crit Damage – 208.13%
Effective Power – 5425
To sum up: Marauders weapons and armour, with assassins earrings and zerkers for the rest of the trinkets gave an effective power almost identical to the recommended zerkers w/ assassins earrings (henceforth z/a), and a good bit higher than pure berserkers, but with an increase of 3250 health. I’d need to playtest to see how much of a real-world improvement to survivability that represents, but the damage difference is negligible (0.99% lower) to the point that I’d say this is a straight upgrade over z/a.
Marauders weapons, armour and trinkets with assassins earrings is more interesting. You sacrifice about 6.7% effective power compared to z/a, but gain 5050 health – a 43% increase. At this point, I’d say that the scholars bonus is going to be much easier to maintain compared to z/a.
I’m sceptical about pure marauders, though. You gain 6060 health, but lose 9.2% effective power, more or less negating the benefit from the scholars runes.
So, the conclusion is of course, that there is no conclusion. There is no “best” set to run, though I’d advise against pure marauders or pure berserkers. If you read this post thinking “What is this guy talking about? I stay above 90% health on my ele all the time”, then good for you. Stick to z/a, because its still the best effective power (though not by much). I can see myself moving my weapon and armour over to maurauders, but keeping my trinkets as they are. Although, it might be an idea to try swapping out some, but not all of the remaining zerkers trinkets for marauders, tweaking the balance a bit to maximise health increase while minimising dps decrease.
For those who don’t know, assassins earrings come from the collections for the Arah and CM dungeon armour/weapon collections, here and here.
Marauders trinkets come from the magnetite shards vendor in raids, though you can get a stat selectable amulet from the HoT Act 4 story achievements too. (Exact same methods as Vipers trinkets).
(edited by BlazingHydra.5702)