Greedy Goblin

Saturday, February 14, 2009

One ring to rule them all

Actually, not. The Kirin Tor rings are not the best in the game now, and will be even less good after Ulduar and later instances. After all they are lousy ilvl200 epics:
Well they are not bad either! They are specially tailored for one job. We often end up with items that has lot of stats on them, just half of them are useless. Haste is just as useful to a restodruid as spirit to an elemental shaman. These rings does not have such annoyances. The healer ring does not have crit and haste, the spell DPS ring does not have spirit and so on. Maybe the tanking ring could have def rating instead of crit rating, but I guess the bears would disagree.

And above all, these are extremely easily accessible rings. They cost 8500G, that's 7600 when honored with Kirin Tor (that's easily reachable by questing). This money can be made in 2-3 hours of trading. You can buy similar rings for 25 emblems of valor. That's 4 VoA25 + Sarth25 runs. Granted, the titanium JC rings are almost as good for less than 2000G so I'd suggest to buy those first.

However we have 2 ring slots and rings have the highest competition on raids. Everyone has 2 ring slots and rings have no armor type. You can expect every spellcaster from warlocks to holy paladins to /roll or bid DKP on any ring that has spellpower. So having a titanium and a Kirin Tor rings is a safe, sure and easy way to fill 2 slots with good (=/= best) rings, saving your DKP for class-specific items that goes for lower.

If you mostly PuG I don't know what to suggest. While you can /roll for better or almost-as-good rings for free, you may never get them since 10+ others will roll too. I'm famous for rolling less than 10 for everything that would be a major upgrade.

If you are in a Loot Council guild, I'd suggest not to buy these rings, and even the titanium JC rings are questionable. After all, the better gear you have, the less gear you get from the council. A blue quest reward will do it.

There used to be only 2 ring, the physical and the spell DPS. I guess they introduced the other two in 3.0.8. I've just noticed the two new rings and bought the healer ring.

10 comments:

Kring said...

The rings cost 25 emblem of valor, not heroism. Therefore are harder to get and if you don't raid 25 there are way more interesting items to buy first with the few you get from VA and OS.

Unknown said...

You missed the best feature for some classes, the extra hearth!

I feel I've gotten my 6.4k gold value from that alone. Time is valuable when I'm working on growing my gold stash along with raiding and other facets of the game. Anything that saves me a flight or even tracking down a mage for a portal is worth the gold.

Gevlon said...

@mutagen: right, I did not noticed since I'm inscribe with scroll of recall.

Anonymous said...

@Mutagen- I figure a asking for a group invite from someone to ghetto hearth (a waste of 3-4 mins tops) greatly outweighs the benefit of a 6k (difference between Titanium rings and Kirin tor bands) hearthstone.

Honors Code said...

"If you are in a Loot Council guild, I'd suggest not to buy these rings, and even the titanium JC rings are questionable. After all, the better gear you have, the less gear you get from the council. A blue quest reward will do it."

That is one reason I hate Loot Council. If you act in your own enlightened self interest, you will not go in with much more than quest rewards.

Sydera said...

The extra hearth is nice, but otherwise, whether to purchase these rings depends entirely on one's gold balance. Due to limited play time, I support myself for raiding with my meager AH income. I have two crafting profs--for the raid advantage, of course--and only about 45 min a day to devote to AH business. Now, I'm never going to run out of money for repairs, but I won't have 7600 gold anytime soon either.

As for loot council, you've made an assumption. With my guild's loot council, we don't award "lazy." So, while we might give an i-level 213 ring to a new raider who honestly hasn't had a chance to replace his quest blue, we'd never give it to someone who had been with us more than a couple of weeks. Why? In that time they would have gotten the badges to replace the ring. Our loot council looks at effort. I know this, because I served a rotating spot on it. In my month of voting, I saw someone lose out on the best-in-slot belt (i-level 226 from Malygos) because they hadn't put an eternal belt buckle on their i-level 213 one. When a guild brings down a lot of loot, most of the time the decision comes down to not just who would make the greatest improvement, but who's put in the effort to get there. I saw myself win a T7.5 helm (I didn't vote on my own) because I had used badges to buy my tier pants that week. Every loot council works differently. I'm not saying ours is always perfect, but it does try to account for player effort--and that's not just attendance, but effort and expense to maintain the gear.

Sydera said...

Oh, I wish I could edit comments.

About the quality of the KT rings: as a resto druid, you won't want the spirit from the healer ring after 3.1 hits, so caveat emptor.

What I'm seeing in my guild's raids (we've cleared everything including OS3D) is that people are replacing their Kirin Tor rings now with raid drops. They're still cool for the free hearth though. I still find occasion to use my Black Temple teleport necklace once in a while, and I imagine a teleport to Dalaran could be really useful in future expansions, at least when it comes to world events and holidays that ask you to go all around the world.

Anonymous said...

WoW, you have some stupid loot councils. My guild doesn't just give loot to people cause they have crappy gear. They base their decisions off of perfomrance and attendence. If there's an epic ring you could get and your not doing it they will ask you why you haven't gotten it yet? Now if two people need an item and ones a 1 dps upgrade the other is a 20dps upgrade and all things being relatively equal it will go to the 20dps person. If you haven't actively acquired good gear they wont let you raid at all. (except for alt runs)

Anonymous said...

Haste is actually a decent stat for resto druids, check EJ. Especially in ulduar, you need a lot of healing fast, and haste accomplishes exaclty that, at the cost of mana efficiency (which does not matter, since trees never run oom).

Ranjurm said...

There is no Tanking rind there. That's a plate dps ring.