It would only be important to keep up during the periods of the fight where rip is not ticking to make sure your shred benefits from a bleed (My 10man is odd in that I’m the only one with any sort of bleed effect). In an ideal fight with high storm power and rip uptime, dropping it sounds like a great idea.

I’m usually consistently around 9k before we call wipes (if the timer’s not looking good) and have finished fights at 11k.

the important parts of getting great DPS here is maximizing time on target and efficient use of berserk (preferably with a trinket procced and/or wild magic potion). I also try to prioritize shredding over keeping up rake while I have the crit buff.

Our most recent kill’s WoL @ http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/ttIo4oaGU8kvgt9Y/sum/damageDone/

Pool your combo points (within reason of course) so that you can apply a fresh rip and rake the moment you gain the storm power buff. Use every cooldown you can during the storm power time as mentioned, but make sure to re-apply (read: clip) both your rake and rip before the buff falls off. Using the add-on “Tell me When” or something similar to monitor when you have it and when it’s about to wear off makes this much easier. Use the time between to maintain your roar, mangle (I have no friendly warrior doing it for me) and shred like there’s no tomorrow.

My reasoning behind this is that any dot applied with a personal buff or debuff should benefit from it for the duration of the dot even if the buff falls off. If rip is applied before you have Storm Power, then the full duration would not benefit even if you got the buff 1 sec later. With approx 60% crit rate and the low number of rips available in 3 minutes, this should be a significant change to your dmg.

Liberal use of kitty sprint and kitty charge to get/spread the buff and get back to the boss is just a bonus of the fight.

If my understanding of the mechanic is flawed or you’re already doing something similar, please let me know so that I can be properly mocked. In addition to being shamed, I can re-evaluate my plan for when I can convince another tank to tank it.

PS – For clarity: To the best of my testing, the buff ‘Storm Power’ is a self-only, fixed duration buff increasing crit dmg for you and has no benefit to others. ‘Storm Cloud’ is a shorter duration buff on you that causes ‘Storm Power’ on those close to you (6 stacks I believe, with the stack slowly refreshing) but gives you personally ZERO in the way of any bonuses. The icon is the same and the tooltip similar, even misleading.

Jace, my guess is that you’re getting a lot of downtime on Hodir. I mean, there are no forced dps stops in the fight so your dps should be at worst equal to what you see on Ignis. Are your priests Mass Dispelling melee when Hodir casts Freeze? That’s a huge help so you don’t waste time and possibly energy to shift out. Also, are you certain you were getting Storm Power and not Storm Cloud? It’s unlikely that you’d get Storm Cloud 4 times in 1 fight and a rogue would get 3, but it’s possible.

The tricky thing about this fight is that white attacks become very important. White damage is the only damage that’s affected by the beams (well, other than increased OOC proc rate) and Storm Power decreases the importance of Rake, making white damage a larger portion of your total dps. Other than staying within range for white attacks and saving Berserk for when you have Storm Power, there’s really no tricks to the fight. The only other thing I can think of is to make absolutely sure you get as much uptime on Storm Power’ed Rips as possible. It’s worth it to throw a 3CP Rip if your Storm Power is about to fade instead of doing a 5CP Rip without Storm Power. I would also suggest overwriting a non-Storm Power’ed Rip with a new one when you first get Storm Power.

I just think in my current situation without an ArP trinket the difference with just some gemming isn’t large enough to worry about.

I know, ultimately when I cannot decide which set to upgrade I just take my agi and call it good. I have the advantage of raiding with another druid and while our gear is not exactly the same, it’s close enough. I gem about half the time with arpen and use arpen food. He doesn’t tank and takes all the arpen he can. The difference between us is around 500 dps. I do have the advantage of a grim toll trinket right now, so it’s most likely a little more than that that I sacrifice. As you can imagine, I’ve been closely considering my upgrades and what sets to take them for.

Also, I’m glad you brought this up because I’ve noticed a DPS loss as well for me and other melee on Hodir. The hints from others doing hard mode are pretty handy. I have to imagine that avoiding the freezes and breaking out the NPCs is part of that, however I hadn’t considered the buffs involved. So, thanks (everyone).