Update 2 Champion Armor Spreadsheet

With the release of the new raid armor sets and a few new heavy armor drops I decided to update my Champion Armor Spreadsheet.

I was originally disappointed with the Dunhathol and Blade of the West sets when I saw the stats and bonuses coming from beta. It turns out Turbine adjusted them right up till release. I really like the new 5 piece bonus for the Blade of the West which gives +20% Auto Attack damage while Flurry is active.

Most Champions have Flurry up almost all the time so this is a sizeable increase in DPS. From looking at some parsing data a few years ago, I found that DW Champions DPS is made up of about 33% Auto Attacks and 2H DPS is about 25% Auto attacks. So this new set bonus will provide a DPS increase of between 5 and 7%.

I also found a few other interesting armor pieces, namely the Scale Leg Guards of the Hill-watcher from the Vol 3 Book 3 conclusion and the breastplate Curucham from Lost Temple. The legs provide a morale heal 15% of the time on incoming damage. This includes bleed and puddle ticks. The Breastplate is the single largest common damage reduction Champions have had available to date: 75% chance to negate 25 common damage.

I have been using the Malledhrim gloves and Breastplate off and on for a few months to get the same effects. But these new pieces also have pretty good stat distributions. And the Leggings represent a new location with the heal-on-hit bonus, having only shown up on gloves and helmets to this point. This allows a build with helm, leggings, and gloves with heal-on-hit procs. When paired with Curucham, you can stand toe to toe with any normal mob and last just about forever. This trivializes any gang mobs like the crows in Library at Thaim Mirdain. They will do almost no damage per hit, but will heal you faster than a drunk Minstrel on the electric mandolin.

After studying builds of some other Champions (primarily Virath, from my kinship) I have also come up with a new strategy for a build. Previously, I have used my LI relics to hold the majority of my Incoming Healing, with the old Teir 9 Gems of the Verdent Glenn. This provides 3000 Incoming healing, getting me close to the cap. I then took some from armor set bonuses or a helm as well as a minimal amount on my Champion Rune. Virath ended up using the Dragon Scale Helm and Gloves to get the greater portion of Incoming Healing and then used a Warriors Greenwood Necklace and his Champion Rune to make up the difference. This freed up his Gem slot on his LI’s to use the new Extraordinary Gem of Hope for an addition of 460 morale.

I decided to go partially down that road. I have switched one of my Gem of the Verdant Glenns out for the Gem of Hope. This allowed me to keep my Champion Rune at the minimum Incoming Healing. I used the Dragon Scale Helm and Gloves along with the new breastplate Curucham and the new heal leggings. To round that out I used the old Berserker Shoulders and Boots to get the 2 piece set bonus of +20 Vitality and Agility. This helped round out my stats.

Using this Incoming Healing build as a base I can then swap out the Dragon Scale Helm for the Berserker Helm to get the Fire resistance bonus for Durin’s Bane. I can also swap out Curucham, and the Berserker Shoulders and Boots for Blademaster or Deathstorm pieces to get Acid, or Frost and Shadow resistance for the other new bosses/instances.

Please see the old Champion Spreadsheet article for instruction on how to build your own sets.

Here are the different versions of the updated Spreadsheet:

• Excel 2010 version
• Excel 2003 version
• Google Docs Version