• If there is a yellow or blue slot, I put a Quick King’s Amber in it.  Red Slots got Reckless Ametrine.  Slot bonuses are accounted for.  Enchanting bonuses are also accounted for in the rankings, where noted.
• Metagems are not included in the rankings.
• Tier bonuses (as well as breaking tier bonuses) are ignored.  But remember, the 2xT9 bonus is pretty damned good, while the 4piece T9 bonus is worthless.
• I went by the Elitist Jerks Shaman HEP ratings: SP = 1, MP5 = 1, Intellect = .6, Haste = 1.5, Crit = .8

So, in terms of rankings…

What does this REALLY mean? Well, we would expect the three i264 pieces to show a good value (and for the most part, they do). However, this doesn’t take into account the tier bonuses. Seeing as how the 2 piece T9 bonus was ~100 HEP, I’d argue that you will probably get a better value by buying the tier pieces first, followed by the cloak. Sometime soon I’ll put up a post with comparison values and the spreadsheet used….

I doubt that’s what they were going for.

Beasts of Northrend: (2 shot)
Gormok’s Band
Icehowl Binding

Lord Jaraxxus: (1 shot)
Darkspear Ritual Binding
Sabatons of Tortured Space (I got it!)

Faction Champs: (1 shot)
Vengeance of the Forsaken
Sunreaver Assassin’s Gloves

Twin Val’kyr: (2 shot)
Sandals of the Grieving Soul
Band of the Twin Val’kyr

Anub’arak:
4 shots, no kill. Lacking DPS hardcore….

A CotA only run.
Empowered Deathbringer
Coif of Ten Storms
Judgement Cover

25m Northrend Beasts:
Stygian Bladebreaker
Forlorn Barrier
Sabatons of the Courageous
Trophy of the Crusade
Plans: Saronite Swordbreakers
Crusader Orb

25m Lord Jaraxxus:
Dawnbreaker Sabatons
Solace of the Fallen
Talisman of Heedless Sins
Trophy of the Crusade
Crusader Orb
Same composition as the previous boss.

25m Faction Champs: (2 shot, first kill for CotA)
Sabatons of Tremoring Earth
Leggings of Concealed Hatred (I got it!)
Icewalker Treads
Trophy of the Crusade

Raid with combined CotA and Faction of Doom people.  Healed on Delarnmint.

Drops (aside from the normal stuff):

Eskhandar’s Links

Dragonstalker’s Helm

Dragonstalker’s Helm

Yes, we got 2 Dragonstalker’s Helms.

Just for the record, my computer is running Ubuntu Gutsy on a T61 14.1″.  The graphics card is the Intel X3100, running the default Ubuntu drivers.  The wine version used was Wine 1.1.2.

First of all, Wine has always been a really big problem for me. I never seem to get anything working properly.  In fact, up until today I had been running a year old version of Wine because any newer version somehow wouldn’t let me run the few applications I still emulated with Wine (mainly MS Office 2003).  Well, today I decided that I would bite the bullet and attempt to install WoW under wine.  Installing it, at least for me, was not unique–Copy the Installer.mpq files from each of the four discs, run the installer under Wine, and go for it.  After the initial game was installed (at version 1.0) the game ran perfectly–well, at least it booted up and went to the login screen perfectly.  After a series of what seemed like endless patches, I finally ended up at version 2.4.3, which is the current version at the time of writing this.

Now, I did something stupid: I assumed.  I assumed that since WoW had started up initially (v1.0) that it would start up after patches (v2.4.3).  After all, I looked through patch notes and there was nothing about breaking wine compatibility (I completely stole that joke from Jeff.  Proper credit is due). But, when I started the program under default settings (DirectX), it didn’t want to work anymore.  It showed my screen slightly mangled and had a cursor, but nothing would work (not even killing the X server or attempting to SSH/VNC in) to stop it.  After a few hard reboots, I attempted to open it with the command

wine Wow.exe -opengl

I assumed that since I was running in Linux and OpenGL was native, that would be a much better solution.  What did I get for my assumption?

The OpenGL version of the WoW login screen

Yes, that’s correct.  A completely messed up version of WoW’s login screen.  Maybe, though, it’s just a problem with the login screen.  Sometimes various things in menus don’t work in games under Wine and it’s just a matter of getting into the game itself.  I assumed this was one of those cases, so I went for it.  My result?

A new graphical pack for WoW that Blizzard pushed just to me!

That’s right.  An AWESOME version of the WoW interface. Great. At this point, I was getting fairly frustrated.  I’m going to cut out the hour or two of me surfing the internet for any semblence of a solution and tell you the final setup I used to get it to work.

This is my solution.  Your results may vary.

• In the ‘winecfg’ program, uncheck the box that says “Allow Pixel Shader (if supported by hardware)“.
• Add the following lines to your Config.wtf (located in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/)

• SET UIFaster "2"

  SET ffxDeath "0"

  SET ffxGlow "0"

  SET gxWindow "1"

  SET SoundOutputSystem "1"

  SET SoundBufferSize "150"

• Keep the display on DirectX (wine Wow.exe -d3d) and remove any references to OpenGL in your Config.wtf file.  I could not get it to work with OpenGL, but DirectX worked.

I doubt this solution will work for everyone, but I thought I may as well put it up to keep others from the same headache I suffered through.  This is what I got in the end:

My final result after lots of hacking with Wine