Lots of strats already coming out for the bosses in Ulduar. Here's some for the first boss on vehicular combat!!!
How Vehicle Gear Scaling works
After doing half an hour of equipment swaps and jumping in and out of the motorbike, I have determined with reasonable confidence how the vehicles scale with increasing quality of gear for the current implementation of the vehicle based fight in Ulduar. Here are my observations in the 10 man version:
- Shirt, tabard, offhand, and ranged/relic slots do not affect vehicle scaling. - This does mean an ilvl 226 1 hand weapon is better than an ilvl 213 2 hander. - Enchants and gems do not affect it either, it is based solely off item level. - An ilvl 200 blue is equivalent to an ilvl 187 epic. Experimenting with other combos of blue/epic gear gave me reasonable confidence that a blue item is equivalent to an epic 13 levels lower. - An empty slot is equivalent to an ilvl 0 epic - this does mean equipping an ilvl 0 blue such as Insignia of the Scourge will be worse than having nothing at all in the slot.
Empirically, taking the average ilvl of your gear (subtract 13 for each blue, 26 for each green) and dividing by 15 (total number of applicable slots), then subtracting 170 will give you the percent increase of the health points of your vehicle compared to base - it cannot be decreased though (naked is a 0% increase).
Thus: All ilvl 200 epic gear => 200-170 => 30% increase in vehicle hp. All 226 would be a 56% increase!!!
I did some limited testing of vehicle damage:
Naked: 2148 average attack with 171 attacks Avg 213 gear: 3038 average attack with 160 attacks 3038/2148 = 41.4% so that seems to be within the margin of error for the expected value of 43%
