Epic ring quest line

I've gotten pretty close to full PvP gear over the past couple weeks. I still need the belt and one trinket and then I'll have full 690 PvP gear ... except for my ring. One of the rings I've been using this whole time is the second stage of the epic ring quest line, ilvl 680. Not only is it fairly close to 690, but it also has the right secondary stats that I want, so I've been putting off buying a replacement for Conquest. Unfortunately, none of the other PvP rings have that same mix of stats, so I started to look into what I actually need to do to upgrade it.

The next part of the quest line requires you to kill the last two bosses in Highmaul, the raid content that was available upon release of WoD, and collect 125 Abrogrator Stones (these can be collected slowly from your Garrison or more quickly from running Highmaul). Sunday rolled around and I had some free time so I decided to give Highmaul a shot. I watched videos on the first two bosses while looking for a raid group in LFR. I got accepted so quickly that I didn't even have time to finish the first video, which made me even more nervous.

Things went pretty smoothly though. The mechanics for most fights were pretty simple and straightforward, and we always had people dropping out before each new boss so I had a couple minutes to try and research each fight beforehand. It turns out my gear is pretty good for the Normal setting of this raid! Normal drops ~655 gear, Heroic drops ~675, and Mythic drops ~685 gear. The PvP gear I have is all 660 so few things were actually upgrades. I managed to hold my own though in terms of DPS, even leading the charts for one fight!

The bonus roll you see in that picture is a pretty cool feature. Each week you can "buy" up to 3 bonus roll chances with either gold, apexis crystals or ... a third thing that I cannot remember (you can also get 1 bonus roll a week from your Garrison's War Mill). After every boss, you have the ability to use one of those bonus rolls in an attempt to get a piece of gear. I used 4 for the day and got only one piece of gear - a necklace that ended up not being an upgrade. The rest of the chances produced an insignificant amount of gold (~25). Some of the bosses also have a chance to drop BoE gear which, if you win, can be sold on the AH. I managed to win one piece and sold it for 4,500 gold.

It took us 3 attempts to down the second to last boss, we wiped once on the final boss, and then the group broke up. Later that night I tried to find a group that was going to kill the last boss. After two wipes, the third time was the charm and I had managed to clear all of Highmaul in a single day!

One interesting thing is that the size of the raid is elastic. The second group I was in was a 10 man, while the first was a 15 man. The difficulty of the zone scales to the size of your group!

I'll need to run Highmaul 2-3 more times to get enough Abrogrator stones, but I'm feeling pretty good about finishing that level of upgrade! The next upgrade has a nice buff that occasionally procs to give you an extra 10% of your main stat.