I have all 9 shards…currently using the Frost bonus since I have shoulders.
Winds is typically 2.3-3% of my dps with a very crit heavy build (38%) and all 3 shards at rank 3.
The damage absorb shield on myself is very slightly behind my 15% leech for total healing (mitigation) on myself.
The absorb shield put on others when I crit does not seem to apply to pet, unfortunately.
Anyone with either of the two other 3 gem bonuses have any feedback?
Unholy is still the number 1 set for dps. It’s an absurd amount of dmg increase.
Im using the unholy set bonus and my dps seemed to go up over 1k overnight and Im almost always top dps in my guild right now.
Unholy seems like it is definitely the way to go.
I only have one socket piece which is unfortunate.
Yeah…I’m waiting for the Unholy piece to drop for me so I can try it out.
From what I’ve read, it is going to be heavily nerfed and the others possibly buffed some more.
3x Unholy
1x Bek
1x Cor
3x Unholy is most important for the set bonus, and make sure you level them up evenly before the Frost and Blood shards because the set bonus scales substantially with overall shard level.
After you have the 3x Unholy gems leveled, level the Shard of Bek (Blood).
Lastly, level Shard of Cor (Frost).
IMPORTANT:
If your only focus is dungeons, set bonuses ARE NOT active and you should only socket the 3 gems that increase your dps; Dyz, Bek, Cor.
I have two of the unholy, and one blood(leech) in my footgear. Hoping I can get the third unholy and then start leveling them up.
I have Unholy 3p set and the dps increase is very large. A 600-800 dps increase for most people.
Don’t use Blood or Frost bonuses btw as DPS. Unholy is way ahead.
But Blizzard doesn’t always give the unholy shards. 
Don’t remind me! I have one unholy and one socket! Plenty of blood and frost though!
I have all 9 shards but can only enable the frost set at the moment. At rank 3 gems, Winds of Winter is doing 3-4% of my dps on average. Not horrible for free damage…about in line with a trinket…but nowhere near close to the dps boost that the unholy set would give.
I should also add that WInds of Winter scales mostly with crit and I am running a crit heavy build.
My experience so far with the 3 unholy shard bonus:
The stat increase is substantial. Hard to quantify how much of a DPS increase it is, since it really just empowers my other abilities through stats, but it’s definitely a noticeable boost.
Chaos Bane damage itself is just annoying. When it “erupts” to do AoE damage, you need to be really close to the enemy. This is yet another example of Blizzard designing system around melee assumptions. It really should be changed to do damage at and around your target, not yourself.
They need to nerf unholy and blood. As someone who don’t have shards it’s a very unfair advantage. Either make shard bonus baseline for all or remove it entirely.
The bonus only works in SoD, Torghast and the Maw. It’s definitely an unfair advantage early on, but it will only be a few weeks before everyone just has them. Their primary purpose is to make SoD easier. Anyone with a set bonus is helping the raid as a whole, which makes it hard to argue about fairness.
That being said, I think the entire system is just dumb. They compartmentalized the game so much now, it’s become a mess. You need shard sets to raid. You need PvP sets to PvP. You need Mythic+ to get better gear. They are now actively discouraging people from playing multiple specs, which just seems insane to me.
Yeah the issue is that for the first month +, people who are not lucky with getting shards are excluded from Raids. LFR only just open to 6 bosses right now and you don’t have access to the guaranteed shard drop on Sylvanas.
It’s a stupid system. A veteran player with very good historical parses will be doing significantly less than lesser peers who have achieved shard bonus.
And it’s made worse because he gets declined/excluded from Raid groups, further setting him back in his ability to get shards. And no, doing M+ to catch-up will not work. I am ilevel 240 from doing M+ but I am getting smacked by a 235 player with unholy bonus.
There should be a catch-up system similar to Renown. If you don’t have shard bonus, they should allow anima exchange for shards, as an example.
The fact that you have to get lucky with both armor drops and shard drops is a real kick in the seat from Blizzard. I think it’s fine to have the armor drops as it currently does, but the shards should just be guaranteed drops from bosses.
I had 1 shard up until this morning, then ran LFR to try my luck and got “lucky” enough to get the other two unholy shards. So, out of 9 total shards, I’ve managed to acquire three. Meanwhile, I have friends with multiple pieces of armor and no shards to put in them -AND- friends with all of the shards and no armor to put them in. It’s a frustrating system from a development team that is condescending to players when asked about the crappy systems.
I still don’t have the helmet to even enable the bonuses, but I do have all the unholy shards.
Barely matters now that Blizzard plans to drop a fat nerf for the unholy set.
Lame.
It was fairly obvious the unholy set was way too overpowered.
Since they consider these to be Tier sets from what has been said and implied, they should allow them to be used in all forms of content. Especially after the upcoming Huge nerf next reset.
Well, they did say that they wanted raid gear to be best for raids. This was their solution.