Cataclysm Stat Changes

Blizzard has released a little more info on the upcoming stat changes for Cataclysm, so like everyone else I'll go ahead and talk about them a bit. Overall it doesn't seem like all that much is going to be changing for us, but there are certainly still some unknowns and a lot might still change before 4.0 actually comes around.

AP will be going away as a stat on items, which means leather and mail for physical types will be down to 4 stats, same as plate is now. This means that you will be sticking with plate from now on, unless you somehow end up with a huge difference in item level. Moreover, they are setting up some kind of system, from the sound of it involving mastery, that gives you free stats for choosing the highest class of armor available to you. So no more taking rogue gear. What intrigues me here is how they are going to handle trinkets, since all physical DPS generally share the same ones in current content. I guess this just means they will have to make more of them that are clearly split between the agility users and the strength users.

They also are changing haste to make it more useful for melee classes by having it also increase the rate of regeneration of your resources (runes, energy, rage) in addition to its current effects. They haven't specifically discussed how they will handle this for ret paladins (or enhancement shamans), but they did mention that they will make it benefit us somehow. Hopefully they don't just have it increase mana regen, because that would be pretty useless and would likely relegate haste to being a very weak stat for us.

Armor penetration rating will be gone completely when 4.0 rolls around, which is something I think we can all be happy about. There will still be armor penetration available through talents and skills, but you will never see it on gear, which is awesome. The new stat that will be found on Cataclysm gear instead is mastery, which has different effects for different specs. Blizzard has stated that they plan to rework the talent trees pretty substantially, and we can likely expect to see talents that simply increase damage by a percent or increase crit chance across the board go away. From what they showed at Blizzcon, spending points in the ret tree will cause an increase in damage and melee crit without any specific talents doing so. The third benefit they showed, which appears to be the only one that gains from the mastery stat, was ability cooldown, which sounds very interesting. Given that paladins are limited by the cooldowns of their abilities and by the GCD more than anything else, this could make mastery a very attractive stat. Obviously, it could also end up being garbage depending on how they decide to scale it, we'll just have to wait and see.

Another big change coming up is that hit and expertise will apparently be getting much harder to cap, and will be harder to cap the higher the level of content that you are doing. As of right now, hit is the single best DPS stat before the cap, and expertise is not far below strength. Depending on how hard it really is to cap, hit could become the default gemming, which I would prefer not to see, since it feels much more satisfying putting strength in all those sockets. On the plus side, it sounds like hit is currently slated to become a blue gem, which would be awesome, since blue sockets currently suck and for them not to would be great.

Reforging is one area where more information is likely necessary to do a serious evaluation, but as of right now it seems like it may have limited benefit. If I'm reading correctly, you can turn one stat into 50% of the amount of another stat (i.e. 100 haste into 50 hit) and there are limitations, the commonly cited one being no turning stamina into strength (sadly). In order for that to be beneficial the old stat would have to be less than 50% as good as the new one. This is true in some cases now, but it sounds like you should still be looking for gear that is good without reforging as much as possible. For example, in a guild setting, I would certainly prefer a piece of gear go to someone who does not need to reforge before someone who does. Again, we'll have to see how things shake out in the months to come.