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.

Frost Emblems and Ret Pallies

I am deciding what to do with my Frost Emblems in the future, and thought I should go ahead and just post my thought processes here so that they might possibly be of use to someone else.

Tier 10
These are definitely good buys for those emblems, and this is where all of mine have gone so far. I'm up to 3 pieces of Tier 10 now (though I can only really use 2 at a time), and my plan is to try to get the legs out of VoA for the 4 piece and save myself all those emblems.

Cloaks
Both the Emblem cloaks are quite nice, Scarlet Onslaught seems to be slightly better if you are expertise capped but Ocean Serpent is definitely a solid choice, and is a little more future-proof as well. I have the cloak from Gunship 25, so this one isn't really on my personal radar at all.

Chest/Gloves
These are pretty decent pieces, but since both are in Tier slots, I am not likely to be taking advantage of them anytime soon. Right now I am using 2 T9 and 2 T10 plus the crafted 245 chest, and there is no way I am paying 95 emblems to get 30 more strength and some extra ArPen. Gloves I am using for a Tier slot, and hopefully I will have the gloves from Festergut 25 for when I am ready to put Tier in the chest. Either way, these pieces are low priority.

Belt
The belt is quite nice if you need the hit, but I personally have way more than I want anyway, and the waist slot is one place I was hoping to be able to get rid of some. One of the bosses in Plagueworks drops a belt (Edit: which has hit and ends up being a sidegrade anyway), and Valithria 25 has the BiS, so with some luck I'll have the opportunity to get one of those pretty soon. Again, low priority.

Trinket
The Herkuml War Token isn't all that great of a trinket, and I am not really interested. On paper it actually ranks up there quite highly, despite the fact that the static bonus is haste. I used Fury of the Five Flights back in the day (and still do for some things, sadly) though, and I can tell you without hesitation that I hate the stacking AP mechanic. It's annoying to get to full stacks and in some fights you will lose the stack and have to start over again through no fault of your own. It hurts, because I could really, really use a trinket upgrade, but I don't think this is the way to go.

Libram
In a continuing theme, this is a nice upgrade, but way too minor to justify the expenditure of Emblems. For SoV, which is what you'll be using for most boss fights, its only a gain of 20 strength, one epic gem. For fights where you are using another seal, the benefit is quite a bit larger, but the stack is fairly slow building up (takes something like 45 seconds to pass Valiance when you are using SoV) and its just not a big enough gain to justify the cost.

That leaves us with...
Primordial Saronite
This seems to be just about the only thing that is left to buy with Frost Emblems. The attractiveness of this is highly dependent on a factor that is not really within my control, however. I am not particularly interested in either the crafted boots or legs (using legs as a tier slot, already have the 251 boots and would prefer the boots from Lady D 25 to the crafted) so the only thing I want Primordial Saronite for is Shadow's Edge. My guild still hasn't killed Rotface or Festergut, so we haven't actually decided who is getting the official support of the guild in obtaining the legendary. Since we are new, we don't have much of a history to draw on, so I don't envy the officers who have to make the choice. So far, however, only two people have put their names under consideration (including me). So...I don't really have anything to say, I guess, since I have no idea how this will go. If they pick me then I get some assistance in acquiring the Primordial Saronites, and that's where all my Emblems will start to go all of a sudden. If not, then who knows what'll happen. Maybe I can even scrounge up the 25 Saronite on my own and the guild can have 2 legendaries :)

So to summarize the gear available from the Frost Emblem vendors, Tier is awesome and everything else is a bit "meh." Obviously everything depends to some extent on your own personal gear, but as far as I can tell, none of the Emblem non-Tier pieces are going to be on a Best-in-Slot gear list. If you happen to be rocking a 200 belt and need some hit though, the Malevolent Girdle is right up your alley. As always with gear choices, you have to exercise those spreadsheet muscles and figure out what will work for you.

On Gear

Gear is a tricky subject for me sometimes. I don't raid to get gear, I raid because I like the sense of accomplishment that comes with it. It is REALLY fun that first time you kill a boss you have been having trouble with, or knowing that an encounter is confusing and odd and then everyone does their job right and the boss goes down and makes it seem easy. That said, gear is an integral part of raiding. Most of the rewards for raiding are gear, and if my gear lags behind, I can't contribute as much to the progress of my raid. Moreover, I do like gear. It's fun to look at the Armory or WoW Heroes and be reminded of what you have done. I have several pieces of 264 gear and this says that I (with my guild) can kill bosses in ICC 25 (even if only in the Lower Spire so far).

I will freely admit that I play (and have only played) in a time of easy epics compared to previous eras of the game. There are still many epics that mean something, however, and the idea that gear indicates skill is not entirely irrelevant. Note that I am not saying that high gearscore indicates a player with more skill or knowledge, but that there are certain pieces of gear that one can associate with skill to some extent. For example, if I had to choose between two players, one in a lot of 245 ToC25 gear and one in a lot of 239 gear, I would take the guy in 239 gear without hesitation. The only place you can get 239 gear is Ulduar 25 hard modes, and those were much harder than ToC25 in their day (and still generally require more skill) and should presumably indicate at least some skill.

The thing that sent my thinking on this particular tangent was the weapons that drop from the Lich King. It is Wyrmfoe's stated goal to kill the Lich King, and after last week's run (one-shot the Lower Spire, including our guild's first ever attempt at Saurfang), I fully believe we are capable of it, even with only 6 hours a week of raiding. The weapon I want from him is Glorenzelg, which is the best weapon I can get from normal mode. My only real problem with it is this: as of right now, it shows the same model in Wowhead as the Citadel Enforcer's Claymore. Blizzard has cautioned against trusting too much to this, but Ensidia, at least, has seen this weapon and made no mention of that model being inaccurate, and the icons are the same. That means that if I get the incredibly awesome weapon dropped by the Lich King himself, the final boss of the entire expansion, presumably the hardest normal mode encounter in the game, it will look the same as if I were wielding the weapon dropped by the first boss of the 10 man version of ICC. I know that it seems kind of petty, but the majority of the drops from Arthas have unique models, and that seems like a good way to show at a glance that a player is at least somewhat skilled. I'm sure that at some point pugs will take him down and /roll to give Glorenzelg out, but at least for a while having that means that a 25 man raiding guild considers you worthy of wielding a drop from Arthas himself. It feels like people should be able to see that at a glance, and not have to inspect you to find out.

EDIT: Turns out Oathbinder, the polearm from the Lich King, is actually better. It also appears to not have a unique model, and I feel the concern is valid regardless.

Ret Pally Gearing

The first post I made about playing Ret is here, about ability use. This one is going to be about gearing and stat priority. Gear isn't very complex for a Ret Paladin, but it's the kind of thing you need to know a little about to do right. The short version is get to 8% hit (7 if you can count on a Draenei), gem Strength, prioritize Expertise (up to anywhere from 16 to 23) and Crit for secondary stats.

Hit is the single best DPS increasing stat available to you until the melee cap, pure and simple. Beyond the melee cap, it is mostly useless, and no longer with gearing for. You need 263 rating to be hit-capped against raid bosses. Getting this from gear is much nicer than having to gem for it (when you get hit from gear, it replaces a secondary stat, like Crit or Haste, but when you gem for it, it replaces Strength, which is your second-best stat).

Strength is the next best stat, and since it has no cap, it is the one you will likely gem the most. It's better than AP because of Divine Strength (15% Strength) and Blessing of Kings/Sanctuary (each of which give a non-stacking 10% Strength). It also gives SP through talents.

Expertise prevents dodges and parries, and for us the dodge is the important part, since you should be standing behind mobs. It takes 26 Expertise (NOT Expertise Rating) to push dodges off the table for a raid boss. Expertise is very good, but since the gems are red, you are unlikely to use them. We also get 10 Expertise from the Seal of Vengeance glyph whenever SoV is active.

Crit is very good, especially with the 2 piece Tier 9 bonus. Crits (as with most classes) trigger certain talents and such. There is a cap, but if you are in danger of reaching it as a Ret, you are doing something wrong. Agility is also provides us with Crit, but at a lower conversion rate (though better than everyone else's) and it does not affect spells.

Haste, AP, and ArPen are all hanging around basically at the bottom. You will end up with some of these, and they aren't reasons to reject gear, but you shouldn't generally be seeking them out. Note that many procs are only available in an AP form, not Strength, so you'll be mostly out of luck there.

Spellpower and Intellect provide a small DPS increase, but much less than any physical DPS stats. Don't be that guy.

Dodge, Parry, Block Value, Block Rating, and Defense Rating are all tank stats. No. Just no.

Despite Strength being so good, there are several pieces of leather gear that are better than their plate counterparts for us. This is thanks to way Blizzard's itemization works and our nice Agility conversion. It's annoying, but that's the way it is. This problem will be going away in Cataclysm, but until then, we're stuck with it.

For gemming, you will be using Bold Cardinal Rubies (+20 Strength) in all red slots, all but one blue slot. The blue slot that will give you the best bonus should be filled with a Nightmare Tear (+10 All Stats). Yellow sockets that will give you a bonus of at least 4 strength (per yellow socket) should be filled with either Etched Ametrine (+10 Strength, +10 Hit) or Inscribed Ametrine (+10 Strength, +10 Crit). Your meta gem will be the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond (+21 Agility, +3% Crit Damage). There is a +21 Crit version, but it requires 2 blue gems, and is therefore a DPS loss.