EDIT: This is not a healer specific thread anymore, feel free to discuss it in a more general way.

WoW is a very gear based game, so knowing how to choose what you wear by the stats is a must. Blizzard has always made that easy by making tiers and sets, with so many clear choices. The enchants have always been strait foward as well, so it was never hard to pick which one was the best for a specific task. In PvE, i would come up with a few scenarios and rate how much mana each stat would give me, as pretty much everyone (i think) did.

The Burning Crusade introduces a new way to improve your gear by offering slots to fill with gems. This feature gives us some more flexibility while choosing which stats to put on your character. It is to our interest to squeeze as much as possible from those slots, but with so many options, what is our best bet? Which stats are clear best choices for us (healers) in arenas, considering we will be healing AND tanking?

This choice is not as clear as picking gear for pve, because you have to rate things that have no correlation wiith each other, like healing spells, resilience and stamina. Our options are:

Armor (mitigation vs physical)
Dodge (avoidance vs physical)
Defense (avoidance vs physical)
Resilience (avoidance and mitigation vs physical and magic)
Resistances (avoidance vs magic)
Stamina
Healing Spells
Intellect

As i have said before, you can relate dodge vs defense, by checking how much each one on average can reduce the physical damage done to you, but how do you rate that against stamina? Having that in mind, i have a few questions for you guys:

1. How do you plan to fill your gem slots? Pure tanking stats, pure healing or a mix of both, trying to get as many socketing bonuses as possible?

2. How do you rate each of the stats above against each other? Which ones are worth putting on slots?

3. How do you plan on handling gems that have higher budgets epic gems with not so great stats, like Enduring Chrysoprase vs Solid Star of Elune?

As far as PVP goes, the same 2 things always apply IMO: Hitpoints/Mitigation and Utility. Most of the priests in my guild for example took the Armor version of the ZG trinket for survivability reasons.

I don't think these principles change at all in TBC. I still can't imagine PVPing without a PVP trinket, no matter what class I'm playing. I also don't see stacking INT/Spellpower being viable. While in theory its great when your heals do more/faster etc., I still think there's way too much DPS out there to survive with anything less then "tank" gear.

Out of all the listed stats, I'd probably go for Stamina the most. Stamina protects you against everything after all, be it physical or magical damage. Then I'd pick Resilience and then Armor. Resilience because it affects all crits, physical and magical, so that's always something good.

The stat I'd value the least as healer would be Dodge. This is assuming that most of my Healing does not come from instants but from channeled spells or spells with casting time because you cannot dodge (neither block nor parry) then. If you play with HoTs and generally alot of moving around with casting on the fly, ignore this part. :P

Stamina, +Healing, Resilience.

Everything else is secondary, and valuing anything else as a primary PvP stat will mean I kill you before you leave stunlock.

Is it okay if we take this thread into a more general direction, as a poster above suggested?


Does a similar approach (survivability above all else) work for DPS classes too?

In general, the longer you live, the more damage you can do, even if your burst capability isn't as great as it could be with a different gear selection. That said though, can you go too far when doing this?

Purely stacking damage stats is probably not the best approach, but I don't think that going for survivability above all else (within reason, of course) is the way to go either. Which blue gem is better, 6 stamina and 5 damage, or 12 stamina? What about the bracer enchant, 12 stamina or 15 damage?

I'd probably tend to favor damage stats once I feel that I have a decent HP total, but I'm wondering what other people think.

As a priest, I would go in very rough order:

Stam>Resillience>Int>+dmg/heal>+mp5>spirit. Stam is greater than everything (to a reasonable extent of course, you don't want to use green +stam just for that reason) in pvp. +spirit mana regen are very low priority simply because they dont scale well in the short burst battles of pvp (even with inflated HP totals, arenas last very short times). Int should definitely not be forgotten though. Even as a priest, its easy to use up an entire mana bar before dieing, and a mana-less healer is quite a useless healer.

I know that as a priest my biggest weakness is my survivability against melee, so I would try to fix that first. A paladin on the other hand might emphasize +dmg/heal and int more because they wear plate and have a shield. The point is that you want to shore up any inherent weaknesses you might have in your gear.

I value stamina above everything else, of course, because it is a stat that will work against everything, be it magic or physical, crit or not, it will help you survive. Resilience, on that matter, is also an interesting choice, because the attacks that can't crit aren't, more often than not, very lethal.

The idea of this thread came to me when i was theorycrafting which gems i would use in my pvp gear, to fill the slots on the arena set. There are some epic gems with stamina and defense, for instance, with a color that will help you get that resilience socket bonus, so you are possibly looking at a 6 stamina, 5 defense, 2 resilience vs 12 stamina. Which one is better? That's the hard part.

The purpouse of this thread is to come up with a way to rate a stat against another in a general situation, so when you need to make a choice like that you just do the math and have an answer.

EDIT: i was looking at the arena pvp set with some honor gear and these are the sockets available:

1 Meta
3 Yellow
3 Red
5 Blue

For the meta, i assume 5% chance to resist stuns + 18 stamina is hard to avoid, so i picked that. Now we have 11 slots with mostly +resilience socket bonuses. If i try to pick the best gems out of each color, i can come up with these stats:

60 stamina
4 defense rating
5 dodge rating
24 resilience
5% resist stun
36 healing

I could go all stamina and forget about the socket bonuses, getting this:

5% resist stun
114 stamina

What would you do and why?

I think ultimately expected targetting order has a lot to do with things here.

In group versus group combat, the value of HP has everything to do with how soon you expect to be targeted - if you expect to be target #1 or #2 on a regular basis, then a large HP total is invaluable, as you're the one the other team is trying to burn through. If you expect to be a lower-priority target, it makes more sense to be a bit more offensive in your gear/rune selections. After all, if you're 4th in line for targetting on your team, there's a very good chance the fight has already been decided by the time the enemy turns any serious damage your way, and you're probably better off boosting your offensive/healing output a lot more.

Obviously the priest(and likely other cloth classes as well) is probably looking at lots of stamina/resilience. On the other hand, warriors and paladins are probably looking at getting gear that boosts their offensive/healing output. The rest of the classes are likely to lie somewhere in between, depending on your group's particular composition and strategy. In essence it's a "bring up the bottom" sort of strategy - your most vulnerable target at any given time, is the one that needs to be looking at grabbing more stamina, resilience, etc.

I'm not quite sure where this thread could possibly go. Will we discover that stamina may indeed be good for pvp, while spirit not so much? And perhaps some common sense should be applied when stacking stamina?

There isnt really a way to mathmatically sort stats for arena combat. The variables (number of players, ratio of healing to dps, ratio of melee to ranged, ratio of magic to physical damage, gear, spec, and playstyle) seem, in my opinion, to make computations unreasonably complex, and proabably not worth while.

There's other factors at play as well when it comes to how much stam/resilience you should wear. For example, DPS isn't usually targetted first in PvP but it depends entirely on who you're fighting and how familiar they are with your setup. A Fire Mage might be able to get away with stacking spell damage for the first few fights, but eventually the opposing groups will realize this and instagib him before he can get heals. Same goes for Warriors who forgo stamina in favour of ap/crit/str, once people realize what their gear loadout is, they just get blown up by magic focus fire (if you've ever done a lot of 5v5s, you'll know what I'm talking about). There definately won't be a set loadout for most non-healer classes.

Stam > Armor > +Healing > Stuff. If I could, I'd wear Dreadnaught in Arenas. If I'm not targetted at the beginning, we'll win regardless of my gear (assuming vaguly competant teammates), and if I am, then my goal is simply to be a tank. You don't need mana to be a tank, or even +healing, as if I can actually cast a heal, the other team is probably pretty bad. Resilience, while a nice idea, is kinda unimpressive. It's just too overpriced for it's benefits.