Heartwarden

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?

 

malthrin

Just a suggestion, this might have more merit as a general thread on arena gear selection. The tradeoffs of survivability versus output are relevant to every class.

Personally, I'm going to be looking for Resilience and Stamina in jewel slots, and possibly some stun/interrupt/silence resistance if I can get it in decent quantities. Unless you're up against a DOT-based team, you can't go wrong with Resilience, and you can never have enough Stam. How much I heal for and how much mana I have afterwards are far less important than me living to cast them at all. If fights are lasting long enough that I'm having mana issues, we probably need to improve our DPS.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

• Cynic

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.

 

Liar

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

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Taikero

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.

 

darthgrimm

Use your arena set. Is the best for that purpose.

All gems should be used for : stun resistence / stamina / resiliance

Usualy you wont run oom in a arena.. even if you do the match is either won or lost by that time.

Priests are usualy the main target so staying alive and managing to land 1-2 heals is all you must do each match.

 

Illidor

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.

 

crimsonsentinel

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.

 

Heartwarden

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?

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Yes

DPS classes generally just need enough health as is necessary to be healed.

I used to say over 5k was enough for a warrior to be healable back in 2005, and we may see a return to this kind of thinking with TBC health levels. In live nobody really has enough health to be considered easily healable (well okay, dreadnaught warriors fresh out of Naxx with a flask on are pretty easy).

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Celnathor

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.

 

Evert

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.

\"Listen, I\'m trying to have a serious conversation about ferret bras and you are not listening\"

 

◊ Eej

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.

 

Mist

On a point for point basis, resilience seems to give an awful low benefit. I'll be trying to avoid it as much as possible in my gear selection.

 

◊ Shalas

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.

 

Feorthas

In my opinion, the best Arena teams will have moderate amounts of damage mitigation, good hitpoint totals, and excellent interruption capabilities; you want to be able to survive an opening salvo from the other team, if they're designed to be a burst team, and control their actions to as large a degree as possible while retaining your ability to move about freely.

With that said, I think that most of the gear choices here are fairly good, to a degree. Unfortunately, survivability seems to be focused on above all else; how effective are thousands of hitpoints, a truckload of Damage Resistance gear (Armor, Resists, & Resiliance), and as many other additional stats as you could want if the other team can, collectively, keep you powerless to act while they whittle you down? I will admit that this is less likely than in Live but I'd be willing to be that it will be even more important to be able to keep opponents off-balance, CCed, and confused in an Arena than it is in Live because burst damage will be less powerful unless it scales at the same rate that hitpoint totals do.

Thus, it's not the +$Stat gear that's important here but some of the immunity trinkets/gear/gems (any "Use: Makes you Immune to..." or "...Removes $Effects..." type stuff) and class combinations that will be much more important. Its all about negating your opponents' advantages, even if only partially, and getting yours into play as rapidly as possible.

I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.

My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.

 

Lamaros

I agree.

As a Warlock I'm going to be all stamina and spellpower. Unless I go destruction. Then I'll go stamina and crit.

The 2% chance to instacast metagem looks nice (insta soul fire please) but the stun resist gem is probably going to be where it's at.

I would expect the better the survivability of the class the less likely they are to stack stamina. I don't expect to see Pallies stacking it for arena.

Also: I expect people to have a few pieces of swap gear with high spell resistances, and use them depending what teams they face. I think gear will get changed depending on the opposition quite a bit.

 

• alcaras

I value PvP gear so:
Agility @ 1
Stamina @ 1.01
Strength @ 2.278
CritRating @ 1.495
HitRating 2.382
AP @ 1.139

These are derived from 1% increases in whitehit + ms damage, with stamina valued at 3% crit = 10% total health worth of stamina (the battle stance/berserker stance tradeoff).

I'll take gear with resilience on it, but I won't go looking for it -- it reduced my chance to be Enraged... Resilience gives about 4 health per item budget point (compare to 15 health per item budget point of Stamina).

 

Mosh

Since I'll be speccing Affliction, crit and hit are practically useless to me. Stamina and +damage/shadow damage will be the two big ones, but because of how the itemization formula works, I think it'll actually be more effecient to grab items with some resillience as a third stat, rather than going for items with only the other two.

 

Thelyna

If I don't stack stamina, my survivability against smart teams (where smart is defined as 'casters, nuke the paladin') will be limited to twelve seconds. My melee survivability is good, I can more or less ignore a rogue or warrior beating on me, but casters scare the wits out of me.

DeeNogger: "No dot timer? Get your belt off, its spanking time."

 

◊ Cathela

You bet your ass I will. More health means more time to react when the assist train turns my way. Survival is the best thing we have going, and frankly I'd be a fool not to play to the class's strength by stacking stamina.

And incidentally, anyone who wants me to keep them alive should be stacking stamina as well. Don't count on my slow-ass heals landing in time to save you if you blow over like a piece of cardboard in a stiff wind.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Crowbite

You should need stamina half as badly as a priest still. Despite the fact they are dispellable, remember your bubble is still one of the best defenses out there.
Of course one well timed shaman could really mess up the caster kills pallys mentality.

 

◊ Cathela

If that's true, it just means that stamina is four times as important for a priest as any other stat is... because I'm quite sure that for me stamina is at least twice as important as anything else.

Believe me, I've PvP'd with 3.5khp and I've PvP'd with 5khp. My survivability is probably tripled in the second case over the first. Yes, I'm serious.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Crowbite

Yes, but for the same kind of survivability gains for a priest, he's going to need more then 5kHp. I never meant "forget getting STA because I have plate." (Edit; I just meant that the priority is a little lower)

That 3K fireball is just as scary for a priest yet he still has to worry about melee as well and doesn't have the same wonderful bubble that normally allows paladins to replace that 3k hp

 

Plea

I always thought agility was almost catching up strength at pvp purposes rather than falling behind, and stamina was far far more important that 0.4 str.

As for armor, resilience, etc; I think we warriors will never calculate those values seriously. Althought I do think 1k armor makes a good difference, I prefer 500 hp over 1k armor any time. Defensive stats arent that significant; since noone with half a brain attacks the warrior in the group, unless the whole group is planning to instagib him.