I've compiled a spreadsheet of my current gear vs going full FS vs full DW vs mix. One thing I noticed while looking over it was that the resillience didnt go up at all for any of the pieces. They simply gained minor spell damage, stam, armor and int. They added a few pieces such as the wand and offhand which have spell penetration now.

Full DW provides:

Armor 1903
Stam 324
Int 119
Res 130
Spell Dam 232
Hit 16
Crit 0

Full FS provides:

Armor 1903
Stam 295
Int 85
Res 135
Spell Dam 219
Hit 0
Crit 127

So I am thinking of mixing them again this season. DW leg/CHest with the rest FS

Mix provides

Armor 1903
Stam 318
Int 99
Res 136 + 35 bonus 171
Spell Dam 236
Hit 0
Crit 61


Also for the wands and offhand they added the spell penetration ones. The grimoire offhand looks especially interesting because you get +35 spell pen, is it worth trading for 21 int, 4 res, 4 spell dam??

So what choices will you go with next week? Mix or full and why? Is the fear bonus that good? Will you trade the minor stats for spell penetration?

There's not a choice to be made for spell penetration, you can have your cake and eat it too. Every damage caster should just get their "normal" gear and weapons first, then pick up the spell penetration wand + staff/offhand and use a weaponswap macro or addon to equip them when killing felhunters or against players with resistance to your school of magic.

The only decision to be made is whether you get the "normal" weapons or the spellpen weapons first. I'm going with the normal ones.

as a warlock in 2300+ 2v2 i would def get the spell pen off-hand/wand first

I'm going with offhand/wand first because spell penetration is the only stat that gets a meaningful boost regarding merciless/veteran gear.

Didn't they remove the spell pen offhand?

I remember in the middle of PTR the spell pen wands and off-hand were removed, I didn't check again the last week of PTR though.

For spell pen, you can stack double epic PvP rings for 23 spell pen.

edit: removed

It is up to yourself to find out. The value of spellpenetration is nonexistent if the opposing players does not have shadowresistance. However it is far and away the most beneficial one if they do have shadowresistance.

So check your combatlog, if it shows a lot of resisted damage get more spellpenetration, if not stack something else.

Stuff that provides shadowresistance:
MoTW
Shadow Resistance aura
Shadow Protection
Shadow Resistance gear
Master Demonologist
Undead Racial

As for myself i am taking the Spellblade, Grimoire and Piercing Touch in that order. Primarily because that is the only slots i don't have up-to-date gear already and because i really want the spellpenetration.

Don't forget the draenei racial!

Also worth mentioning: for some reason [Mysterious Fire Opal] is an orange gem. It should be purple but isn't. This means you can get spell pen in a yellow socket without sacrificing a socket bonus, at least in 1 slot. Hope you have a good group that's willing to run stuff for you though; good luck finding pugs for heroic botanica.

It might happen with the new heroic dailies though!

I discussed spell penetration with a few of my guildmembers but we fail to see the point of it. No-one wears resistance gear in arenas anymore, so it's not really needed. And if the resistance is already 0 it can't drop below that.

It is also fairly common for healers to use the SR cloak enchant and some paladins even permanently equip a couple pieces of BT SR gear (like the cloak) or use /ignore, which still works.

Do the two different sets from the same season stack for bonuses? I was under the impression that if you bought 2 pieces of Dreadweave and 2 pieces of Felweave you'd get the 4 piece bonus; however, they look like two different sets in my UI (granted I only have 3 pieces total right now).

Anyone heard any news on the [Vengeful Gladiator's Grimoire]? Seems to not be on the vendors, not sure if it was taken off the PTR. Is it up on any other realm for people?

It's not on the vendors for me either. Only offhand that I can see for a warlock is the normal [Vengeful Gladiator's Endgame]. Still has both the staff with spell hit, and the one that has spell penetration instead, along with the 1H.

It's been changed so that any four pieces of arena gear will provide the set bonus. So now you can't have 2 +35 resilience bonus.

I'm still unsure what gear to pick, I'm either going full stat/damage or crit. Having a bit of both comes to be a waste I find. I'm in any case going with 1H and O-H. I was destruction in the beginning of season 2 so I bought the staff back then. Been playing with it this whole season and it annoyed me having it every time i met teams with shamans.

Anyways, the difference between stat/dmg and crit gear is the following (arena+honor gear excluding weapons/wands):
54stamina
45intellect
15resilience
32spell damage
16spell hit
VS
229spell crit rating (I think that's 10.36%)

What spec are you and what gear are you getting?

Personally I'm going with an unorthodox spec as an experiment. 5/35/21 (felhunter). My arena team has a Moonkin though and I'm fully aware of the limitations of Destruction. The spec is kinda bollocks in 2s and 3s compared to the beaten path but after being Felguard for a while I decided to give this a shot.

As for weapons I'm going against my better judgement and getting the Hit/Crit Staff rather than 1h+OH but that is most likely the combo to go for. I'll pick those up after I complete the S3 set.

Why did teams with Shamans specifically annoy you over the staff?

Lower attack speed for totems I think.

Yep instead of just running past a totem whilst hitting it you have to stop wait for a hit =/ Then there's also the issue of healers drinking. You easily let them get 1 more tick with the staff.

5/34/22 seems pretty nice, only problem is the horrible "your target must be in front of you" when a melee is running around you like a monkey =(

The running around sure gets annoying sometimes but it's not horrible. It plays like Felguard for the most part, but you've got Destr. Reach and Intensity to back you up. It annoyed me a lot how vulnerable I was to random pushback like pets and such when I was FG.

But as I said before it's not terribly versatile. Good LoS-ers will make you wish you were Affliction but if a Shadow Bolt actually does crit it'll mean a kill more often than not, and you're not squishy like full Destro locks. I'm a bit of a sucker for big numbers though. Pew pew.

Yes, apologies. I though this wasn't the case, as I have just found out for myself!