Thank you very much the only reason i asked is because blizzard actually hit the nail on the head finally with our tier gear which is a first, not to mention the badge belt. There is good leather gear out there and overall i am happy with the itemization so far.

Only me struggling to keep below the 400 haste softcap?
I've done a couple of cursory runs through rawr and I usually end up with a lot more sp, a tiny increase in crit, and a massive increase in haste in all the setups i've been through. It seems the only way to stay below the hastecap is by leaning hardcore on spirit :\
This ofc is further compounded by the Anub trinket, which really encourages an ~400 haste rating.
Has anyone else had any luck here, anyone managed to find some clear gearing-pathways?

I'm currently at about 500 haste (due to the new rep ring replacing the [Firestorm Ring]), but it's low enough that I can still get Reign procs off consecutive starfire crits some of the time.

I'm a little concerned going forward, however, as my current ICC gear plan (involving only 264 loot, will revise when my guild gets into hardmodes) has zero spirit(!) but 600 haste, with the rep ring being the only item with haste but no crit. I imagine that'll hurt my Reign procs quite a bit. Probably not enough to make [Dislodged Foreign Object] better, but still... :-(

I now must wonder, is there an amount of haste where adding a crit/spirit item is better than a crit/haste? Well, I'm sure there is, but is that point well within the attainable range? Reign compounds the issue, especially since latency makes the no-consecutive-proc range so fuzzy.

Hmm, I just realized that dropping a point in CF is better than dropping a point IIS for me right now. Probably true for a lot of people, as pretty much everyone is over haste cap by now, and we're all casting Starfire more after 3.3. Might not bother respeccing at the moment, but something to keep in mind.

Yeah, I did have that backwards. Still, IIS is showing as stronger on the sheet--maybe I just hadn't looked at it since before I was consistently well over the haste cap (and now, under the crit cap).

The damage bonus from IIS is multiplicative.

Is Black Magic weapon enchant good for balance now?


Good as in, better than 63 sp.

I looked in the balance posts and didn't see it mentioned.

Yeah, I've noticed this as well - as far as haste goes.

My current BIS list according to Rawr (focusing on EoF/crafted/10man ICC normal modes right now since I've been taking a break from 25 man progression runs), pushes me up to 613 haste and a crit rating of 1082. It also reduces my spirit to 446 and optimizes T10 so that I'm using offset gloves - [Gloves of False Gestures]. [Muradin's Spyglass] looks like the best new trinket at this level, and the [Idol of Lunar Fury] is still leaps and bounds above all other idols, though it doesn't look like the [Idol of the Lunar Eclipse] is even being modeled at this point.

Hmm, Once you are over the softcap haste diminishes in importance only slightly. Haste will still scale your instant spells (MF, IS) and still scales SF well. Keep in mind the only spell that haste is no longer useful for is wraths, which should be in the range of 30% of your damage. So without busting out a spreadsheet, pre-cap haste > SP by a small margin, post-cap it'll drop, putting it only slightly behind crit. And to answer the above poster's question, in equal amounts (1:1) ignoring any trinket significance, it will always be better to go with the haste piece vs the spirit one.

I received this staff last night, and I can confirm that the proc can readily have 2 Valkyries at a time. I only used it for a few fights, but there seemed to be one Valkyr up a significant fraction of the time, and I noted twin Valkyries up more than 3 times over the 5 fights we did (2 pulls on Gunship and I'm not sure if it was 4 or 5 on Saurfang, then we went back to TOC 25 normal for some of our casual raiders and did Beasts and Jaraxus).

One thing which I find will be an issue. The Valkyries are not very bright. I had one proc almost immediately on beasts, but it decided to stand in a flame patch and die only about 3 seconds into the proc. They also died almost immediately on Jaraxus (fel fire and pulsing infernos). I'm not sure what their AOE avoidance is.

On Icehowl I definitely had very close procs back-to-back, and when he died there were 2 living valkyries and one dead at his feet (I'm not sure if all 3 were active at the same time).

Overall, I found that on the longer fights (Saurfang for us), they were averaging 200-300 DPS overall for me based on recount data.

Update; Tonight doing a few solo quests, I had 3 Val'kyr chasing after me so there can clearly be 3 up at a time. I don't currently know how the later fights will go in ICC, but I intend to replace this with an OH/MH combo when we get the drops, the valkyr are just too fragile and die too easily (almost immediate death for Faction Champs, Twin Valkyr and in P3 Anub'arak). The numbers i posted before are accurate for dPS when they live and proc, I can post a WOL if anyone is interested.

The only impact haste has on MF and IS is to reduce the global cooldown. Therefore, once your past the soft cap haste has very little impact on them as well.

Actually, that post states clearly that I was talking about the Staffs not having proper itemization.

You are correct though that the only other option would be the Frozen Bonespike and an off-hand (of which the Spindle does seem to be the best). However, the 1-hand weapons itemization is really not much better. The Bonespike has Spirit on it, which is okay I suppose, but haste would be preferable.

And... that's it. The other 1-hand weapons in 25-man are an mp5 mace, mp5 Dagger, and Trauma, which is most certainly a healers mace. In 10-man, all the off hands and main hands have +hit on them. 2 of the 3 staffs have Hit on them, and the other has no crit, just haste/spirit. We aren't in shortage of hit.

We do not yet know what Arthas drops, but I am hoping he drops something that at least remotely resembles a decent weapon for us. Again, when you consider how good our t10 stats are, it really makes you wonder about the rest of the stuff in there.