To clarify, yes, I limited myself to bosses who dealt mostly physical damage (though post 2.0 but pre-TBC a lot more of the instance became soloable), but still made impressive progress considering I was alone and in terrible gear. Soloing part or all of non-heroic instances even a few levels below your own is nothing to write home about as quite a few classes manage one or another. With expansion talents released, well if TBC is anything to go by, some classes are definitely going to be able to do so even more readily.

In response to the hit rating concerns: seeing as we now share itemization with 2 plate wearing DPS classes who have to contend with dual-wielding or dual-wielding with Titan's Grip, my concerns are actually that we might be hard to pressed to not overshoot the mark for hit. Hopefully they balance it around mostly gear to 9% and gems/enchants for the rest if dual-wielding.

And what about the period 3.0 goes live until wotlk will be released? Replace all str/crit gems with hit gems?

Pretty much, yes.

Well, fury warriors existed prior to this... remember T6 offset pieces (hyjal shoulders, mother chest)? All hit and crit rating. I'm sitting at 142 in all my +hit pieces right now, which, if my calculations are correct, should give 8.98% to hit at 70? That's with no re-gemming for hit, though I do use Surefooted and the +AP/Hit head enchant.

Three words.

[Stormrage Signet Ring]



In all seriousness hit rating is never really that hard to find if you start looking early. The helm of Council and ring linked above are excellent examples of what you can be shooting for.

With all this talk of soloing, what I'm really interested in is if we can solo heroic Blood Furnace up to the first boss. Being one of the lazy sods who still doesn't have the libram, I am wondering at the viability of solo farming for it, since finding groups is nearly impossible.

No.

You no longer need to be hit capped thanks to changes to CS mechanics. You just want to maximize dps, and stacking str (barring some kind of massive change to mechanics in the interim) is the best way to maximize dps. Just accept some misses and gem for str.

That said, if you can hit socket bonuses with a hit gem, that is probably just fine. Hit isn't bad by any stretch, it just isn't necessary to cap anymore.

Isn't hit still more "cost efficient" way to get dps-boost? One point invested in hit (and expertise for that matter) is going to give you more dps than stacking more strength. The relative value of hit goes up the more you have AP.

Obviously this isn't something you want to obey 100% while leveling 70->80, but if you want to max your dps in 3.0.


[edit]: what I mean here that hit and expertise lessen in power while you level as they are ratings. Attack power (str) in the other hand does not suffer from this, and it might indeed be better to stack AP while leveling. For 3.0 lvl70 max dps I'd still try to get hit & expertise -capped.

Not as Ret. After breezing through normal Ramparts up to the first boss, I decided to give heroic a shot. I didn't get past the first pull.

Granted, I'm not good at this new instance soloing business... but it's not going to be easy with the incoming damage on a 2H wielder.


I think it may be possible with Prot, and definitely doable if you duo it. (Grab some tanking type to soak up damage)

How did you kill the first boss? Even with all the healing, I get raped when he uses Corrosive Acid. The dot and armor reduction cause me to take more damage than I can deal with. And he invariably fears while it's up. I'm in T6 level gear. :/

Not solo. Note once you get Wrath, you can get a better libram in one of the first quests in Bondra.

Umm, how is it you don't need to be hit capped? A miss is a miss and is always 0 damage. Even if by some obscure thing CS always hit despite not being hit capped, what about everything else?

Valerys still slacked on getting the libram? I told you ages ago to get that!

The reason it was so necessary to be hit-capped is that we had to keep up other people's judgements. Since CS no longer does that, hit rating is just dps-weighted like every other stat, and it comes out lacking against strength (though apparently not by much).

Regarding hit now, Avitus I always wondered why you use the boots you do. Does your raid not have a Moonkin or have the tier 6 boots never dropped for you? I mainly want to make sure that I'm doing rawr right for myself and not hurting my dps because of my hit rating.

What I log out in, is not always necessarily what I raid with (I also use the Leatherworking gloves in raid, btw.)

I've had the T6 ret boots (of multiple specs) for months, but I usually don't use them unless we have our drenai warrior in the party (+1% melee hit). Otherwise, [Dreadboots of the Legion] work out better for me.

As a human who's expertise capped with only 2x T6 pieces, Sword-racial and SoC trinket, the expertise on the T6 boots is completely wasted while not being enough for me to drop the expertise trinket and gain from another trinket. Similarly as an alliance player with no access to SoB, the haste on the T6 boots is only a minor damage boost. Other than that, they're both almost 1:1 on STR and CR.

For reasons mentioned above, it ends up being a weak 27 haste rating (and 1 str, 2 CR) vs. 18 hit rating, which results in the Dreadboots working out better until hit capped.

Besides, the ugly T6 boots just don't fit the rest of the set!


And no, we don't usually run a Moonkin (or only very recently in preparation for WotLK).

Bonus info for WoW 3.0: Something I hadn't noticed before: It seems the different Drenai racials (Heroic presence = 1% melee hit, Inspiring Presence = 1% spell hit) are being rolled into one racial that gives 1% to hit with all abilities. Meaning if you're alliance, your drenai shaman will now be giving you 1% melee hit!

The human expertise racials were also nerfed down to 3 expertise. Just something worth noting that even humans will be stuck using 3-piece T6 to cap after 3.0 (though we would be anyway for the haste).

It's because of human rogues, who can use both mace and sword at the same time?

The simplest fix to that would be to just say "When you use a sword and/or a mace", no?

No they changed it a long time ago so DWing a sword and a mace would not increase you expertise by 10 for both hands.

Expertise is tracked seperately for MH/OH. What difference does it make for them?

Well, humans are supposed to get "Fall of Humanity" that as I understand it works like the PvP trinket and gives back some mana. I guess humans lost 2 expertise for this ability and 5% spirit.

Still that is better than the Blood Elf Pally (who get 6% total mana back every 2 minutes from Arcane Torrent) gets for dps.

For all intents and purposes 5% spirit and "mana back" (I only heard of the pvp trinket effect) is worthless for melee DPS.

I'm going to send feedback on the beta client and maybe try additional feedback channels, I suggest anyone who cares does the same. I'd much rather have 5 exp. to swords than 3 exp. to maces and swords, even if it limits my optimal weapons somewhat.


Edit: I just tested the new human racial [Every Man for Himself] and it does not restore any mana, don't know where you read that. Additionally, as advertised, it puts any pvp trinkets on cooldown. (I really fail to see the point of this racial considering in PvP I'll use the PVP trinket for resilience anyway, but I digress).

Edit: Rating removed, it's 16.4 rating.