You can't have a perfectly itemized gearset at this stage of the expansion. We still have (at least) 1 more raid instance before the next expansion, and if you have a perfectly itemized gearset before then, you aren't going to have anything left to work with in the last raid. It's still very early for this PTR, and there is lots of time for gear changes to happen. We also haven't seen any offset items, so we have no idea if we'll run 5/5 T9, or drop shoulders/chest for something else.

Oh but you'd be wrong then. They put quite a few blue sockets into the warlocks tier 8 gear, and I don't see why they wouldn't give us blue sockets now knowing that.

They like to "mix up" the itemization between tiers. Will it change before the actual patch? It's possible, but again, they might just keep it like that and I don't really see why they wouldn't.

I think what people fail to realize is that throughout the history of class, having gear that's light on blue sockets has been the exception and not the norm - in fact, the quality of our sockets of late has been, in my opinion, unusually good.

Consider the number of sockets of each color in our tier sets to date:

T6 (SWP pieces): 3 red
T6 (BT/Hyjal pieces): 4 yellow, 4 blue
T5: 2 Red, 2 Yellow, 3 Blue
T4: 4 Red, 1 Yellow, 1 Blue

T7: 2 Red, 2 Yellow, 3 Blue
T8: 5 Red, 2 Yellow.

When you look at that, what you see is that in all the tier sets we've had since socketing was introduced, the vast majority of our tier sets have had as many or more blue sockets as any other color. The only exceptions to this rule are T4 and T8. So the fact that T9 is weighing in at 3 red and 4 blue isn't really surprising, when you look at the historical trend. Disappointing, perhaps, but not surprising.

Now, one might ask *why* they do this. And the answer is, again, pretty simple. They've stated that whether to socket for the set bonuses (or not) should be a decision, and if all the sockets are the color you'd ideally want to use anyway there's no decision. I mean, if they were just going to make gear with the exact color sockets you'd want in the first place, why bother having socket colors at all?

So: there are a lot of blue sockets in our next tier. It is not abnormal in this respect - it only feels like it relative to T8, which is, in reality, the abnormal set. However, much as SWP was, in general, better itemized, both in terms of stats and socket colors, than the preceding tiers, I'd expect T10 to move back towards red and yellow sockets as well.

Of course, Blizzard may yet change their mind about the T9 stats - personally, I hope they do, as the amount of expertise on those sets is stupidly high. But there's no particular reason to believe they will based purely on what we've seen.

I'd rather they go the other way. Give set items a high amount of expertise, maybe a MH dagger, and replace Weapon Expertise.

Really, the problem that keeps arising is that Combat has Weapon Expertise and doesn't really care about Expertise while Mutilate doesn't have it but wants Expertise. This problem is going to exist in every tier until the talents reflect what the builds want.

The expertise does not seem like that big a problem to me. First of, the 4pc bonus is very lackluster. So if we skip it in favor of BiS gear, then it is quite possible (if not probable), that the pieces with expertise are the ones to be skipped. Even if 4pc bonus does turn out to be our best choice, that leaves us with one free piece, which could very well not have any expertise on it at all.

On a more positive note: No haste. Thank god.

Why? You aren't a hunter or a mage. There's no cap on the quantity of haste that's useful to you.Last time I played with the spreadsheet, Haste came out close enough to crit that, outside of the narrow line for gemming, it was six of one hald a dozen of the other. There's really no especially good reason to dislike haste on gear, especially when it's one of the few stats availiable to us that doesn't hit a wall of diminished or zero value (See: Armor Pen, Hit, Crit, Agi (due to it's crit contribution), Expertise).

does the value of haste increase linearly (you gain the same benefit from each additional haste rating) or does its value increase decrementally (you gain less benefit from each additional haste rating)?

I personally have observed that haste does have a "diminishing return" to it. to reduce your weapon speed by 10 percent, one would need more than 10 percent haste. Since SnD, LR, imp WF/icy talon provides a total of 70 percent haste, any additional haste will be "diminished"

This is, however, only my personal understanding, I do want to hear some feedback/answers to my first question.

thanks

Every 32.79 haste rating give you 1% speed increase whether you are are at 0 haste or 500 haste (if you have no other haste buffs). However the effect of that 1 extra percent on the final weapon speed is going to be diminishing. See edit below for details.

The only haste cap that comes to mind is related to discreteness of the game. I've seen it mentioned somewhere that either game calculations or game state updates are discrete with 0.1 sec interval. If it's game state update there should not be a problem, if it's actually calculations then at some level of haste fast weapon speed can drop below 1 swing every 0.1 second and some CP procs could absolutely theoretically be lost. However, during Comet's Trail proc, with blade flurry, heroism, SND, Lightning Reflexes, and all haste-related raid buffs, it would take 13000 haste from gear to reach that level. So basically it's nothing to worry about.

I agree with Feist-Mok haste is not a bad stat primarily because of lack of caps.

Edit: as far as diminishing returns, yes there are diminishing returns with haste, as with many other stat exceptfor ArPen. A 100 haste rating when you already have a 100 is going to give you a higher percent speed increase than a 100 extra haste rating when you already have 200. For instance with blade flurry, heroism, SND, Lightning Reflexes, and all haste-related raid buffs, going from 100 haste rating to 200 haste rating increases weapon speed by 2,96%. Going from 200 to 300, increases weapon speed by another 2.87%.

The extra expertise will be nice to be able to grab a full 2/2 filler talent.

It's also nice to see an increase in sta over the t7->t8 decrease in sta.

If we're spending itemization points on something we could get from a talent, we're effectively sacrificing those itemization points for just a "filler" talent. It's like saying you could pick up 5% crit on gear and drop Malice.

I'm actually interested in the change to Shadow Dance: Shadow Dance cool down reduced to 1 minute.

Before you write this off as nonsense, try to at least consider it. Now Shadow Dance has an shorter cool down that Killing Spree w/ glyph.

Me and my friend fooled around with a few specs in the calculators; it looks interesting and maybe worth a try (though we have serious doubts about it since it requires a dagger MH for Ambush). If anyone is interested in diving further, I created a spec using mmo-champion's calculator... possibly not optimal... possibly so... but Blizzard continually improves Shadow Dance with every patch. Maybe it might be worth a look at?

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?rogu...&version=10026

We left out Precision as it might not be needed in T9, added Vigor for better burst during Shadow Dance. Not saying that anything in here is how it should be... just giving the reason behind some of the more questionable parts of this spec.