I know a lot of people are doing Arenas and Battlegrounds and the epics are dropping in everyone's laps but I just wanted to remind everyone of something.

While some of that stuff is killer for PVP and PVE (Those daggers come to mind /drool), most of it doesn't compare to other items of even blue quality when it comes to DPS. (I think the same is true for tanks but to a lesser extent)

I've started doing Arenas myself now but anything I buy will most likely end up in a PVP only set. I have a couple of spare pieces in the bank that have PVP type enchants on them such as Stamina or Resilience.

Please, please, please, if you want to be a contributing member of Heroic or Raid runs consider having a separate set. Don't come to Kara with Stamina enchants if you're a mage... it doesn't help us down bosses faster :)


As I said there are several pieces that could be great for PVE, but if you're going to be using them for that purpose at least have them enchanted the right way.

As has been pointed out in PMs.... there are exceptions to every rule. The Stam enchant is a bad example :)

heh, here's a good example:
a hunter in all the gladiator gear, for instance, will actually dish out a fair amount of damage and have a good number of hunter-desirable stats, but the emphasis in the gear profile will be on stamina, resilience, and crit rating. ovs, the last one is v nice, but hunters in full pvp gear will typically have over 1000 less mana than a hunter in raiding gear(as well as less overall AP from what i've looked at). the mana deficiency, therefore, makes the pvp set less than ideal for raiding.

it's things like that that deserve your consideration in choosing raid-appropriate gear.

burst vs sustained damage, the eternal battle.

Eul's explanation is better suited I think though. Sure, more per HIT but over TIME.. meh.

I just log in every couple weeks and stir up some shit though, I really have no idea what I am talking about.

Like Fox said you have to look at each piece and what it brings and how you play and what your role is in the raid.

I got my tier 3 Arena helm it has slightly better stats then my Tier 4 helm (the one from the "Fallen" items)

I was surpised though when I ended up having slightly less spell dmg then the blue helm from shadowmoon it replaced (by about 4 spell dmg)

What it did give me is 500 more hp which for a warlock is good cuz I tap it to turn it into mana so it was still worth it.

But to Fox's point never assume a purple will beat a blue or what is good in the Arena will be good in another context.

You may never end up like a poor druid with 3-4 different sets of armour, but you will probably end up with 1.5 or 2.

Along these lines, I've been PM'd a great site that I'd like to pass on to you folks.

http://wow.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=935

This is a list of the base stats you should be aiming for to start running Kara. It is only for the first half (Up to but not including The Curator) so you should be well over these stats to start running the second and third nights.

Nice find. Thanks for the link

Well, that's nice for the minimums, ( I'm above on all of them), but I'd really like to see a list of recommended stats..... They are mentioned, but not specified in the article.

Minimum or recommended stats are really hard to throw out given the various play styles and specs. I'd say that the paladin minimums in that thread are a bare minimum for +heal and mana, with the 90 mp5 being a great thing, but sometimes harder to get until later on.

With gear, you have to know which stats are important to your spec and playstyle, and then select your gear based on that. There are some PVP pieces which are excellent for PVE, and some which just don't work. The same goes for the heroic badge gear / some of it looks awesome, but is missing a critical stat for my build (eg the hunter heroic belt has no +hit, and my current blue belt has +24 hit, so it would seriously hurt my hit rating). With the pally heroic gear, alot of it has no MP5. The thing I'm noticing is that the gear is designed to *force* you to make conscious decisions about your stats; for me, much of it generally isn't that well stat balanced.

How do you figure out where you are at? For me, I check the armory both of fellow guildmates, people I see on the server, or also raiding guilds on other servers. I check their spec, see what gear people are targeting, and I go for that. Then, I watch the damage done and healing done meters (knowing they are subjective). If you are in 'the pack', then all is good. If you are way behind, start asking the other people how they play, or use mods like Recount to see what spells/actions they use, and check out their spec.

Btw, I hope people who tank (except for bears) don't rely on resilience to get themselves crit immune :)

Btw, I hope people who tank (except for bears) don't rely on resilience to get themselves crit immune :)

Could you explain a bit more? As a bear, we still generally lean towards +def. I just don't know how you metal wearers work.

This is about tanking bosses at raid level, not 5 mans :)

As far as i know you need 415 def with the right talents to be crit immune. As a plate wearer we need 490 def to become crit immune. The problem is that some people wear too many pieces of pvp / arena gear (meaning their def drops) and there just isn't enough resilience to make up for the lack of def. Also, there may not be as much avoidance on pvp pieces (block / dodge / parry) on pvp pieces for plate wearers. On the other hand, there are gobs of stam on pvp gear, which works out perfect for bears since you rely on stam and armor to take the big hits anyway.

While a warrior might be able to keep uncrittable and uncrushable status with pvp pieces and a tankadin will more than likely not be able to do the same with pvp gear, a bear will probably not have much of a problem remaining uncrittable even with pvp pieces (imo, have never played a high enough level druid).

Druids can make use of Resilience for tanking because there isn't a heavy penalty for using it. There is a slight dodge loss, but nothing worth worrying about. It's just that the average piece of defense gear(not many) is better than the comparable resilience piece for druids.

However, the penalty for tanks and paladins is pretty steep when picking resilience over defense in PvE. Yes both help you accomplish crit immunity, but you lose out on dodge, parry, and block in the process when using resilience gear. A druid cannot block or parry, so defense isn't as important to them.

The big thing with a druid is to reach 5.67% chance to not be crit, whether it be through resilience or defense. Boosting your dodge percent is best done through agility and +dodge items for druids.

^ what he said :p

Thanks. I knew how things worked for bears (I'm working on more dodge for Beam through _agi and +dodge thingums), I was just curious how things were in metal wearing land. Makes sense now!

apropos of nothing, but i've seen my cat 'block' attacks (and parry) on occasion.

does that mean KITTEH is smarter than a druid bear?!!

(don't mind, i'm just bored :(

Hey Pallies- what about the PvP Holydin gear? I've found quite a bit of good reading about the tankadin gear available through Arena, but not for healers. Any insights?

Make sure Jorack sees this thread, I know he was giving me some info about the pvp paladin gear on the late night Kara run I was on. I want to say he said the helm was better than most PvE helms you can get, but I will want him to verify to be sure. :)