Post by Kibethe@Stormcrow on Jun 25, 2008 14:38:53 GMT -5
So now that we have all kinds of PvP gear options the question is coming out, is PvP gear legitimate to use for PvE?
The answer is a conditional yes. The conditions are...
There are 2 class specs for which #1 is painfully true: Retribution Paladins and Boomkin (although Boomkin can wear cloth spell DPS gear at only an armor loss and not a massive mana loss unlike Retpaladins and Warrior plate, and Blizzard has indicated they are expected to, it's kind of retarded to be given the option of wearing leather and then given no spell DPS leather, lolwtf?).
But PvP gear is much easier to get! Yes it is, but it also heavily over itemizes Stamina and Armor (especially on plate), and has an added stat (resilience) that if you're not a tank has a lot less value when it comes at the expense of DPS. Let's not forget in WotLK, resilience will do nothing in PvE. Did you roll a Retribution paladin to tank? I certainly hope not because they're pretty bad for it, with or without 400 resilience.
Let's look at T4 stats compared to S1 and S2 Arena gear for the Retpaladin sets (Battlegear and Vindication). If you do similar comparisons for other specs and classes, you will find a lot of the same. S1 is arguably about the same itemization level as T4 and S2 is slightly above. Assume we would gem these as identically as possible (T4 has 1 blue socket in place of a yellow on the Arena sets) to make all socket bonuses function but not have a significant difference in gem-stats.
The crit rating differential is misleading; don't forget that with Kings your agility will actually go up by 10%, almost completely closing the gap between melee crit and agility at L70. So, you effectively have 65 agility, which is 2.56% crit. Add in the 2.27% crit from your rating and that's 4.63%. S2 by comparison is 4.72% crit. So, almost 0 gain.
In fact if you look at this what you can see is despite being higher itemization level, S2 only gets you 0.1% crit and 14 str in terms of your DPS. All the rest of that itemization is spent where? Stamina, Armor, and Resilience.
The capper: T4 has enough +hit that a paladin is hitcapped for anything but bosses. Toss on a specific neck/belt/ring/cloak combination and you are set for boss content.
So, what does this mean? The Arena/Faction-rep sets are good, especially when enchanted and gemmed for PvE, until you can get your hands on proper PvE gear[/i]. But you really want to get proper PvE gear as soon as possible, because the DPS differential will be very significant; so much so that you often have to scale up 2 item level tiers before your PvP gear puts out as much DPS as your PvE gear.
That said I am rocking an awful lot of PvP gear because it's what I can get. Also now that there's S4 items out there, it's finally a DPS upgrade for PvE, and a PvP upgrade at the same time.
The answer is a conditional yes. The conditions are...
- If there isn't something better from PvE.
- If you can't reasonably get the thing from PvE that's better any time soon.
- If you gem and enchant it for PvE.
There are 2 class specs for which #1 is painfully true: Retribution Paladins and Boomkin (although Boomkin can wear cloth spell DPS gear at only an armor loss and not a massive mana loss unlike Retpaladins and Warrior plate, and Blizzard has indicated they are expected to, it's kind of retarded to be given the option of wearing leather and then given no spell DPS leather, lolwtf?).
But PvP gear is much easier to get! Yes it is, but it also heavily over itemizes Stamina and Armor (especially on plate), and has an added stat (resilience) that if you're not a tank has a lot less value when it comes at the expense of DPS. Let's not forget in WotLK, resilience will do nothing in PvE. Did you roll a Retribution paladin to tank? I certainly hope not because they're pretty bad for it, with or without 400 resilience.
Let's look at T4 stats compared to S1 and S2 Arena gear for the Retpaladin sets (Battlegear and Vindication). If you do similar comparisons for other specs and classes, you will find a lot of the same. S1 is arguably about the same itemization level as T4 and S2 is slightly above. Assume we would gem these as identically as possible (T4 has 1 blue socket in place of a yellow on the Arena sets) to make all socket bonuses function but not have a significant difference in gem-stats.
| T4 | S1 | S2 | |
| Str | 212 | 192 | 226 |
| Crit | 49 | 100 | 104 |
| Agi | 59 | 0 | 0 |
| Int | 127 | 94 | 113 |
| Sta | 150 | 215 | 246 |
| Armor | 6136 | 6284 | 6923 |
| Res | 0 | 101 | 110 |
| Hit | 46 | 0 | 0 |
The crit rating differential is misleading; don't forget that with Kings your agility will actually go up by 10%, almost completely closing the gap between melee crit and agility at L70. So, you effectively have 65 agility, which is 2.56% crit. Add in the 2.27% crit from your rating and that's 4.63%. S2 by comparison is 4.72% crit. So, almost 0 gain.
In fact if you look at this what you can see is despite being higher itemization level, S2 only gets you 0.1% crit and 14 str in terms of your DPS. All the rest of that itemization is spent where? Stamina, Armor, and Resilience.
The capper: T4 has enough +hit that a paladin is hitcapped for anything but bosses. Toss on a specific neck/belt/ring/cloak combination and you are set for boss content.
So, what does this mean? The Arena/Faction-rep sets are good, especially when enchanted and gemmed for PvE, until you can get your hands on proper PvE gear[/i]. But you really want to get proper PvE gear as soon as possible, because the DPS differential will be very significant; so much so that you often have to scale up 2 item level tiers before your PvP gear puts out as much DPS as your PvE gear.
That said I am rocking an awful lot of PvP gear because it's what I can get. Also now that there's S4 items out there, it's finally a DPS upgrade for PvE, and a PvP upgrade at the same time.