2fps

There’s a host of options available to choose from when it comes to which gems you use in your gear. It can be difficult to know what all your options are to begin with, let alone which ones of those you want. A lot of times, people choose gems that aren’t quite the best for what they’re trying to accomplish, other times they choose outright terrible gems altogether.

In an effort to be helpful, I’ve published a guide for choosing gems aimed at a beginner’s level audience and you can find the link to it here as well as in the sidebar where it will be a permanent fixture.

I hope it can be of use!

Lately, everyone has been posting about their first thoughts and experiences concerning the recent patch. Meanwhile, I’ve been slaving away on arranging tiny spell icons in my recent mini-series on Blood Death Knight tanking. Now that that’s done, I’m going to jump into the pool too.

So without further adieu, here’s my thoughts on 3.2! (gosh I’m love rhyming things with 3.2 today)

I think I might have to stop playing WoW altogether. Either that or give up tanking. You see, RatingBuster is borked.

Ratingbuster, you see, is the best addon ever. It adds a bit at the bottom of the tooltip when you hover over a piece of gear that displays gains and losses in stats compared to what you currently have equipped.

But now WoW does that too! Why do you need an addon to do exactly what the game does already!?

The WoW implementation of this idea is beyond complete and utter fail. It shows gains and losses in ratings only. I’m capable of doing simple math like comparing the parry rating I have on a pair of gloves vs. the parry rating on another pair of gloves. That’s of absolutely no help at all.

What I care about is the difference in percentages after diminishing returns. Anything else is a peripheral concern.

The thought of having to run a bunch of formulae to determine percentages taking diminishing returns into account every time I look at a piece of tank gear is horribly depressing.

Moving on from that tragedy for now…

I’ve spent a lot of time grinding out badges. I have my shiny new chestpiece, am halfway towards a shiny new sigil, aaand can’t honestly think of anything else that I absolutely need. I’ll pick up the helm I guess just because I don’t really know what else to do with the badges and its still an upgrade even if its not the most attractive upgrade ever. Moar hit? Meh.

My warlock is a third of the way to the Putress helm! Yay!

The new 5man is kinda meh. The intro is frustrating, the jousting is dangerous only in that its hard to stay awake through it, the trash feels like it was included only as an afterthought and the whole general concept of the place is offputting. Crazy old Tirion Fordring builds an ampitheater to kill off the champions of both factions and a host of Argent redshirts? And all the faction leaders come to watch them die and think this is an acceptable way to spend time in Icecrown?

Clearly the Tirion Fordring I knew and liked has either developed Alzheimer’s or is an agent of the Scourge. An unfortunate turn of events regardless of which is true. Seriously Blizz, I was going along with this tournament idea but now its just too much.

I’ve managed to snag six or seven epic gem designs on my paladin. Selfishly I got the ones that were most beneficial to me, i.e. expertise/stam, stam, spellpower/spirit, spellpower/hit, spellpower/haste, etc. I like the icons for the epic gems, they’re very pretty.

Lastly, I was hounded into changing the guild tabard. People have been griping about wanting a real tabard and not just the placeholder that we’ve had for ages. While scrolling through the different icon and color combinations I made a black and yellow getup featuring a bat icon. I made the joke that we could run around shouting “I AM THE NIGHT!” and other such things… and people actually took that seriously.

Enjoy it for now people, it ain’t staying around long!

Getting right to the point, we’re talking about sockets on your gear and why you should be ignoring the socket bonus.

This may be one of the hardest habits you’ll ever have to break in WoW.

I can be pretty compulsive with some of my habits and it took me a long time to get over this one in particular. I know there are a lot of other people out there (even Pike!) who struggle with this too. So let’s take a deep breath and say it together:

I don’t have to match the colour of the sockets on my gear.

I generally shouldn’t match the colour of the sockets on my gear.

Ok. Good.

What is the point of putting gems in your gear that match the socket colours?

To get the socket bonus!

Right. The other big reason is to make the socket bonus text appear in a regular white font, not the faded grey that drives us mad. That reason is the one we just have to learn to live with unfortunately.

Generally speaking, the socket bonus is terrible and you don’t want to go out of your way to get it. This is almost universally true. There are very few exceptions to this. Let’s look at an example.

Here we have the T8 Shadow Priest robe. Lovely idn’t it? We have here a blue socket and a yellow socket and the socket bonus is 6 critical strike rating.

Judging by what we know about caster dps generally and Shadow Priests in particular we know we generally want as much spellpower as we can get. We love our Runed Scarlets but darn, no red sockets here so we can’t use them right? So very much wrong.

Let’s take a look at the current stat weights for Shadow Priests as posted by Mearis on the Elitist Jerks forums. Stat weights are a handy list of the relative worth of all of the dps stats we can have on our gear.








If we wanted to get the socket bonus we’d have to use a Purified Twilight Opal and a Potent Monarch Topaz (assuming hitcapped). That would net us 18 spell power, .30% spell crit and 8 spirit.

Or we could socket two Runed Scarlet Rubies and get a fat 38 spellpower.

It comes down to whether or not we want to trade 20 spellpower for a third of a percent of crit. This is not a difficult decision to make.

So do you never want the socket bonus?

There are times when you may want the bonus. For caster dps this is almost always when the socket bonus is spellpower. That doesn’t mean you should match sockets every time the bonus is spellpower however. A spellpower socket bonus is just an opportunity for you to see if that piece of gear is a good place to put one of your two blue gems that you need to activate your meta.

Activating your meta gem is almost the only reason for using non-red gems as dps of any kind. At the end of the day you’ll almost always be better off socketing pure red gems be they Bold, Delicate or Runed depending on who you are.