Posts Tagged ‘holy’

First Impressions of the 31-point Holy Paladin Talent Tree

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I’ve been avoiding posting about Cataclysm so far because it’s still so early in the process that it’s likely to change quite a bit. I generally don’t want to sink a bunch of analysis into such a moving target. My motto has been that once it’s on the PTR then we can start to really dive in to changes that might actually hit the live realms.

But today Blizzard released a build that included the initial drafts of the 31-point talent trees. It’s fascinating stuff, so interesting in fact that it’s convinced me to break my rule. Let’s take a look at what the holy tree might look like in Cataclysm, complements of mmo-champ’s talent calculator.

If you’ve been living in a cave and missed it, we’re talking about Blizzard’s intention to slim down the current talent trees for Cataclysm. The idea is to fold the bland mandatory talents into the core of the class (trained abilities, spell base values and coefficients, mastery bonuses), throw away some truly clumsy stuff, and leave interesting choices as talents. You can read the original blue post announcing 31-point talent trees from July 13th.

To set the stage, here’s my incredibly detailed rendering of the difference between the current holy tree on potential cata holy tree:

initial-cat-holy-tree-illustrated

It was just too crazy with arrows showing where things moved..

Let’s start with the talents that vanished all together.

This all seems reasonable to me.

We can definitely do without divine favor. If you’ve spent any time with combat log parses recently you’ve probably noticed that most holy pallies don’t bother to cast it.

I guess we can now walk through the talents in each tier of the new tree. Some of the talents don’t appear to be updated in Wowhead’s database yet. I’ve tried to mark them as having old tooltips.

Tier 1

Sanctified Light -> Sanctified Light
(holy light and shock crit +6% -> judge and shock crit +15%)

Not much here. The choice of buffing judgment might seem strange at first, but wait a few tiers. We’re going to care a lot more about judgement damage as holy.

Spiritual Focus -> Spiritual Focus

A simple addition of our new heal to pushback protection, not much to see here either.

Divinity

Divinty trades spots with Seals of the Pure, which then ends up in the prot tree. This makes sense in the Cataclysm model where you can’t spend talents in other trees until you spend 31 points in your first tree. This gives people leveling holy access to divinity much earlier.

Tier 2

Healing Light -> Healing Light

Again, the simple addition of divine light.

Improved Lay on Hands

No change. It’s still a huge DR cooldown available pretty early in the tree.

Judgements of the Pure -> Judgements of the Pure (old tooltip)
(25% seal and judge damage, 15% haste -> 9% haste)

That’s a decent amount of haste to lose, it’ll be interesting to see if we feel the difference with the new raid buffs and healing gear itemization. The other big change is that it flew up the tree, giving early holy pallies faster casts. I’m willing to write off the loss of the judgement damage as noise during rebalancing.

Unyielding Faith -> Unyielding Faith (old tooltip)
(-30% fear and disorient duration -> -50% cast time after fear or disorient)

Now that’s interesting, but I’m not a huge fan of PvP so I don’t have a strong feel for the implications. It certainly feels in line with the general rhetoric to slow down crazy bursty arena matches.

Tier 3

Illumination -> Illumination (old tooltip)
(30% mana back on HL/FoL/shock crit -> 30% back on all “abilities”)

Instead of scaling the percentage chance to get 30% back up with 5 points, we scale the mana returned up to 30% with 3 points. That’s a fine cleanup. It’s also nice that it presumably now procs on all our heals, it’d be interesting to see if it also procs on damaging abilities. That might make some attacks even more potent regen tools if part of their cast can be refunded in addition to their current SoW procs.

Divine Light

Our new slow, large, heal.

Beacon of Light -> Beacon of Light

Beacon flies up the tree! Today it’s available at level 60, in Cata it becomes available at level 20. This will be a great help to early paladins who are trying to heal groups.

The real news, though, is that only holy light and holy shock are transferred to the beacon. Today everything transfers to the beacon. One could say that we chose the size of our heals by what our beacon target needs, but we can help out the raid by landing that heal just about anywhere. With the new beacon we might have to return to our beaconed target if the appropriate heal they need doesn’t transfer. We’ll be duplicating our healing out in the raid less often.

This’ll be awfully interesting to see. It’ll chance our triage flexibility, for sure.

[Inspired Judgement] (not in wowhead yet?)

Are you sitting down? “Your Judgement spell also heals your Beacon of Light target for 100% of the damage caused.” That’s just crazy talk.

Today we rely on judgements for haste, at the very least. Most of us also judge reasonably often for SoW regen. But every time we do that we’re creating a gap in the healing stream. On some fights (enraged shambling horrors, juggling multiple saurfang marks) that gap can be pretty risky. Making judgements also heal cleverly mitigates that risk.

It’ll be awfully interesting to see how much damage and healing judgements can end up doing. All the other talents that mention Judgement just got a lot more interesting.

Tier 4

Infusion of Light -> Infusion of Light

There went the FoL HoT. I haven’t noticed if it’s surfaced somewhere else. I rather like it ticking away, I have to admit, so I hope it’s not gone for good.

Blessed Life -> Blessed Life

No change. Maybe PvP rebalancing will make this more interesting, but it seems like a long shot.

Enlightened Judgements -> Enlightened Judgements
(judgement range +30 yd, +4% hit -> judgement range +30 yd, +100% spirit as hit rating)

Remember those judgements that now heal our beacon? Yeah, I don’t want them to miss either. The change from a flat hit percentage to scaling hit rating with spirit is an interesting choice. It’s hard to get a feel for what that implies without seeing how all the stats balance out.

Tier 5

Improved Concentration Aura

I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t changed, given that it feels like a participant in the PvP arms race. Maybe it still will.

Aura Mastery

Also unchanged. While we’re here, can I vote for a return to a longer duration? Thanks.

Sacred Cleansing -> Sacred Cleansing (old tooltip)
(30% chance on cleanse to increase resistance -> cleanse also dispels magic)

A previously unreliable PvP talent (”chance of having a chance of..”) is reborn as our corner of the great dispelling redesign in Cataclysm.

Tier 6

Purifying Power -> Purifying Power (old tooltip)
(confusing pile of mana cost and cooldown reduction -> judge debuff caster on cleanse)

“When you Cleanse a harmful effect, you have a 100% chance to strike the caster of the harmful effect with your Judgement ability.”

OK, that’s just awesome. Presumably the judgement will then heal our beacon. Will it work on bosses? Will the judgement proc seals? How will line of sight work? Can we use this to cheese the range of Judgement of Justice? Man, now I want to fool around on the beta.

Holy Power -> [Selfless Healer]
(5% holy spell crit -> 6% healing spell crit on others)

It’s a subtle tweak, but it seems reasonable to suggest that selfless healer is taking the place of holy power in the tree.

I have to admit that this, along with quite a lot of the other healing effect and crit buff talents, feels exactly like the kind of boring required talents that we are trying to get away from. It seems like these math talents should be hiding behind coefficients and gear. If we don’t want other specs to have access to them then hide them behind the tree’s mastery bonuses?

Tier 7

Divine Illumination -> Divine Illumination
(50% mana cost reduction for 15s -> 30% “spell and attack” crit for 15s)

That’s an interesting take on the current DI. Instead of just flat out reducing mana it takes a round-about path through Illumination to provide a weaker equivalent. With larger health pools that increased crit might actually amount to something. It’ll become relatively less powerful as we gear up and our crit increases, and it could theoretically push us into the crit cap. Though hopefully we won’t see anything like the inflated gear levels of Wrath for that to be possible. Maybe it’s just me, but this doesn’t feel quite as consequential as the final tier in a lot of the other trees. Though I’ll admit that it’s in line with the clicky cooldowns given in quite a few trees.

Full speed ahead!

I’ll close by sharing that I love where this is going. Maybe it’s the techy in me, but I feel a lot of sympathy for trimming the trees down to the bare essentials. KISS, “perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, and all that.

Finally, what might a cata holy pve spec look like? Something like 35/3/3 sure looks like fun.

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Shield of Righteousness meets Seal of Wisdom

Monday, March 15th, 2010

How many holy paladins out there have Shield of Righteousness on their bars? I’m guessing not very many. I kept it around when I switched from protection to holy and, until recently, only really used it when goofing around.

I bring it up because I’ve been thinking about it as a tool for sustained regen for holy paladins. Around patch 3.3 (I think?) SoR was changed to proc seals. At the time I saw that as a way for protection paladins to proc their threat seals and didn’t give it much more thought. In the last few weeks, though, it struck me that having an instant on a 6 second cooldown that procs Seal of Wisdom might be an absurdly powerful regen tool.

How much regen are we talking about, here? To use it we have to be in melee range. We’ll have a chance to proc from the SoR attack itself, and then we have a chance of getting a melee swing in while the GCD is ticking down. We could be getting two SoW procs, 8% of our mana, every six seconds. To put that in perspective we can look at Divine Plea. It gives back 25% of our mana every minute, or about 2.5% every 6 seconds.

That could be a ton of mana depending on the SoW proc rate. But at what cost? Spending a GCD every six seconds is very expensive indeed. Depending on your cast speed and latency you might be sacrificing, say, 1/5th of your holy light casts. 20% of your healing throughput. Compare that with DP’s 50% for 15 seconds, or about 12% over the course of a minute of spamming holy lights.

But the nature of the cost is very different.

On the one hand, the healing reduction of weaving SoR into the stream of heals is more consistent. Every few seconds you’ll miss a heal, but there will never be 15 solid seconds where all your healing is cut in half. The resulting consistently reduced throughput might well be sufficient for many encounters.

On the other hand, there are gaps in the healing stream. DP nerfs your healing, but works in the background. Keeping SoR on cooldown introduces significant downtime. Every 6 seconds we’ll go over two seconds before a heal lands. Often that’s not a problem. In some encounters, with some healer comps, that’ll guarantee losing a tank.

This is all fascinating stuff to think about. Let’s see what it looks like on a dummy.

That comes to 37k mana.

That comes to 37k mana.

I threw on a weird assortment of buffs to get a little closer to a mix of int and haste that one might see in raiding these days. This was further complicated by having removed items that proc spell power to make the tests more consistent. I used the level 83 dummy because SoR can now be dodged and we want to take that in to account. In every test I started by judging and would keep Judgements of the Pure up by judging every minute, at least.

First let’s set the stage by seeing how long we can just spam holy light:

Seconds until OOM: 65
Heals: 564896 (8690 HPS)

OK, now let’s first cast DP at 85% mana and then every minute as it comes off cooldown.

Seconds until OOM: 104
Heals: 770899 (7412 HPS)
DP mana returned: 18505 (~890 MP5)
SoW mana returned: 2960 (~142 MP5)

DP bought us an additional 40 seconds but our average HPS took a 15% hit. That’s more than the theoretical 12.5% for two reasons. First, we paid the 50% cost for two runs of 15 seconds but didn’t have enough mana to amortize that across two full minutes. Second, the DP itself costs a GCD and delays our healing when it’s initially applied. We got a drip of SoW regen from keeping JotP up and from the melee swings that can arrive during the GCD we spend popping DP.

Now let’s use SoR every time it’s up.

Seconds until OOM: 237
Heals: 1548033 (6531 HPS)
SoW mana returned: 65133 (~1374 MP5)
SoR hits: 36

Using SoR on cooldown cost us 25% of our throughput but let us go four times longer than we could just spamming holy light. Comparing it to DP, we went more than twice as long. We had less throughput, but it was more even. The constant 25% reduction never approaches the occasional 50% reduction of DP. Some back of the napkin math implies that we got around 4% of our mana back for each use of SoR.

While we’re on the subject, let’s see what it looks like to keep judgement on cooldown while healing from melee.

Seconds until OOM: 87
Heals: 694894 (7987 HPS)
SoW mana returned: 7410 (~425 MP5)

By judging every 10 seconds we only drop throughput by 8%. If you only need those extra 20 seconds, or so, this is a much safer way to go than popping divine plea. It’s also interesting because it ensures that our judgement buffs are kept up.

So where does this all leave us? In practice, I doubt that most situations call for using SoR very heavily. These contrived tests just help us better understand where SoR fits in amongst our other tools.

At the end of the day, knowing when to safely bonk the boss with your shield is another opportunity to set yourself apart. Maybe you’ll only do it as you’re running by and holy shock is on cooldown. But maybe you can work it in enough to avoid having to risk the spikey reduction of DP.

I have a dream that some day holy paladins the world over will make the most of their regen tools. We shouldn’t always be that guy standing in the corner calling for Innervate a half dozen times in a long fight.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Give it a try. Surprise your raid leaders.

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WotLK Trinkets for Holy Paladins

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Now that Arthas’ loot table has been released and we know the entirety of Wrath of the Lich King loot, I thought it’d be fun to look back at the trinkets that raiding Holy Paladins have at their disposal. I often find myself looking at subsets of trinkets for a given task or tier, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever sat down and taken a broad view of the trinkets that we used throughout Wrath. Let’s do that.

Trinkets, by design, are hard to categorize. Their variety is intended to add some flavor to our gear sets. Sometimes we might want a constant effect, other times we might want to trigger a proc at just the right time during an encounter. Depending on what you want, the best trinket for the job might be a weird drop from three or four tiers back.

To bring some order to this mess let’s group the trinkets by their primary passive effect. Then we’ll list the secondary proc effects of the trinkets in each list. We’ll use a bit of shorthand to describe the procs. Something like “15s/45s Chance:” means that every 45 seconds there’s a chance of triggering the proc which lasts for 15 seconds. “20s/2m Use:” means that every two minutes you can chose when to trigger the effect which lasts 20 seconds.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. There are a decent number of trinkets which have an effect that we’re interested in that is paired with an effect that we don’t really care about for healing raids. PvP trinkets, trinkets with hit, and trinkets with secondary effects that proc on “harmful” spells are examples of trinkets that fall into this category. Sure, using one of these would be better than using no trinket at all. We wouldn’t search them out as a valuable raiding trinket, though, so they’re not included in this list.

This list won’t tell you what to use. It’ll let you glance at what’s available and maybe, hopefully, help you come up with fun ideas for when to use which trinkets.

Intellect

Personally, I use the talisman and pandora’s plea in my day to day healing. Tears of the vanquished stands out for being a strong trinket that is very easy to farm.

MP5

Am I the only one who thinks that the direct heal procs are underwhelming? My resto tree BFF and I routinely sustain thousands of HPS in 10-man ICC. A single heal proc with a cooldown measured in minutes, even if there was no overheal, is a drop in the bucket. If I were to value a passive MP5 trinket, I think I’d aim for the spell power procs. I’m also having fun triggering the snowflake just after popping out of the emerald dream in the Valithria encounter.

Spell Power

This expansion is crammed full of spell power and regen trinkets. There’s a few decent throughput options, as well.

Critical Strike Rating

These were a lot more compelling before Illumination’s regen was cut in half. These days a Holy Paladin would be teased for wearing these.

There we have it! I think that covers most everything that we’re likely to see in the wild. Enjoy!

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Holy Paladin Icecrown Gear List

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

(This post now includes Arthas’ loot table. Enjoy. — Z, Early Feb ‘10.)

Well, it’s that time again. Patch 3.3 brings us Icecrown Citadel and the final set of upgrades that we’ll be seeing in Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard has gone all out. We have items available from bosses, crafting, emblems, faction rep, and even quest lines. Let’s see what Holy Paladins have to look forward to.

I want to keep this post nice and simple. I chose to build this gear list with the following guidelines:

  1. No cloth, leather, or mail and no items with hit or spirit.
  2. The relative value of an upgrade will depend on the individual healer. For this list I’ll use the following simple priorities: iLevel > Crit > Haste > MP5.
  3. Heroic upgrades of items are omitted, as are the 10m tier pieces.

I liked the icons I used in the Ulduar gear list to show which stats a given piece has. Let’s use them again:

  • Items with crit and haste
  • Items with crit and MP5
  • Items with haste and MP5

Here we go!

Head

  1. [Sanctified Lightsworn Headpiece] T10
  2. [Faceplate of the Forgotten] Festergut 25

I can’t see many paladins preferring the faceplate once they’ve acquired these well-itemized tier pieces.

Neck

  1. [Blood Queen's Crimson Choker] Lanathel 25
  2. [Holiday's Grace] Festergut 25
  3. [Soulcleave Pendant] Saurfang 10
  4. [Choker of Filthy Diamonds] Rotface 10

We have a pretty decent set to choose from. With luck we can pick up the soulcleave pendant from Saurfang early on and then sit tight until we finally get to Bloodqueen and have access to the choker.

Shoulder

  1. [Sanctified Lightsworn Spaulders] T10
  2. [Rusted Bonespike Pauldrons] Marrowgar 25
  3. [Emerald Saint's Spaulders] Valithria 10

Like the head slot, our shoulder tier piece is fantastic. Either of the 10-man pieces will do until you can get your hands on the tier upgrades.

Back

  1. [Frostbinder's Shredded Cape] Valithria 25
  2. [Drape of the Violet Tower] 50
  3. [Heartsick Mender's Cape] Blood Princes 10

This is certainly a step up from Ulduar. We have a great best-in-slot piece to watch for and we can blow some emblems on an upgrade until we see it drop.

Chest

  1. [Sanctified Lightsworn Tunic] T10
  2. [Rot-Resistant Breastplate] Rotface 25
  3. [Chestplate of Unspoken Truths] 95
  4. [Chestplate of Septic Stitches] Putricide 10

Tier wins again! I’m starting to get used to this lightsworn business.

Wrists

  1. [Crypt Keeper's Bracers] Princes 25
  2. [Bracers of Pale Illumination] Gunship 10

Honestly, there’s not a whole lot to choose from here. Grab what you can.

Hands

  1. [Gauntlets of Overexposure] 60
  2. [Fallen Lord's Handguards] Deathwhisper 25
  3. [Sanctified Lightsworn Gloves] T10
  4. [Festergut's Gaseous Gloves] Festergut 10

Oh no! We have to decide between strong off-tier pieces and the 4pc T10 bonus! It was a little too easy to ignore the terrible T9 set bonuses and happily take whichever pieces were best itemized. I’m undecided, but am leaning towards dropping the 4pc bonus.

Waist

  1. [Lich Killer's Lanyard] 60
  2. [Belt of the Lonely Noble] Trash 25 (BoE)
  3. [Waistband of Righteous Fury] Gunship 25
  4. [Tightening Waistband] Lana’thel 10

The lich killer’s lanyard is readily available, very well itemized, and has an awesome name. Expect every holy paladin in your neighborhood to be sporting one.

Legs

  1. [Puresteel Legplates] BS 8
  2. [Sanctified Lightsworn Greaves] T10
  3. [Leggings of Dying Candles] Valithria 25
  4. [Corrupted Silverplate Leggings] Marrowgar 10

Oh no! T10 vs no-MP5, round two. We might have dodged a bullet, though. Both the leg and hand tier pieces have crit. There’s a decent chance that we’ll be around the point of diminishing returns of haste rating with this gear level so trading haste for MP5 in these tier pieces might not be such a bad thing at all.

Feet

  1. [Protectors of Life] BS 5
  2. [Boots of the Funeral March] Valithria 25
  3. [Ancient Skeletal Boots] Marrowgar 10

Another slot with not much choice. It’s nice that the strongest piece out side of 25-man hard modes is crafted, though it’ll be no fun competing with melee DPS for primordial saronoite.

Finger

  1. [Ashen Band of Endless Wisdom] The Ashen Verdict - Exalted
  2. [Ring of Rapid Ascent] Gunship 25
  3. [Incarnadine Band of Mending] Princes 25
  4. [Marrowgar's Frigid Eye] Marrowgar 25
  5. [Cerise Coiled Ring] Princes 10
  6. [Runed Signet of the Kirin Tor] 1000 1
  7. [Signet of Putrefaction] Festergut 10

Boy, there’s quite a lot to choose from here. Everyone can easily get the kirin tor and the friendly ashen verdict rings right out of the gate. At the high end expect a mix of rapidly ascending, coiled, and endlessly wise rings. That spell power proc and gem socket are both fun.

Trinket

  1. [Althor's Abacus] Gunship 25
  2. [Purified Lunar Dust] 60
  3. [Sliver of Pure Ice] Marrowgar 10
  4. [Bauble of True Blood] Lanathel 25

The abacus is interesting because its proc is a smart heal that can crit and which appears to have a long range. It has a 45 second internal cooldown, however. The lunar dust proc works out to about 100 MP5, the sliver about 67 MP5 if you always spend a GCD on it when it’s up. The bauble is underwhelming, to put it politely. None of these seem compelling when compared to trinkets like the [Talisman of Resurgence] or [Pandora's Plea].

Main Hand

  1. [Bloodsurge, Kel'Thuzad's Blade of Agony] Arthas 25
  2. [Royal Scepter of Terenas II] Arthas 25
  3. [Valius, Gavel of the Lightbringer] Arthas 10
  4. [Trauma] Rotface 25
  5. [Quel'Delar, Lens of the Mind] [Battered Hilt] quest chain
  6. [Lockjaw] Rotface 10

The weapons off of 25-man Arthas are going to be [The Turning Tide] all over again, except this time we have a mace and a sword in the mix. We might have preferred haste on the mace from 10-man Arthas, but it’s still worth it. Trauma has no internal cooldown and a 1% chance to proc, making it fun to play with but better left to our healing friends with higher spell cast rates. Quel’delar and Lockjaw give nice throughput or regen options.

Shield

  1. [Bulwark of Smouldering Steel] Marrowgar 25
  2. [Lost Pavise of the Blue Flight] Sindragosa 10

Like our wrist slot, we have very little to choose from here. The fantastic news is that the bulwark is available from the very first boss in the raid! You might even be able to get it from PUGs if you don’t regularly run 25-man with your guild.

Libram

  1. [Libram of Blinding Light] 30

I can’t decide if this is worth it. On the one hand, it takes quite a while to get up three stacks and we have to burn a spell we’d like to keep available for emergencies to do it. On the other hand, it’s a guaranteed stack instead of the random chance that ToC’s [Libram of Veracity] will proc. And we can keep the stack up while running. Hmm.

There we have it! Now go beat up some bad guys and take their stuff.

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MP5 still unwise for Holy Paladins in Ulduar

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

In a previous post I took my first swing at analyzing how valuable MP5 is in gear for holy paladins.  I looked at WWS parses of fights in 25man Naxx to find out what portion of our regen came from MP5.  The result?  Barely any.

I guessed that this wouldn’t change in Ulduar because the underlying fundamentals weren’t changing.  Some comments in that post suggested that the situation might change because Ulduar fights are a lot more mobile, etc. It took a while to get a decent set of parses showing the regen in 25-man Ulduar. I think I’ve now come to a representative sample from the early fights.  The methodology is the same as in the post from Naxx.  We express the sources of regen as MP5 for each fight:

ulduar-regen

We’re looking at about 1100 to 1700 MP5 from regen sources other than gear MP5 in 25-man Ulduar.

This makes small amounts of MP5 in gear irrelevant. It doesn’t come close to the other sources of regen we have. As an example, in the fights that were parsed I had about 56 MP5 from mostly T7.5 gear. That’s around, what, 4% of regen? That much MP5 may as well be Spirit or Hit for the amount of good it’s doing.

But what if we go all out and try to stack MP5? How much can we get and what do we sacrifice for it? Let’s throw together some rough gear sets that either stack MP5 or try to avoid MP5 entirely.

MP5 stacking set: 811 int, 255 crit, 367 haste, 1718 SP, 303 MP5
MP5 avoiding set: 821 int, 651 crit, 691 haste, 1667 SP, 0 MP5

If we really try we can get up to 300 MP5 at the cost of around half of our crit and haste ratings.  All right, now we’re getting numbers that could matter. That much MP5 could be on the order of 20% to 30% of our mana regen.

I don’t want to get too lost in the details of our regen sources — that would make a fun post on its own — but let’s consider the nature of MP5 for a second. Replenishment and Divine Plea scale with the size of our mana pool. Seal of Wisdom scales with our mana pool and haste. Illumination scales with our casting speed and crit rate. MP5 always returns mana at the same rate. When your friendly neighbourhood shammy pops {Heroism,Bloodlust} your mana consumption increases. Illumination and SoW try to keep up. MP5 sits there staring at its navel, returning exactly the same amount of mana as it did before.

Is it worth it, then, to get static MP5 at the cost of huge chunks of our gear’s haste and crit, stats which scale our top two sources of mana regen? This pally says absolutely not. As long as we have the huge mana regen sources of Illumination, SoW, Divine Plea, and Replenishment I’ll continue to see MP5 as somewhere between useless to downright harmful.

Finally, these updated numbers combined with the experience of raiding after some “upgrades” ([Poignant Sabatons] -> [Greaves of the Rockmender], [Chestplate of the Great Aspects] -> [Breastplate of the Afterlife]) have given me a much stronger feel for the gear set that I’d consider best-in-slot. My initial hope that our Ulduar gear would be OK, given all its MP5, turned out to be sadly wrong.

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