How to Read PvP Gear for PvE

Con­tin­ued from yesterday’s Intro to Using PvP Gear for PvE.

(I apol­o­gize in advance for the for­mat­ting, I don’t have the patience for proper html coding.)

PvP gear is typ­i­cally heavy on the fol­low­ing stats. I’ll explain how each mat­ters in PvE.

• Resilience … helps you sur­vive crit­i­cal hits. The raid boss is going to one shot you any­way, whether it crits or not.
• Spell Pen­e­tra­tion … over­come resis­tances. PvE mobs don’t have resis­tances. Spell pen­e­tra­tion does noth­ing in PvE.
• Armor … makes melee dam­age hit less hard. See Resilience for how this helps in raids.
• Crit Rating/Spell Crit Rat­ing … is nice, but usu­ally there’s some­thing more impor­tant you could be work­ing on, like hit rating/haste/healing/stats/spell damage/mana regen/whatever. But, we won’t com­pletely ignore it. (Again, this changes by class and build; some make use of these bet­ter than others)
• Sta­mina … is spe­cial. You do need a cer­tain level of sta­mina to instance and raid. How­ever, PvE gear will get you to that level. All that extra sta­mina you get on PvP gear… I’m not going to say that it goes to waste, but when the raid is try­ing to knock over a boss as quickly as pos­si­ble, your non-tanking health usu­ally isn’t the lim­it­ing reagent in that alchemy. Whether you’re try­ing to heal the tank right after a crush­ing blow hits the tank, or try­ing to do as much dam­age in as lit­tle time as pos­si­ble, sta­mina doesn’t help. Most of the time in PvE, you stay alive by know­ing the event and hav­ing each mem­ber of your team play correctly.

So, to sum up: When look­ing at PvP gear for PvE, men­tally black out any line that has Sta­mina, Resilience, Armor, and Spell Pen­e­tra­tion. When gear­ing for PvE, there should be no time where you ever say, “Well, this piece does have more Resilience than the other one.”

I’m going to use the exam­ple of a new L70 mage. Yay, you’re L70! Let’s get you geared up and hit­ting hard. You point at your green gloves and say, “Well, I need to improve there.”

Right off the bat, just by being Hon­ored with Sha’tar (which you likely got from quest­ing), you can buy these:

[Evoker’s Silk Hand­guards] (Sha’tar, Hon­ored)
97 Armor
+33 Stamina
+12 Intellect
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 17 (0.77% @ L70).
Equip: Improves your resilience rating by 17 (0.43% @ L70).
Equip: Improves the range of your Fire Blast spell by 5 yards.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 19.

Okay, so let’s men­tally block out accord­ing to the guide above, and just use the parts that mat­ter when you’re try­ing to do damage:

[Evoker’s Silk Hand­guards]
+12 Intellect
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 17 (0.77% @ L70).
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 19.

Com­pare with the Dun­geon Set 3 piece, which drops in normal-mode Steam­vaults, sim­i­larly cleaned:

[Incanter’s Gloves] (nor­mal Steam­vaults, 1^st boss)
+24 Intellect
+12 Spirit
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 14 (0.63% @ L70).
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 29.

Dif­fer­ence going from Evoker to Incan­ter:
+12 intellect
+12 spirit
-3 crit strike rating
+10 damage

You might be think­ing, “Big deal! So it’s a lit­tle worse.”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

The prob­lem is that if all your gear is a lit­tle worse, all those lit­tles add up to a great big mediocre, and you end up under­per­form­ing in raids. You’re basi­cally try­ing to raid in gear that works about as well as Nagrand quest gear. Don’t be fooled by the item color or the item level, that PvP gear just isn’t designed for instancing/raiding.

You’re also telling the raid lead that you can’t be both­ered to run instances to get bet­ter gear but you want to raid any­way, you just want to pick it up with other guild­mates who did bother to do that. Finally, you’re say­ing that you prob­a­bly haven’t run instances on this toon, so you’re going to be con­fused as to how to play on a team.

Gear says a lot.

Let’s move up a level in rewards. Here are the cur­rent epic PvP gloves you can buy for grind­ing honor in battlegrounds:

[Mer­ci­less Gladiator’s Silk Hand­guards] (S2 gloves, honor)
+46 Stamina
+20 Intellect
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 19 (0.86% @ L70).
Equip: Improves your resilience rating by 23 (0.58% @ L70).
Equip: Improves the range of your Fire Blast spell by 5 yards.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 36.

…which we clean up for pure PvE dam­age role:

[Mer­ci­less Gladiator’s Silk Hand­guards] (S2 gloves, honor)
+20 Intellect
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 19 (0.86% @ L70).
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 36.

Here’s what you win going from Incan­ter to Mer­ci­less Glad­i­a­tor:
-4 intellect
-12 spirit
+5 spell crit rating
+7 damage

They’re a good, if small, upgrade.

Now let’s look at the T4 gloves you can get in Karazhan:

[Gloves of the Aldor] (T4 gloves, Cura­tor)
+22 Intellect
+19 Spirit
Equip: Improves spell hit rating by 17 (1.35% @ L70).
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 19 (0.86% @ L70).
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 35.

Dif­fer­ence from Mer­ci­less Glad­i­a­tor to Aldor:
+2 intellect
+19 spirit
+17 spell hit rating
-1 spell damage

This is a no-brainer. The T4 gloves destroy the S2 gloves for PvE. Yes, mages largely don’t care about spirit, but look at that spell hit rating.

So even though the Mer­ci­less Glad­i­a­tor gloves are an upgrade over the Incan­ter gloves, the Aldor gloves destroy all of the above at PvE.

One last example:

[Hand­wraps of Flow­ing Thought] (Karazhan, Attumen the Hunts­man)
+22 Intellect
Yellow Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +3 Spell Hit Rating
Equip: Improves spell hit rating by 14 (1.11% @ L70).
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 35.

Mer­ci­less Glad­i­a­tor to Hand­wraps of Flow­ing Thought:
+2 intellect
+14 spell hit rating
-17 spell crit rating
-1 spell damage
+1 yellow socket
+1 blue socket

Even the gloves that drop from Attumen, the very first boss from the very first raid, are an over­all upgrade because of the sockets.

This is true of just about all pvp gear, so choose wisely. If you just never see any gloves drop (for exam­ple), then go ahead and grab the PvP ones. Strings of nonex­is­tant drops hap­pen. My tank war­rior is exalted three times over with Vio­let Eye and has never seen [King’s Defender] drop. Some well-chosen PvP pieces can help out a lot.

How­ever, as I said above, if you gear up for PvE entirely in PvP gear, raid lead­ers are going to look at you funny and won­der why you aren’t run­ning instances before you sign up for raids, or why you aren’t sign­ing up for early raids (Kara, Gruul) before you try to get into an advanced one (ZA, SSC). Even if you go, everyone’s going to notice when you’re barely ahead of the main tank in dam­age, and you won’t be invited back.

Use PvP to patch weak­nesses, not gear up over­all.

More Words!

• Where PvP Gear Often Helps
• There is no heal­ing spreadsheet
• WoW Wrath Class Redesign and Reit­em­iza­tion Explained
• Intro to Using PvP gear in PvE
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: PvP vs PvE