Yes­ter­day, I talked about How to Read PvP Gear for PvE, and short­cuts on how to eval­u­ate PvP gear when it comes to enhanc­ing your PvE set. The big take­away from the arti­cle was: use PvP gear to patch your PvE set, not for over­all gearing.

Today, I’ll list as many of the commonly-patched cases I can think of. If Blizzard’s going to keep pol­lut­ing sprin­kling in pvp items in your pve instances/raids, you might as well cherry-pick pieces from the pvp side that will actu­ally help you in PvE.

Remem­ber, con­tinue to block out the lines I men­tioned yes­ter­day as you size these items up.

Weapon-based classes: key weapon

What’s a weapon-based class? Any class that has abil­i­ties based on “weapon dam­age +X” (for exam­ple, Steady Shot for hunters). Melee weapons for melee classes and ranged weapons for hunters. All that mat­ters for those classes is how hard their weapon hits. You can make up for the lack of PvE well-roundedness in the rest of your gear.

For these classes, where weapons are one of the largest parts of over­all dam­age out­put, and PvP rewards are guar­an­teed rather than a drop chance in a raid you can run once a week. Dag­ger rogues love [Mer­ci­less Gladiator’s Shanker], hunters love [Mer­ci­less Gladiator’s Cross­bow of the Phoenix], and so on. Those pvp weapons offer com­pa­ra­ble dam­age to the weapon drops you’ll get in raids.

This is why you’ll fre­quently the fol­low­ing classes rock­ing pvp weapons: dps-warriors, dps-pallies, rogues, melee-shammies, and hunters.

Nuk­ers: spell haste items

Spell Haste is some­thing that was intro­duced about halfway through the Burn­ing Cru­sade. This means that it’s tough to get on crafted/instance/heroic/early-raid/early-badge gear. It turns out that for cast­ers, spell haste is typ­i­cally the sec­ond or third best stat you can stack. So, if you have every­thing else cov­ered, maybe a spell haste item from this list could be a good move for you, depend­ing on where you are in the game.

Pal­adin tanks: weapon

Pally tanks basi­cally gear up just like a tank war­rior in every slot except for their one purely paladin-tank item, their weapon. There aren’t many choices avail­able for this weapon. [Mer­ci­less Gladiator’s Gavel] is a good pickup.

Druid tanks: everything

Ok, I exag­ger­ate. I ini­tially ducked talk­ing about tanks and pvp gear because tank mechan­ics are a deep enough topic to get mut­li­ple arti­cles of their own. How­ever, druid tanks and pvp gear is really easy. I learned druid tank opti­miza­tion for my wife’s feral tank side project, and the state of the rawr-tank union can be sum­ma­rized thusly:

Druid tank play­ers should obtain a thick piece of leather, bite down on it, and run battlegrounds/arena until they can’t take it anymore.

Check out emmerald’s excel­lent guide on feral tank gear pri­or­ity, browse those item slots, and see how often pvp items appear in the top 10 spots for each item. Bliz­zard still has some seri­ous class design work to do for my rawr tank friends. What a mess! As much as I don’t like how my pro­tec­tion war­rior plays in bat­tle­grounds, at least I don’t have to run them to improve my char­ac­ter. I’ll write more on this sub­ject soon.

Con­clu­sion

These items are the excep­tion rather than the rule. Fol­low them closely. For exam­ple, spell­cast­ers don’t use their staves in the same way that phys­i­cal classes use their swords/bows. They have no spell that says “this spell does weapon dam­age +100 fire dam­age”. Basi­cally, a cast­ing staff could be a bot­tle of sham­poo for all you care, you just want the bonuses it gives it gives to your pri­mary abilities.

(I’ll add any other excep­tions peo­ple can think of, just post in the comments)