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.
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.
Raids and instances are PvE. Battlegrounds and Arena are PvP. You get to play multiple ways with the same toon, it's really fun! The cool thing about WoW is that even in PvP, with no group, you can get gear to help you in PvE.
This article is written for the PvE player looking to supplement their gear with some PvP gear. I'm assuming you are a newbie raider who has been to a couple of instances and wants to take the jump to Kara, ZA, Gruul and so on and not suck at your role. To do this, you can definitely help yourself out with some well-chosen PvP gear.
The series: [Introduction, and a call for comments, Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty, PvE vs PvP, Variety vs Specialization, Solo Performer vs Group Utility, Your role in a PvE raid]
No class is globally better at PvP than every other class. WoW PvP is a huge rock-paper-scissor game, where there's an answer for every move, or in WoW's case, Class A always feels overpowered to an opponent of Class B, Class B over Class C, and Class C over Class A. (except expanded out to an 11-way graph) While no class is universally dominant in PvP, some builds are universally better than other builds in that environment.
So let's say you have a guild. Some of the people are good friends, you've known them for a long time. You know what they do in their lives, you know a little of their family life. You know about their pets! They raid with you, quest with you, arena with you.
Then there are other people who have been in the guild for a long time, but never make the list of people you think of when you want to explore new stuff. They don't particularly care about knocking over challenges, but are glad to come along to raid or pvp as long as their real-life connection is going to be there. These people are the other half of a "package deal". They have played enough to get to the max level, and they do like the sight of zomg epics. Who doesn't? So they volunteer to come with you, whether it's for your new arena team, or your raid. Some of these people evolve into actual gamers, people who get good at their role in a group, who understand the game and what they can do in it, and who socialize with the others. The others become SPHOs: sub-performing hangers-on. (Pronounced how it looks, rhymes with show.)
Continue reading SPHOs