*drool* PvP gear!

PvP gear is out as of Tuesday, and with it my flirtation with 10-man raiding. Back to what I know and love, Boomkin pvp! I think that I'll restrict my PvE gear to drops off heroics, especially as that lets me continue my exclusivity viz a viz not grouping with death knights.

There seems to be a slightly skewed requirement here with regard to arena ratings, to wit --

No Rating Moderate Rating Uber Rating

Gear Savage Hateful Deadly

Accessories Hateful Deadly n/a?


And of course there are currently no weapons available besides the Deadly ones which is ridiculous as they have a 2030 rating requirement on them.

If you take the simple route to getting savage gear, ie., mixing with arena points instead of trying to do straight up honor which is much more expensive, you should be able to get full gear & accessories after the trifling total of 347,200 honor and 1625 arena points. Which is not terribly bad considering that you could get I think around 5000 honor every four matches, and you could pick up a piece of gear every week assuming you did the arena matches. 278 matches later, you have a full gear set! To say nothing of what you start with, which for me right now equates to approximately 25k honor. It's really nice I think that they dropped the mark requirement on any pvp pieces, reducing marks to the sole point of turn-ins for yet more honor. I admire what they did before which seemed like an incentive to get you to do certain bgs, but I don't think you really lose that here since you'd still need to do all the bgs about equally (except AV, praise Lolth that was the one they dropped in exchange for strand of the ancients) in order to have an even turn-in rate.

Gear, no choice on -- obviously it's the savage wyrmhide all the way. WRT to accessories though there's a little bit of choice, at least on some of the gear. Do you want hit, crit, haste, or mp5? Hit is *just* about worthless I think, as you'd expect with a primarily pve stat. There's a 96% hit chance against an equivalent level, which all the BGs are at 80, so you only need 4% more and boomkin have an automatic 4% from talents, and bumped to 7 if you bother (or have time) to cast IFF on your target. Ditto the worthlessness of mp5 or spirit on gear -- you die so fast in a BG there's no way you run through your entire mana pool...I don't think it's happened more than a handful of times in all the BGs I've done, though on occasion it has occurred in longer-running arena matches. So...crit / haste / spellpower? Spellpower trumps on importance I think, but between the other two what do you do? I'm inclined to give a slight edge to haste here, if only because people are stacking serious resilience nowadays which somewhat lowers the effectiveness of crit; but on the other hand it's an extremely useful pve stat and much as I might like to, I don't spend 100% of my time in BGs so :-).

The savage gear nets --

blue xxx
red xxx
yellow xx
meta x

There is also a prismatic one that you could add to your belt slot with a belt buckle...at least I assume any serious person would do so.

For the meta I'm tossed between the Ember Skyflare (25 sp, 2% int) and the Enigmatic Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced snare/root). I think the ember is probably better for overall usage, especially with druids slipping out of roots through shifting and the medallion of the alliance for getting out of fear. If I start running into a ton of locks in arena though I'll probably switch out for the Impassive Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced fear).

As per usual I think we're shooting for blue-int, red-spellpower, yellow-crit. The yellow I'm figuring on Perfect Smooth Sun Crystal (+14 crit), for red Runed Scarlet Ruby (+19 spellpower), and blue...as usual blue provides trouble, tending to be more PvE-useful than PvP, tons of spirit and mp5-based gems, and little to choose from pvp-wise. There is of course the old fallback to straight stam boosts a la Solid Star of Elune...but I'm more inclined I think to go with something like Forceful Forest Emerald (8 haste, 12 stam) or Jagged Forest Emerald (8 crit, 12 stam) so I'm at least getting something caster-useful out of it.

My guild recently had a Vent Meeting where I was yet again reassured that This Time things will be, you know, different, and we're going to be Super Serial about PvP / arenas, etc. My confidence in such promises dwindles every time it comes up and goes unfulfilled. But the beauty of arenas, of course, is that I don't *need* my guild to do them. Where it suffers is trying to do BG premades, a chimeric dream that I have that the few of us pvpers in the guild have never been able to convince the rest of the folks to come along for. I rather suspect that I'm going to have to go with my fallback on this one, trying to do premades with Meridius, though the chat channel they allegedly created for that purpose seems to have died as I haven't heard anything on it for a long-o time.

Time to hit 80 already so I can start implementing this :-)