Naxxramas gear by type

As far as stat types, leather and mail are both split half-and-half for caster vs melee. This is a little iffy. In both cases, there are two caster specs (Balance and Resto Druid, Elemental and Resto Shaman) out of six total specs (Druids and Rogues, Shamans and Hunters), so it seems a 33/66 split would make more sense, but maybe they just wanted to keep it simple.
The case that really bothers me is plate, which is split evenly between caster, tank, and DPS (see right). The only plate spec that wants caster gear is the Holy Paladin. That's one of three specs from one of three plate-wearing classes, and yet it gets a third of the plate gear. I'm sorry, my plate-clad healing brethren, but that's just not an equitable proportion. Mostly it just means that our prot pallies have full healing sets and we're still disenchanting a good chunk of the plate every week. Here's hoping we see less caster leather, mail, and especially plate in Ulduar.
Filed under: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
jfofla Mar 18th 2009 6:06PM
Recently I did a population search on my server. I was surprised to find out 25% of all Horde 80s were Paladins.
With this in mind, and adding the warriors, 25% of all gear being plate seems appropriate.
gundamxzero Mar 18th 2009 6:14PM
Yeah a month or so back I checked on mine, 20% pallies, 20% DKs. Oddly enough 2 of my 3 80s are those classes.
JBurg Mar 18th 2009 6:41PM
I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just find more uses for spell power plate. Like giving Ret palies some use for it. They need some spell power from their talent trees so maybe they should remove the attack power to spell power conversion and replace with an intellect to strength converter. Then rets could use the same gear as holy with lots of intellect(for physical power), spell power(to give some abilities a little oomph), haste and crit would be the same use they have now.
Just an idea and probably not a great one...
Kassu Mar 18th 2009 7:22PM
My guild has, umm, 2 raiding pallies and neither of them are in my Naxx team. Loot master always ends up with enough caster plate to pimp out 3 pallies.
Elemental shaman gear is another thing to love...
Mooghoul Mar 18th 2009 6:07PM
I've been frustrated about this for a while now. They figured a solution so "feral druid" staffs could be shared among other classes. Time to find a solution for spell power plate.
SP based on either STR, Armor (so Paladins don't resort to Cloth/Leather gear so freely) or a combination of both seems the logical solution to me. Certainly much easier than figuring out ways for Death Knights to find Spell Power more attractive. The ball is in Blizzard's court.
Shinn Mar 18th 2009 6:14PM
I agree. I don't see how DK's would ever want Spell plate. Unless they part of the noobrigade. The breakdown is off for spell plate, our pally tank had full heal and tank set now and he views his Lock as his main -.- SP based on armor... mmm... is feral faerie fire physical or spell based? coz with that kind of change... ooh boy! lol
Eddy Mar 18th 2009 6:22PM
I feel like something like that would be... basically like consolidating all stats into POWER and then just letting everyone scramble for raw points. It would probably drop a lot of the theorycrafting down and it would just be weird.
bundee Mar 18th 2009 6:59PM
This is particularly disturbing as everyone can wear cloth, but only some can wear plate. It would make sense to have more of the armor type that most can benefit from.
Vati Mar 18th 2009 6:12PM
I've noticed this, and its rather upsetting, running with myself (Ret paladin), A fury warrior and a DPS DK the plate dps gear is scarce, yet every single paladin in the raid (2holy, 1prot, 1ret) have all BIS holy gear just because it drops with absurd frequency.
Painhealer Mar 18th 2009 6:12PM
Amen.
Tired of DE'ing plate after plate item while mail, leather and clother wearers bite their tongue and all the DK's and paladins already have theirs.
Chamual Mar 19th 2009 2:04PM
just gear up all your paladins with a nice healing offset and never be short of healers again?
Vortok Mar 18th 2009 6:14PM
That is such a flawed analysis. There's so much loot because each spec needs to get a least a full set of gear. How much of the caster plate is a duplicate of a slot that drops elsewhere in Naxx compared to others?
Plate has three specs to gear. Tank, dps, and caster (Holy Pally) and each needs gear.
Mail has 2 (arguably 3). Physical dps, caster dps, and Healer. There isn't any specific caster dps gear (aka, has hit) outside of tier pieces so caster dps and Healer mostly share.
Leather is split up into roughly 2 groups as well (Rogue/Feral and Boomkin/Resto), whereas it could easily be four or five.
Same for cloth.
That explains why there's more plate. It's simply that each type needs to be covered for their slots. It has nothing to do with putting more drops for more common types and everything to do with making sure each spec can gear each of their slots... granted they didn't do that perfectly either (itemization-wise) but the analysis based on the amount of each type dropped is horribly flawed as-is.
Matthew Rossi Mar 18th 2009 6:37PM
Be that as it may, you're still ignoring the point that more caster plate drops than can possibly be used. Only one spec of one class wants it: both prot and ret paladins eschew it, as do all forms of DK's and of course warriors wouldn't touch the stuff if it came with free legendary 400 DPS weapons.
Healing paladins need to be moved to the same basic stats as all other paladins: strength and stamina. Borrow a page from prot and make Stam their spellpower stat, let them have a talent high in the Holy tree that converts Str to Mana Pool.
bundee Mar 18th 2009 7:03PM
This is a problem. Plate has tanking gear, dps gear, AND healing gear.
Mail has physical dps gear and healing gear (no mail pieces that drop have +hit on them.)
Leather has physical dps and healing gear (again, no leather pieces that drop have +hit on them)
and then there's cloth, the only proficiency outside of physical dps armor that has any hit whatsoever.
So what do elemental shaman and balance druids (like myself) do to reach that hit cap? Roll on cloth. Then there's the crying about how "but you can wear leather (disregard that most leather is resto crap)"
But I'm glad holy paladins get their own loot table. >.>
Evaline Mar 18th 2009 7:06PM
I don't think making Holy paladins hit like rets would solve anything ( a bit weaker, due to no ret talents). Especially in PvP. And stats like armor penetration would be wasted on them. I think what you're sugggesting is a bit far-fetched. But then again, look at what they did to feral (tank) druids, they use rogue DPS gear basically, and tank fine. But hopefully Blizzard is done with gear homogenisation now.
A better idea would be to remove the 'armor category' from armor altogether, so that when a warrior equips it, it gets plate-equivalent armor, and when a mage equips it, it gets cloth-equivalent armor. That would allow everyone to focus on the actual stats of an item.
Sharda Mar 18th 2009 11:39PM
Unfortunately by giving holy pallies a sp and int conversion off of str and stam you're going to create a PvP embalance of having a high health healer who would be a really hard to kill
Tinwhisker Mar 19th 2009 8:45AM
Correct, I don't think it matters what the number of caster plate vs tank/DPS plate is. Everyone needs full sets which means the number of pieces should be 33/33/33.
What really matters is the drop rates of these items. If caster plate drops are a much lower percentage than tank/DPS plate then there's no problem.
Until drop rates are looked at, this analysis is completely useless.
xenothaulus Mar 18th 2009 6:14PM
In our Naxx10 run last week, all the plate drops were caster; we only have 1 paladin in the whole guild, and he's usually not even raiding (happened to be our OT that night but passed on it.) So we got I think 9 abyss crystals that run. The loot system need serious help.
Ron Mar 18th 2009 6:15PM
I can corroborate this anecdotally. My main is a Healadin. I got geared up faster than anyone else in my guild when we started running Naxx. Caster plate drops left, right, and center in there. In the beginning I also kept rolling on caster weapons like Grieving Spellblade, or various spellpower/crit rings and trinkets--and then later when I realized how badly things were skewed towards my spec in there I felt really guilty for not passing on that stuff that Mages and Locks could also use.
While I liked getting geared up quickly, and the better heals certainly supported our efforts, it would have been nice to know of the imbalance from the start so I could have passed on stuff so as not to feel like a loot whore. Here I just thought I was having a really, really, really good string of luck. :/
jaybarti Mar 18th 2009 6:28PM
I found the same thing my except that my Pali healer is my alt and almost completely geared in ilvl 213 pieces. Where as my main which is a Prot Pali is still wearing Blue ilvl 200 items.