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by Allison Robert 
May 9th 2010 at 4:00PM
This is the situation I'm in, and I suspect it's one that a lot of other hybrid players would recognize; I play restoration in most guild 25-man and 10-man raids, but I tank just about everything else. On easier content, or on nights when we have too many healers show up, it's not unusual for a few people to haul out their DPS sets and go DPS for the evening.
As such, hybrid players (and particularly hybrids who have dual-specced into a role requiring a completely different set of gear) have an interest in keeping their offspec set up to date, and the best way to do this has typically been through 10-man raids where there's not much gear competition. I got 3 Sanctified feral pieces from heroic 10-man ICC, and I'm still using a few ToGC-10 pieces to tank as well. When you only have 10 players in a raid, the number of players angling for a given piece is necessarily small, and items go to offspec quickly.
25-man raids couldn't be more different. For a specific example, I'm in line behind our feral, three rogues, fury warrior, two hunters, and possibly even two retribution paladins (!!!) for the Frostbitten Fur Boots off heroic Marrowgar-25 (yes, the number of people salivating over melee leather in Icecrown is amazingly annoying). Realistically, I'm not going to see this piece until the end of the summer or possibly even the beginning of autumn if the boots drop at their usual rate.
The situation's made worse when your guild makes the leap from normal to heroic, because the line just restarts. Anybody who wanted Toskk's Maximized Wristguards, for example, is almost certainly going to want their heroic version. So, rather than being 2nd in line for the next normal drop, I go back to being 6th in line for the heroic one.
As a result, the prospect of losing 10-man raids as an option to gear offspecs is a little scary, and I wonder if the raiding split is going to have an impact on the offspec that hybrids choose to play. Without the ability to build a bear set through 10-man raids, I'm really tempted to axe the resto/bear dual-spec and go bear/cat or resto/moonkin so that both sets share as much gear as possible. I don't think I'm the only hybrid player thinking about this.
An additional point for consideration: Is competition for melee leather finally going to die due to mastery bonuses encouraging mail and plate classes to stick to their armor, or is this just wishful thinking?
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 5)
Daigeil May 9th 2010 4:46PM
You'll gear your offspec the same way 10-man raiders currently do.
Slowly.
Lissanna May 9th 2010 5:52PM
which will suck for someone like me that switches between DPS & healing as needed during a raid.
Stilhelm May 9th 2010 7:30PM
25-man raiders will still gear their offspec faster than 10-man raiders. Just not nearly as fast as now when they can run both 10 and 25s.
As a 10-man raider, the only thing that will change is that there will be no more itemization holes in 10-man loot tables that require 25-man raids to fill.
Daigeil May 10th 2010 12:46PM
yep, I do the same. I swap between resto and balance regularly, and on my warrior I play prot/arms. In the first case, I obviously have some interchange between the sets, but the warrior? That's a bitch. Regardless, this change is doing one thing and one thing only: Bringing 25-mans into line with 10-mans, because Blizz likes the 10-man format more in terms of speed of gearing.
Aidan May 9th 2010 4:46PM
<quote>An additional point for consideration: Is competition for melee leather finally going to die due to mastery bonuses encouraging mail and plate classes to stick to their armor, or is this just wishful thinking?</quote>
It is absolutely going to die down significantly, since melee leather will be near useless to plate wearers, with the removal of attack power. Melee leather will still be potentially desirable to hunters and enhance shamans, but not to plate wearers.
Etreya May 9th 2010 4:49PM
The problem is see with the gear is not that other classes roll on Gear that is not of their 'intended armor class', but rather the availability of suitable gear of each class.
For example, I'm an Ele shaman. looking at my projected BiS set, the legs I will be using are Cloth (Plaguebringer's Stained Pants). Why? Simply because i will need the hit and Haste>Crit. There are no mail spell legs that have both hit and haste. I have to branch out to be at my optimum. Same is true for my offspec stuff.
More stat variety in the same armour classes would be nice and possibly solve some of the competition.
Though everything is hunterloot anyway.
I can see Offspecs being geared a lot slower come Cata because of the 10/25 weekly mutual exclusivity. not that that's a bad thing. It may mean that Epics may be that little bit more valuable than they are now.
justin_stephaniuk May 9th 2010 6:22PM
Maybe Blizzard will make most drops like that purchasable with the new points.
You never know.
Lissanna May 9th 2010 5:45PM
but you have to spend points on your main set first, and there's going to be a cap on how many points you can get per week of the higher tier gear. For someone like me that tries to keep up two complete sets of gear, it's hard to do now, and one is almost always lagging behind the other. Without being able to kill things in both 10's & 25's, my off-set is going to lag even further behind, which will be bad.
Aliandro May 9th 2010 5:06PM
Plate wearers won't want cloth or mail any more. It won't have Strength and won't give them any AP at all. Mastery would still be good wherever it's found, it's that AP will come from stats that will save us.
Sp1der X May 9th 2010 5:35PM
mastery will only be found on your armor proficiency, not sure about non armor pieces though. i.e. warriors will only get mastery from plate and boomkins from leather
V Magius May 9th 2010 5:06PM
No one's really bringing up a different solution to alleviate the MS/OS problem in Cata. We may be cutting down on different gear.
Take Paladins, they have three different gear choices. Def/Str/Int basically. We're losing defense, and they could get mana based on Strength instead of Intellect. That leaves us with only 'DPS' gear. Spec appropriately for your role and you'll do great. Spec one way and function in another, you'll be OK for a minute or two until you can switch specs.
This could be taken to every single class and seriously drop the amount of different gear. Yes, we'll only have 4 different gear types. Not much to do about that until gear repainting happens.
Lissanna May 9th 2010 5:49PM
In theory, moonkin & resto druids have similar stats they need now (both are spell casters). However, there is very, very little overlap between the two sets of gear given consideration for: slightly different min-maxing of stat priority, different gem priority, different trinkets, different set bonuses, different idols, different "caps" on stats (hit will equal spirit in cata for moonkin, but moonkin will still have a spirit "cap" that resto won't have), etc.
Pete May 10th 2010 9:49AM
This.
Although you might need to supplement off-spec sets with certain trinkets and the enchants/gems might not be spot on, you're still going to have a somewhat functional set for off-spec. Considering it is your off-spec, you could equate the loss of spec-specific enchants/gems/trinkets to the loss of using current 10-man gear v. 25-man gear. Bottom line, you'll still have the slightly inferior off-spec set available only it won't require actually getting the actual gear.
Overall, I think much of this is premature until we see exactly how the entire respec of stats works out. Take the pally tank and dps. Both will focus on str and stm. It's likely that the same set can be used for both with the change out of weapon.
I'm personally hoping that I won't need to work on 5 different sets for a pally in the future. ... On second thought, it is fun to gear up all the different specs and PVE/PVP, just time consuming.
Avan May 9th 2010 5:29PM
I'm disgusted that you've got to wait for Ret Pallies to get the boots before you. ArPen is a horrible stat for them, is it not? They shouldn't even be on the list.
Nodonn May 9th 2010 6:16PM
Two things
1) It's BiS for ret.
2) If you find me some boots without arp that aren't horribly outdated I'll gladly take them.
Stilhelm May 9th 2010 7:33PM
and 2nd BIS for Ret is probably not more than a couple dps (out of 8k+) worse, or probably less than 0.001% less dps than the BIS. If you're not chasing LK heroic mode, you don't need BIS, 2nd BIS will do just fine. 2nd BIS is also probably not going to keep you from heroic LK anyway, since the few guilds that have done it so far were surely not in full BIS gear.
On top of that, you'll still need to keep some plate boots of some sort around. The leather boots will be completely worthless for a plate wearer as soon as patch 4.0 drops.
comedown May 9th 2010 10:12PM
So wait - a ret pally should pass on his main spec BiS boots so some grumpy main spec healer capable of wearing leather can have them rot in their bag for progression? Seriously? Get over yourself.
Allison Robert May 10th 2010 3:36AM
@comedown
No reasonable person is going to argue that a drop like that does more if it "rots in a bag," and no one's made that argument here. The discussion concerns hybrid players who switch between two specs with contradictory gear requirements frequently, and whether this will be improved or not by Cataclysm raiding changes. It does not address people who play only one spec in a raid and want offspec gear over main-spec raiders for funsies.
The melee leather situation is a related, but ultimately tangential, point addressing the difficulty of gearing a viable offspec when virtually every physical DPS in the raid is a slave to armor penetration. I think everyone, Blizzard included, agrees this is not an ideal situation.
Your tone both here and in your other comment is unnecessarily aggressive. Please be polite, or we ask that you do not comment.
rkaliski May 9th 2010 9:34PM
Like it or not, the whole idea behind loot distribution systems is to advance the guild. It may suck to watch the tanks get all the good stuff while you wait for a bone to be thrown at you but trust me, I salivate at the DPS plate that goes to the other side. Your guild needs you as a particular spec. If you want that badly to play another spec you should find one that needs tanks.
You will get offspec loot. I was arms/fury in Black Temple for my guild, but I still built up a decent set of tanking gear from the drops that the MTs didn't need because they were using Tier gear.
I wouldn't doubt that Blizzard is also trying to put the brakes on the zergs through heroic dungeons by limiting the high end gear.
Good guild managment can help this problem by using attendence as well as dkp/main/offspec. If you are one of those guys who have been there every night for the past 5 years the guild leaders can give you that piece of tanking gear rather than the number four tank that is in the raid. Same goes with DPS gear to the tanks.
Zidri May 9th 2010 5:37PM
"An additional point for consideration: Is competition for melee leather finally going to die due to mastery bonuses encouraging mail and plate classes to stick to their armor, or is this just wishful thinking?"
I think it's fair to assume that in cata, rolling on your own armor class will be encouraged by most players/groups/guilds.
And about your other point, it's the only reason i heared so far that makes any sense as to why someone can be against that change.
Still, gearing up your offspec shouldnt be that hard.