Posts with tag stat-weights

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights.

Now that we've had a bit of time with patch 4.0.1, hopefully you've settled in to a decent rotation and spec and have begun to feel your way around the new system. Now that you've done that, there's one more step to take: figuring out the best way to reforge and regem your gear. Reforging can be done through certain NPCs in major cities and is a process whereby you take one secondary stat (the ones in green text) and reforge part of it into another stat. This process can be very useful for getting rid of extra stats past the soft cap or just plain getting rid of stats that aren't important for your class or spec. You can't reforge a stat into another stat that's already on the item, but otherwise, your possibilities are endless.

Gemming remains more or less how it always has. The one big, new curveball we've been thrown is the fact that hit gems are now blue. This is probably overall a win for DPS death knights, as it gives us a few more options to aim for gear bonuses without handicapping ourselves as much.

To understand how, when and if to regem and reforge your gear, you'll need to understand stat weights. While it's still pretty early in the 4.0.1 game (and therefore, it's not completely clear what stat weights are for every spec), the death knight community has still done enough math that we're relatively certain of the general order. With that in mind, let's look at every spec and figure out the best ways to regem and reforge.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

With the state of pretty much every class on beta in limbo thanks to the forthcoming talent revamp, we're taking a break from beta stuff to ransack the Ruby Sanctum. Hopefully, we'll see the new trees on beta in the next week or so, so we have more to work with than speculating on exactly what "signature abilities" everyone will get. In the meantime, we have shiny new loot and a new boss to tackle in the here and now.

The Ruby Sanctum is ostensibly the last major raid of the Wrath expansion, and as such, ostensibly your last chance to get a few extra pieces of gear and uber yourself out before Cataclysm comes along and replaces everything with level 81 quest rewards. There are definitely some pretty prime upgrades to be had here, including a few straight-up best in slot drops, so let's get going and check out what you can grab.

As with previous gear guides, try to keep your stat weights in mind, and when it comes to the heroic versions of these drops, unless otherwise noted, it's usually safe to say the same stuff about the heroic version, except even more so. Also, comparisons here are normal to normal, or heroic to heroic. Heroic versions of ICC loot are, for the most part, probably still going edge out normal Ruby Sanctum loot.