The Results Are In, And We’re Kinda Ignoring Them
So who “won” the poll? First place is the Steady Talasite. This is a pure “defense” gem and we’re not really keen about it. We win by killing things, we lose when we fail to kill things. We just cannot make ourselves equip one of these.
In second place was the Wicked Noble Topaz. Now we’re quite familiar with this beauty, even though we’ve never used one. For our PvE exploits, we prefer +4 Hit/+4 Agility gems instead. Does this pure “offense” yellow gem seem appropriate? At first glance, it’s what we were going to choose. But then we looked at the 28% of you who admonished us to up our defense and paused…
Is there a balance - oh there’s our favorite word! - between pure offense and pure defense?
Sure is, and it’s our third place winner. The Jagged Talasite. A little bit of offense, little bit of defense. OK, we’ll take one and see your reactions.
And only eight gold on the Auction House? /grabby hands!
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29 Responses to “The Results Are In, And We’re Kinda Ignoring Them”
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Maybe my math is off, but usually 13.6 > 12. Wouldn’t that make the Mystic Dawnstone the third place winner, and the Jagged Talasite the 4th? Even if you go by the updated poll, where the Jagged Talasite closes the gap to .2% it’s still in 4th place.
Jagged Talasite…
You could do worse. Not what I would do, but a decent choice nonetheless.
The problem with stacking crit is resilience. You kill more by surviving longer. It’s imperative you stack more resil if you are planning on getting to the higher brackets in arena.
At least you added a little stamina too.
Only EIGHT gold for the Jagged Talasite on your servers AH? You lucky, lucky bastard…
On my server the price is around 35~45 G BO. *pout*
Don’t lock yourself into a PVE mindset with your PVP gems. ON BGs hunters get hit a lot. In the PVE world this is a bad thing, if you manage your threat well, the hits your hunter takes are few and far between. Your going to get hit in PVP, so resil and stam are your friends. You don’t DPS when your dead. I gem for resil because it keeps and up and moving. It also gets you into better premades. 300 resil is the starting point for solid PVP.
Thanks for your work, it has made me a better hunter.
Rat
Just wanted to be the first to say…
Told you so!
Gratz on the gear BRK, you’re making me want to get into the Arena more and more after a little time off. I just need to find a more fitting partner. Me and my ice mage irl friend do OK, but still haven’t broken 1600.
Mangaras (hunter) & Slye (mage) of Mannoroth!
It’s going to depend on how you *feel* you are surviving. If you feel you are surviving well, go for offensive stats. As you continue to gear up, the defensive stats will continue to improve.
If you feel you aren’t surviving long enough, every socket is yellow and blue.
Staying power with a decent amount of killing power wins the game and until resilence is devalued, Crit isn’t where it’s at for PvP.
Maybe people play different in your continent / realm / battlegroup, but whenever I play arena in either 2v2, 3v3 or (rarely) 5v5 I am essentially a tank.
I get locked down and focus fired more than any of my opponents. When they are stupid enough to leave me alone, we usually win, but more often than not I’m the guy they kill.
Maybe they recognised my gear and realise I’m the biggest threat compared to the other classes in my team - and perhaps BRK - this is why you do so well, because you don’t have any obviously good pvp gear. I wonder if your experiences will change, once you start equipping some decent pvp gear (S2 shoulders and S3 Axe are the ones that stick out the most).
Keep in mind he’s in the mid 1500’s on a battlegroup that isn’t terribly competitive.
I’m not sure what battlegroup you’re in, but in mine, everyone in the 1500s range has just about full S1 and all the S3 honor stuff. I think as he gets to higher ranges he’ll see more competitive teams with better strategies and the resilience will make more of a difference.
BRK, you should try and get your priest to grind some honor - that 101 resilience makes me cringe!
As a PVE Arms Warrior, I have approximately eleventy billion percent crit, and it serves me very well: in Kara/ZA/Badge epics, I can drop 650+ DPS without Windfury on a good day, which is plenty good enough for our level of progression (T4 and VR), especially with Deep Wounds/Blood Frenzy making my melee comrades very happy.
But I get my face melted something like seven times out of ten in Arenas. I have 107 resilience with my two Arena pieces and random dungeon-drop Res cloak. It’s sad.
The bottom line is, unless you’re trawling the depths of the sub-1500 brackets (as I am, mostly because I don’t care), you’re gonna get people with lots of Arena/BG gear, lots of resilience, and it actually hits the point where your crits barely do more damage than your regular hits (and I think they actually do -less- damage, oddly enough, after around 400, though I’m not sure if this is possible/advisable with standard gear), and occur less frequently. If you want to stack damage, you’re better off stacking AP, and whether you like it or not, resilience has to win the day at some point, because you’re gonna get smacked, since there’s no such thing as tanking in PVP (unless a Prot Pally flag carrier counts).
BRK im pretty sure 13.6 % is more than 12 %, but hey i could be wrong
double check that one again
So there’s really no point in making that poll, you didn’t REALLY listen to what we had to say.
If you prefer to win by killing then you should definitely stick to Steady Talasite for a blue socket. You can not provide your deadly damage being already dead. We have both PvE and PvP hunters in my guild and i never saw them wasting their blue socket with anything else than Steady Talasite. If you want to go higher than 1500 you have to get as much resilience as you can possibly get.
@Poolstick
When somebody asks for an opinion, chances are they just want to hear what others say and then their own reaction will tell them what they *really* want.
At least, that’s the way I’ve noticed it works with my wonderful wife sometimes… so I just tell her the first thing that pops to mind and then feel no offense when she goes the exact opposite choice.
@Morath
Thanks for restating my earlier comment
It is kinda funny that after BRK selects it the Jagged Talasite increase 1.3% and passed the Mystic Dawnstone. Kinda makes you wonder how when he calls the 4th voter getter the 3rd, and several hours later it happens…
Crit is next to worthless in the arena. The vast majority of its usefulness is taken away by resilience.
You have next to no pvp gear and therefore next to no stamina or resilience. Go with the Steady Talasite.
BRK, there is a reason why people voted a certain way on the poll. Ask Ms. PvP what she thinks while you’re at it.
BRK! GO WITH YOUR GUT INSTINCT!!!! +8 INTELLECT!
Jagged Talasite? 8 gold. Vengeful Gladiator’s Longbow? 3750 Arena Points. Being smarter than the Priest in your Arena Team? Priceless. For everything else there’s MasterCraft.
@Chess - LOVE IT!
But seriously BRK, even I, the PVE noob of Arenas, voted for the Resil gem. Why? Because I NEVER see anyone even bother to mention they’re looking for a team until they hit at least 300 resil. It’s that important. I myself may never get good in Arena, and that’s ok. But you seem to want to get to the higher stages of it, and resil/stam/ap are the way to do it. Agility seems to me to be downgraded there because you’re getting enough from the gear, and it adds to crit and only 1 AP.
But, you’re BRK, and will do what you wish anyway. I look forward to the email where Mrs. PvP comments on your choice. You will be posting that one, right?
At least the gem was cheap.
You win by staying alive. Mana doesn’t really help when youre up against a mana burning priest or a viper sting-ing hunter. More int wont help you there.
There is a reason it was called a poll, not a vote…
He was looking for knowledge, not letting us choose for him.
Thank You Kindly.
BRK you didn’t take the one I voted for!!!!!!!111onetwothreefour!
Oh well.
Seriously I think BRK is dabbling in PvP but wants to remain in PvE mostly.
In truth, he needs one PvP set and one PvE set to set himself up the way he really needs to be.
PvP = stamina and resiliance
PvE = agility and crit and hit and all the other things one needs.
In PvP you sacrifce some things in order to stay upright for longer. You wouldn’t need/want 14k HP as a raider for Kara, unless you are a tank or melee person.
You don’t DPS when you’re dead.
Your armory profile indicates you are no longer in a guild.
Why is it everytime I see you or TJ talk about how much something on the AH is I cry. Lightbringer (US) must have the most inflated economy in the world.
The reason we all chose that steady talasite is because you are low on resilience with your 2/3 pieces of gear. Once you get all the non set’s and a few more vengeful/glad gear our decision woulda been different
Listen to the people cuz!
When my brother startet Arena with his rogue he used all slots for +stam gems. After he had a few pieces of S1 he re-gemmed to stam/resil and later to AP/Agi. I think, this is the way to go because you need to survive in first place and resil+stam > all in arena. At least IMHO ^^
I’m happy, based on some of the comments I’m reading, that people in the right mindset—for all those other Hunters out there who are like BRK and starting out in their Arena/PVP career and gearing up, it’s important to go over some things that other have chimed in about.
1) Little STA = you dead. You dead = 0 DPS.
2) Little Resilience = you are hard to heal. You hard to heal = your healer babysitting you and might be open to being killed more easily.
3) When starting out in gear, go for STA and Resilience, it’s the biggest bang for your buck (in terms of stat return) when you’ve got limited PVP pieces and not alot of good experience under your belt. The longer you last, the more time you can try things out, learn what works and what doesn’t work, etc..
4) Once in the 250-300 Resilience range and 10-11K HP mark, you have to reconsider your gear, especially in context of the brackets you play and what partners you have. You’re not close to the soft cap of Resilience yet (~490), but if you run with a Shadow Priest for instance, it’s much more important for him to ramp up to 400+ Resilience while you can replace some survivability gems for AP/Crit.
5) After hitting your STA/Resilience benchmarks: AP > Agi, AP > Crit. When going up against high Resilience targets, you want your “white” hits and specials to hit the hardest they can without critting.
The biggest thing to understand about this is that some classes WANT to get critted—Discipline Priests get a flat reduction in damage taken and an increase in their healing recieved. Wouldn’t it suck if your crappy autoshoot crit them which then in turned your next Arcane/Multi (your bread and butter burst) to be severely reduced? Then take into consideration that the same said Priest will usually have Martyrdom, which means they have will increased resistance to Interrupt/Silence effects after a crit, which just might ruin your Rogue partner’s Kick.
The other aspect of AP > Agi/Crit, is that you get more of it for the same “cost” (16AP as opposed to 8AGI) because Hunters do not have the 1for2 luxury like Warriors, Ret Paladins and Enhance Shamans and the Strength stat. This means you pay less “tax” on high Resilience targets because your AP is always working to increase your DPS, noncrit and crit alike. And if your target has low Resilience—you’d probably own them just the same in 3-4 shots, so why not stack up to fare better against targets that do stand a chance?
6) Polls = st00pid.
While I agree with above that AP>crit generally speaking in higher arenas, you wanted the socket bonus and needed the yellow gem. Since you need stam, you went green. And I very much agree with the jagged over steady decision.
Good luck with your arenas, I like reading your recaps.