Season 4: My thoughts on gear optimisation.Follow

Preamble

This post started out as a request for help, but in attempting to describe my problem I kinda ended up answering it, so I decided to turn this post into my musings on sockets and enchants for the pvp that I do. If you disagree with what I think don't assume that i'm saying "I am right you are all wrong", I consider myself a reasonably hardcore raider but a very casual pvper, so some feedback from more experienced players is welcome.

Introduction

Season 4 is coming up in just under two weeks, and for the first time ever I am exceptionally well prepared for it. I am sitting on 3867 points, i'm going to get about 550 this week and unless we have a total rating collapse I will get roughly that much next week, bringing me up to just under the 5000 limit. In honor terms I am on 59033 and assuming my computer doesn't die, or blizzard's BG servers don't explode, I will have the 75k limit there. My 2v2 rating peaked at around 1800 this season, and we've generally hung around the 1750 level for the last couple of weeks, so aside from weapons and shoulders I will likely have access to all the new gear in the first couple of weeks of the season. I also have 166 badges and counting, so I am going to splash out on BT gems for all my gear.

This puts me in the welcome position of replacing almost all of my pvp gear in one go, with a "clean slate" on socket and enchant options. Up until now my pvp gear has been a total mishmash, I have one bit of s1, two bits of s2 and two bits of s3, the s1 and s3 are socketed for stam and resilience, but i got the s2 when i started raiding so they are socketed for pve, honor gear wise its a mix of s2 and s3 stuff, again with a mix of socket choices based on whether i first got it for pvp or pve. This season the only piece of new gear I would consider using for pve right now is the healing mace (500 healing!) and i'm not getting that in a hurry, so its going to be a set dedicated to pvp for the first time.

What do I need?

So first up its probably a good idea to look at what I need the gear for specifically. I mostly play 2v2 with an MS warrior (I have never managed to form a reliable team for any other form) this means I am mostly the centre of my enemy's attention.

Against teams like druid/warrior or druid/rogue I need to be able to heal myself through mortal strike/wound poison as well as interrupts like kick and pummel, while at the same time performing other tasks like judging the druid. This means I need to be durable enough to go for a long time between heals (stamina/resilience/armour) and I need the punch to be able to heal effectively through MS type abilities (healing/crit). My conclusion was that the high base armour from the plate gear gives me most of this durability against melee, but the gear is quite weak in pure healing terms, so +Healing enchants and gems would be preferred if every fight was like this.

Against mana drain teams like druid/hunter or lock/priest (and many other combinations) I need to be able to avoid as much mana drain as possible (resilience), the incoming damage tends to be quite low in the case, often with no MS type effect, so my healing needs to be as mana efficient as possible (crit/mp5/healing). My conclusion is that a lot of mana drain is avoided by hiding (running round pillars...) and the amount that each point of resilience mitigates doesn't help that much, so the focus is on healing and crit for efficiency purposes.

The final type of team we face are double dps teams like rogue/mage, mage/lock etc. These teams will usually focus on CCing me while they nuke down my partner or CC my parter and nuke me down, so here I need to be very durable (stam/resilience) and heal quickly between fears/blinds/sheeps (healing/crit/haste). The few times that we have beaten this kind of team has been done by hiding from the mage's LoS and/or bubbling early, so my conlusion here is that the extra stamina is wasted if I execute the plan properly, so big heals are my preferred sockets.

Final Build

In my opinion my earlier sockets for stam/res were a little shortsighted, the paladin is durable enough to not need extra stam and res, but is a little weaker than other healing classes in terms of healing speed and efficiency, so I plan on socketing for healing and crit, rely on my classes inherent durability to get me by.

When my new gear is "complete" I will have 4/5 S4, S2 shoulders, all the new honor gear, the new 45 epictrinket, the badge cloak, plus Hammer of Atonement and Felstone Bulwark from my pve gear.

Unsocketed, unenchanted (apart from the pve stuff which is enchanted for pve and won't be changed) and without a second trinket this will give me:

10.9k HP - Fine
10.7k Mana - Fine
368 Res - A bit low (want at least 400)
29.95% Holy Crit - Great
1580 Healing - Much too low.
4 Red Sockets
3 Yellow Sockets
1 Meta Socket

In the end I chose pve enchants with the exception of boar's speed on boots (theres a lot of druid chasing to be done), glyph of the gladiator and resilience on chest (which cures the res problem). I wanted to put 22 healing gems in every red socket and 10 crit gems in every yellow, however I needed to compromise to get my meta to activate. I chose Insightful Earthstorm Diamond because it only required two gems to be changed to blue, I figured i'd rather lose 22 healing than 20 crit, so I went for 11 healing-2mp5 gems to keep with the spirit of "heal longer and faster". The second trinket also follows this theme, essence of the martyr, i'll probably get a battlemaster healing trinket eventually for an extra "osh*t" button.

So the "final" stats are:
11.4k HP
10.9k Mana
412 Res
32.1% Holy Crit (a nice 34.1% Flash crit and a pretty mighty 40.1% Holy crit chance)
1938 Healing

This has turned into a wall of text, but what do you guys think, am I right on the money or should I have got more res and stam?

Edited, Jun 13th 2008 1:30pm by Tinyknight

Edited, Jun 13th 2008 1:31pm by Tinyknight