Stat Weights and Judgement Calls

I'll have to check things out again, but currently AskMrRobot is showing me the following for stat weights. This means you should always choose the best DPS weapon, followed by agility, followed in secondary stat preference of crit, haste, and then mastery.  I'm not sure if this is cached in browsers or if they just updated their weights in the last few days.  I'll have to look at it more.

One of my personal reforging issues has been that I'm swimming in +hit.  And I got a new and better weapon that has +hit while my old one does not.  I checked FemaleDwarf and she told me even if I'm swimming in extra (and useless) hit rating it is an upgrade for overall DPS.  That's cool.

So when I look at what AskMrRobot suggests I go through the differences of what I have.  Yep, it suggests I remove the two +80agil/+160hit gems in my shoulders and replace them with +160agil gems.  Even with the set bonus loss of +120agil, I'm ahead of the game.

But it's worth stopping to consider another option.

Using the stat weights we see that 320 agil should be multiplied to 4.36.  We also see that any stamina value should be multiplied to zero.

The stat weight of stamina really isn't zero.  It is zero for the purposes of damage dealing.  Obviously all our gear comes with some and we don't reforge it off, but there is some value to surviving a two-shot combo boss mechanic.  Hypothetically, you or someone you raid with has done something wrong if you get two-shot.  Or you are very undergeared for the instance you're in.  It isn't "RNG".  But having some cushion can help, because accidents happen.

Part of me is tempted to put in agil/stam gems and wind up with 280agil/240stam instead of 320agil.  Maybe it's just the pet-tank-wanna-be in me though.  Trading 40 agility for 240 stamina isn't quite enough stamina to make me do it.  I'd probably give up even more stamina for agility.  But that price is pretty close to my break-point.  A little more stamina, or a little less agility and I'd go for a little more survivability.

RPPM Changes Will Change Our Stat Priority

I haven't gone through all the changes and how items are being "re-balanced".  (I'm still catching up on things since my vacation.) This affects the performance of my RPPM gear, the value of prepotting, and all the gems, reforging, and some enchants.  In a nutshell, this is a rather huge change.  Haste will not be as good.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
There are some further changes to the RPPM system in development that we'd like to share with you. As you know, RPPM is something we've been doing a lot of iteration on, and we have another iteration that should be hitting the PTR soon:

As you may know, RPPM proc rates typically scale with haste. This was done because historically, attacking faster meant you had more chances to proc something, so got more procs, and we wanted to preserve that effect. However, most procs before RPPM were such that either their effect didn't also scale with haste, or their proc rate was predominantly limited by an ICD. Many of our RPPM effects thus far have had neither of these limitations, such that they effectively 'double-dipped' on haste, benefiting twice from it. In some extreme cases, the proc was designed such that they actually triple-dipped.

As RPPM effects have become more wide-spread and more impactful, this has caused a variety of problems. Primarily, it has skewed stat balances toward haste rather significantly. It's also a compounding problem where many of these procs stack multiplicatively with each other, causing insane burst when all of these procs go off together. That can be fun, but also raises the skill cap on your performance, and makes gearing choices more restricted to ones which stack together optimally.

For 5.4 we're going to change both new and existing RPPM procs to not double-dip on haste. Benefiting once from haste is fine and expected, but not twice. For example, suppose you have two hypothetical procs, Flamekissed and Villainy:
Flamekissed's proc rate scales with haste, and its effect says "Chance on hit: Deal 500 additional fire damage". This is fine, because only the proc rate scales with haste; the effect doesn't.
Villainy's proc rate also scales with haste, and its effect says "Chance on hit: +5000 Agility for 20sec." This is not fine, because both the proc rate and the proc effect scale with haste. The more haste you have, the more attacks you do in that 20sec period which benefit from the increased Agility.

If both the rate and effect of a proc scale with haste, we're going to remove the haste scaling from its proc rate. In these cases, we'll compensate for an expected amount of haste by increasing the base proc rate. For any procs whose effect does not scale with haste, their proc rate will continue to scale with haste as before. However, we're also revisiting the proc rate tuning on all existing procs that were made overbudget due to the addition of Unlucky Streak Prevention (which ends up increasing effective proc rate by 9%). These changes should bring RPPM procs back to being on-budget and tied with traditional ICD procs in value.

This will obviously have a noticeable effect on most players performance; don't panic. We're going to be adjusting damage/healing/tanking performance with these changes in mind.

These RPPM changes should make it to PTR soon, and you'll be able to find the exact changes to each such effect there. We now show RPPM proc rates in the tooltip of the effect, which should make it easy to find.

....

However, we recognize that not everyone likes the RPPM gameplay, and are going to greater lengths to provide alternative options in Siege of Orgrimmar. In addition to RPPM-based trinkets, there will be trinkets that use the older internal cooldown (ICD) method, as well as a few on-use trinkets if you'd prefer to have an even greater degree of control over when your trinkets are active. There's even a couple trinkets with completely passive effects.

Meta Gems, Primary vs Secondary Colors and Stats, and Reforging!

My Issue
Hey, so over the weekend I went through some meta gem soul searching.  My meta gem of choice requires me to have more blue than red gems.  Most of my gem slots are currently red!  So I went with almost entirely purple which gets the slot bonus but keeps the playing field of red vs blue even and then I tipped the balance by one for blue.  Then because I used purples with reforge-able stats I adjusted a little bit with reforging.

This was done in the context of having a jewel crafter and purchasing patterns useful for others.

Primary vs Non-Primary Colors and Stats
Non-primary colors (orange, purple, green colors) give you a +20/+20 in the rare quality.  Primary colors (blue, red, yellow colors) give you a +40.   The difference between the two is that it's usually +20 primary-stat / +20 secondary-stat vs +40 primary (or secondary) stat.

Primary Color/Stat Gems
If you're using a primary color, you want a primary stat on that primary color. That's the advantage of using a primary stat color.  Otherwise don't bother with a primary color.  Primary stats on primary color gems can't be reforged-to (or reforged away).

Non-Primary Color/Stat Gems
Unless you're a tank don't take stamina as a second stat without a really good reason.  e.g.- Take +agil +hit. If you're over the +hit cap, just reforge some away on your gear into a more useful stat.  This can get you the meta requirements you need MUCH more easily.


Primary vs Non-Primary Stats and Reforging
Item stats are either Primary or Non-Primary.  Reforging can shift 40% of a non-primary stat on an item into a new non-primary stat which is not already on the item.

Primary Stats that You Can Not Reforge:

• Attack Power
• Agility
• Intellect
• Stamina
• Strength
• Resilience

Non-Primary Stats that You Can Reforge to/from:

• Critical Strike Rating
• Dodge Rating
• Expertise Rating
• Haste Rating
• Hit Rating
• Mastery Rating
• Parry Rating
• Spirit

Summary
If your meta gem has ugly requirements and you don't want to lose out on gem slot bonuses, consider using reforging and some non-primary gem stats to get the slot bonuses and meta you want.  If all you want to stack is one primary stat, this wont work, but most of us have many primary and non-primary stats we need to balance now.

These comments are general purpose, but are specific to the current meta gem of choice.  Back a while ago, we were told that the old gem was flipping back to a requirement of "more red than blue" instead of the current "more blue than red".  But that was mostly about the old gem and a month ago.  They should switch it, but until they do you still really want your critical strikes increased by 3%. That is... until you have tons of gems.