Shiva, I don’t know what else to say. Gear hasn’t had AP on it since the 4.0.1 patch right before Cataclysm came out. They removed it at the same time as they removed MP5, spellpower (except on weapons), defense and armor penetration from gear. I’m sure you could find the patch notes and all the articles on the stats overhaul if you wanted, but I suppose it’s up to you.
And in other news… Guild Challenges/quests are coming in 4.1.
Hopefully they’re interesting to do, and actually give nice chunks of guild xp/rep, like guild achievements did before they nerfed them and made the guild leveling system utterly boring.
OTOH, if they don’t add new guild levels for 4.1, it won’t matter, since all the guilds of any size will be sitting at cap anyway, long before 4.2 comes out.
ShivaX
5543
That can’t be true because otherwise my Worgen Rogue never would’ve seen any, and I assuredly saw a lot of it. Most of my gear had AP on it.
I hadn’t played since BC so its not like I was remembering gear I didn’t know even existed.
The only items who still have spellpower or attack power are weapons, mostly the heirloom ones. Armor doesn’t have it any more since 4.0.1
None
5545
Necklaces and rings also have attack power but I’ve yet to see anything else other than weapons and trinket procs with any mention of attack power.
According to Wowhead, there are 227 armor items, and 520 weapon items, that still have Attack Power. There are also plenty of enchants and leg armor type of items that have it, and other items with random stats. Most of these items aren’t useful or usable by a cat, but there are some like the Death’s Choice trinket that were intentionally left with just Attack Power, since it is used by both Agility and Strength classes.
For a feral leveling up, it is true that they can just focus on getting Agility items. If an item doesn’t have Agility, they generally don’t want it. This is doubly true because it makes it easy to switch to bear and tank a bit if need be. Once the druid is level 85, they can take a look at the relative stat values of Agility, AP, and all the rest. There are a very few times where a cat will find it worthwhile to choose an item with AP over an item with Agility; the leg enchants mentioned is one of the only ones at level 85. It’s possible to get over 1000 Agility just in enchants/gems at level 85, and it really helps; for cats, Agility is king.
Daagar
5547
If you are not yet raiding and want an easy way to evaluate gear playing with relative stat values is the way to go. An increasingly useful site to get values for all specs of all classes is askmrrobot.com.
To make life even better, use the values you get from MrRobot and stick them into the in-game addon “Pawn”. You will now get an on-the-fly gear rating compared to your current gear (I highly suggest also having TekKompare installed).
Note that MrRobot isn’t necessarily a replacement for tools like SimulationCraft, Rawr, Mew, femaledwarf.com, etc. However, they seem to collate a lot of the data from various sources (include those I just listed) and distill it down. If you aren’t progression raiding and just need to know if you’re gearing yourself right, this will do the trick.
Side note: Note that the stat values on MrRobot are base stat values, and thus using them in Pawn just gives you a starting point. The actual gear optimizer portion of MrRobot does a lot of things behind the scenes (hard/soft caps, diminishing returns, etc) so you’d want to refer to that to truly optimize your gear. This is especially true for tank classes, where avoidance stats start to taper off at certain points in favor of mastery which raw relative stat values can’t account for.
Well shit, I was wrong. Wowhead has failed me and for that we are no longer friends. I do know that there are no 80+ items with AP and that all my Wrath gear across every alt had every bit of it rolled into agility or strength. Even heirlooms no longer have it. So yes, while leveling there may be a time where you might have to choose AP vs AGI, but I sort of doubt it’ll make any significant impact simply because of stat budgets on similar ilvl gear.
I’m actually surprised there’s still that many items with attack power still on the books. All those weapons are actually old arena gear or highly exotic legendaries. As far as the armor items… a lot of those must’ve been overlooked by the wipe Blizzard did on attack power, which seems very odd to me. That’s a sizable chunk of leftovers.
maxle
5550
I took a look at that site and it tells me Seliza’s Spear is BiS for pre-raid Blood Knight. Which I guess isn’t impossible, but it’s sure surprising.
ShivaX
5551
Eh, I’d take that with a grain of salt.
Yeah the extra dodge is nice, but I can’t see it being THAT nice. If my tank showed up with a Hunter/Druid weapon in his hands I’d be less than thrilled.
Still, from a pure survivability angle I can see it. A lot of AGI for dodge and a ton of Mastery. I’d still rather have a Akirus. Hell I’d probably go with a Wild Hammer over it.
Threat could definately be an issue in Heroics with a pure mitigation weapon.
On my iPhone here, but my dk tank uses a +agi 2-hander. It’s like .50% dodge with agi vs. .20% parry with a str weapon. I certainly don’t have aggro issues.
Edit -> Here.
I wish there were more DPS two-handed weapons in the game. Strictly speaking, given access to all bosses in the game, Ashkandi is the only viable option in both hands for a Titan’s Grip Warrior. Wyrmbreaker isn’t that good stat wise, and Shalug’doom doesn’t have hit, which makes them both inferior by varying amounts.
Of course, my biggest complaint is that the damn things never drop, and there are no alternatives. No craftables, no currency reward, no reputation reward.
As someone who has a feral druid almost fully in epics, and still waiting on Halfus to drop the one and only Agility epic two-hander… I feel your pain.
They did a poor job with itemization in general this tier, and especially with weapons. Given how important weapons are to all classes, if they don’t have enough slots to put in extra drops of them, they could skip having as many duplicates to items that people can buy with Valor Points – put more weapons in those drop slots, instead.
The good news is that the heroics coming in 4.1 will have ilevel 353 epics in many of the poorly utilized slots. So there will be at least stop-gap gear there, which will also be some of the best gear available for people who don’t raid, for now.
In a discussion about the difficulty of putting together raids on my main server, one of my guild leaders wrote:
And just to add a little fact to the mix. If you don’t already know, I keep a census count for warcraftrealms.com just for fun. The population is down by about 10% overall and the percentage of that that are 85 is less than what it used to be. We also used to be a high pop server. We’re not anymore. We’re consistantly medium. The pool is starting to shrink.
That was the sense I got back before I stopped logging on about three weeks ago. Between the grind of the endgame and the leveling theme-park design that removed the world from Warcraft, the game is really not engaging anymore.
Jag
5556
Yep. Pretty much nailed it for me too.
I’ll throw in. I was burning through levels getting to 85, one of the top five whatever that thing on the armory counts contributors to the guild. Then I did some heroic instances. Now, they probably weren’t the best ones to do (tried to heal Deadmines with a guild group, and that was just what the RNG decided to give us, and I got some decidedly weird behavior in VP before being…either kicked or dropped or something, but after the first boss somebody asked me if I was okay, and a guy in the group asked me if we were 4-manning the whole thing, and then I left the group not of my own accord, but I got no kick message), but they didn’t exactly light my fire. Now, after a few days of having not logged in at all because I was trying to address a couple of other games and the tremendous backlog of television content that a weekend out of town will do for you, the thought of logging in again is actually filling me with dread. I’m going to do it because there are people depending on me to mix their flasks for them, and I’m sure that somewhere along the way the desire to play will kick in again, but thus far I’m not really looking forward to the whole end game environment the way that I was when I got to the end of Lich King.
Also, having read the encounter descriptions on WoWHead, I’m pretty sure that I won’t be qualified to do ANYTHING in a raid (outside of maybe the first couple of encounters in BRD) for a while, and instead of motivating me, that’s making me want to play any game other than this for some reason.
I don’t know. I think the levelling content is in the best shape it’s ever been. But I’m back to a fairly arduous grind for raid-worthy gear I may not get into a raid to actually use, endgame-wise, rather than the smooth sailing that was getting in shape for ICC towards the end of Wrath. And quality questing or no, I’d currently rather explore completely new worlds than hang around running endless alts.
Aceris
5559
I get the feeling that the game lacks a certain something, but I actually think the level 85 instances (normal and heroic) are really good. The encounters are challenging without having random OTT mechanics. There’s the occasional group of fail, but it really is just occasional. People will explain tactics if you ask.
Also it’s really not that much time to get to a respectable “start raiding” gearset (which i would describe as a 346 in most slots with a few 333s, properly gemmed and enchanted). Especially if you compare the amount of time to the time you might spend raiding to learn encounters.
Of course some raid guilds may demand that you get every possible pre-raid purple, or close, they are being unreasonable. The problem is if they have a full roster they can afford to be.
I wonder if you’re lucky in that regard. My girlfriend and I have been doing heroics for a couple of weeks now (though still fewer than 10 heroic runs total) and more often than not – especially on weekends – we get the same impatient DPS who think we’re still in Northrend.
Its incredibly frustrating. People still don’t know the fights, nor are they interested in knowing. Nevermind helping explain. We’ve asked for people’s input and everyone’s silent. They still expect the tank and healer to carry them through every fight, where they are allowed to just keep PewPew’ing.
