My first impression of the new loot coming out on the PTR right now is, holy-armorpen-batman! I’m genuinely surprised, as I was expecting with the nerf they gave armor penetration that there would be less focus on the stat in the future, and so far the opposite is proving to be true. Armor penetration will be on nearly everything – something I’m not entirely thrilled with as a tank trying to fill out the hit/expertise caps. It seems that the leather now more than ever is extremely well itemized for cats, less for bears. That said, there’s a few promising items with strong expertise and all it will take is a few to get ‘enough’. I ponder whether it will come down to bears capping armor penetration like cats do to push for additional threat, which is quickly becoming a hot issue for tanks of all kinds. In both forms I find myself suddenly paying a lot closer attention to the threat meters.

I am most excited over a trinket currently coming out of the new 5-man content, the Needle Encrusted Scorpion is amazing with a whopping 114 crit rating and a 678 armor penetration proc. We’ll finally see an armor penetration proc that is accessible to everyone. I find that in itself is going to be the most striking change for all DPS classes. We’ll no longer see posts that have to say “gear this way if you have a trinket. gear that way if you don’t have access to it.” Anyone who cares about armor penetration will now tell you to farm this bad boy and otherwise assume for gear lists that you already have it.

While I am excited by the trinket, I am also pleased with the Tier 10. The tier bonuses are exciting for DPS and particularly amazing for tanking. For bear form I am used to negligible set bonuses.

~ by lily on November 15, 2009.

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