In Cataclysm, several of the stats that are currently on our gear will be going away. We will no longer have armor penetration rating or attack power as stats on gear, and we’ll no longer have intellect on our gear once we throw off the yoke of mana and make our switch to focus.
In Cataclysm, all those stats that you have now will magically turn into different stats. Here’s how:
- Armor penetration turns into haste (mostly)
- Intellect seems to get divided partially into stamina, and partially into crit (or possibly boosting another stat already on your gear if it didn’t have crit)
- Attack power just goes away. Keep in mind that your agility should now give you 2 attack power for each agility, rather than one.
- Ranged weapons have their base dps increasing significantly. Rowans went from 255 to 345. Heroic Stakethrower went from 253.2 to 343.3
- Armor pen gems convert to crit gems in Cataclysm
Note that while these rules hold true for most gear, every now and then one might be different. For example, the passive ArP on Deathbringer’s Will turned into crit rating instead of haste, the ArP on Hersir’s Greatspear turned into crit instead of haste. The ArP on stakethrower just went away, rather than adding to its haste.
ArP gems are turning into crit gems.
Note that in Cataclysm Serpent Sting is able to crit by default, and the t9 set bonus was not updated, making the 2-piece t9 set bonus worthless come patch 4.0 
The end result for my character in my level 80 gear was a slight loss of attack power (probably due to the loss of careful aim int conversion) and a jump of about 7% in crit chance, as well as a lot more health. I also ended up with 587 haste.
What do the Attack Power procs turn into ie Whispering Fanged Skull & Sharpened Twilight Scale. This article is a start on one of my concerns is what gear we need to start collecting now that will be better suited to our probable builds for Cataclysm. Although we can expect some if not much of this to change. It would be great to be better prepared for the transition when Cata hits.
I don’t know on those two specifically, but I do know the AV rep ring still procs 480 attack power, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the others were staying the same.
Attack power is still in the game, just like armor pen is, they just aren’t part of the stat selection on your gear anymore.
What happened to the ArP gems that you had in your gear (I am just guessing that you did have some!). One thing we might need to do before the big change is to change out all our ArP gems to Agility ones, perhaps?
From my understanding, Attack Power procs stay Attack Power procs. They’re simply avoiding putting raw AP on gear now, but the procs should stay the same.
Good to know the info about the 2 piece T9. I was wondering what they would do with that. Not what I wanted to hear, I thought they might update it and make it cool (all ticks have a chance to do double damage, a crit for crits?). Oh well – guess I better save up frost badges for 4 piece T10……..
what happens to ARP gems in gear? :S
I’m coming out with a ArP to Haste conversion ratio of 1 ArP to .80345 Haste thus far then.
Does this sound about right to you? I like to know what to be expecting when 4.0 hits?
I assumed the following:
1. You went on the Beta with exactly what Armory shows you wearing now.
2. The Haste stat on your gear did not change at all during the conversion.
3. The ArP you have that is being converted is 580. After subtracting the ArP values of the three items you mentioned above from your current ArP of course.
Let us know if it sounds right or it’s wrong because I missed something.
Interesting…thanks for the update Brian.
O wow 800 passive haste? Will the ArP gems be turned into haste too? And the RS trinket?!?!?!?!
@Kotar it’s converting at a 1 to 1 ratio. On every piece of gear where the arp converts to haste, it converts fully to haste. There’s just the occasional piece where the arp converts to something else (typically gear that is not hunter specific like rings, trinkets, etc).
Actually this is good. Not so much the stat changes, but the base damage changes. It matches with what we saw sofar: hunters will pump out less (non-auto) shots in very heavy movement situations, but each of the shots do more damage.
This matches with my sofar cynical – but now I’m starting to like it – conclusion, that we are becoming ranged rogues. Although I still dislike the loss of the mana-mechanics, in PvP we’ll be now be really ranged rogues in terms we also get their benefits.
Like the rogue is hated for its stun and three slices and you are dead, we’ll now become the 3 shots and its over equivalent. Add Fox and even running around makes us pesky suckers …
Of course in melee, we are now even more vonurable then we were, but that is only fair to the other classes.
A different topic, how much does haste affect focus gen. And How much does haste affect autoshot dps, steady shot and GCD? With so much haste just being trown onto us, the conversion factors must be also higher. Else every hunter in greens is going to be hit capped instantly and will have focus gen’s that are insane.
Oh, and by the way, anybody worried on what gear to collect: don’t.
The blues from quests will likely outdps most of the ICC25 stuff. There are even green items reported that beat most ICC gear already.
I’m keeping all my gear just for fun. Like to see what happens to ArP trinkets and all the tier bonusses. Like the T5 is very usefull now for solo tanking, who knows what other T’s will do for cata.
Perhaps I missed a previous article addressing this, but how will haste help us generate more focus other than allowing for faster Steady/Cobra Shots? Will a soft haste cap of 1.5 secs still exist?
Haste will increase your rate of focus regeneration, in addition to shortening your shots. The soft haste cap will likely end up being 1 sec.
Regarding the 1 to 1 ratio for ArP to Haste, will we still get the 15% baseline Haste?
After reading that it looks like MM hunters will go back to agility builds once Cat goes live as it will be impossible to get enough armour pen to get near the cap .
Any idea what the Attack Power on Death’s Choice gets changed to since Attack Power is going away?
Death’s Choice never ever proc’d Attack Power, it was always Agility.
Don – I’d imagine it stays – Attack Power isn’t going away, just AP on armour itself – I would think that cross-class items like rings, trinkets etc. will still have attack power, as the reason AP was removed from armour was to stop armour items becoming unintentionally cross-class (i.e. fury warriors taking mail, hunters taking leather etc.)
The new “soft-cap” I would imagine now is the amount of haste needed to take the new Aimed Shot down to 1.5 seconds?
No, I suspect the new soft cap will be the haste requried to bring steady to 1 sec (starts as a 2 sec cast, btw, just like now).
Hmmm, sounds like the real winners for gear to keep will be ones that in their current forms have: High Agility, High Int, Armor Pen and Crit. Isn’t that most of our current 264 gear? Proc on Zod’s is sounding like it compounds instead of stacks with our Mastery bonus. Wonder if Zod’s will proc Mastery, LOL.
Guess the next question is what peices of gear will flunk the 4.0 taste test? Rings, cloaks, and neck peices seem most likely to suddenly suck in my books. I pray nothing falls over to the Strength Stat side ><
I hate "Working as intended", GL fellow hunters and remember… DE/Vendor Nothing before 4.0 comes out. No telling what items will be more useful tomorrow than today.
AP simply going away worries me a little. I know that some our of gear have their itemizations sometimes slightly skewed to have more agi, less AP, or a lot of AP and less agi. For an example of this, compare our T10 helm and the Short-sighted helm from Rotface. If AP simply goes away, a lot of high AP gear is going to get the short end of the stick.
Also, will HWT suddenly beat out DBW?? I certainly hope not..
Then again, who really cares right? It’ll all be leveling gear. I do hope that comments that leveling greens will beat out 264 gear are joking, though.
Hey Frostheim, we should instance in beta some time! I’m on Gilneas. My hunter is Threkk and my Paladin is Althen. Hit me up for some good times!
I was seriously hoping Blizzard will make the numbers more real like. In other words that it will get all tuned down. I would love to see for example crit rating 30% max with top gear. Instead of that we will get more crits, as I understood from your topic. Like my 63% crit without buffs was already not more than enough.
Where it will end? With Cata top gear crit rating 80% and next expansion crit rating will be removed as worthless and our damage will be just doubled by base (since else it would be 100% in top gear)?
Way to go Blizz….
Hi!
My arp gems turned into crit gems, not haste. Bug maybe?
@Semris
Ever heard of rating conversions? At lvl 60 you needed 14 crit rating to get 1%. At lvl 80 you need 45.91 crit rating for 1% crit. Why do you think that 2400 agi and 1200 crit will give you 60% crit at lvl 81 or even at 85. I bet that these numbers will grant you approx 25% crit at 81 and under 10% at 85 after having seen stats on items like Elementium poleaxe, lvl85 crafted epic polearm having 341AGI, 228 CRIT and 228 MAS.
The only period your crit % will go up will be when 4.0 comes out, just before Cataclysm itself is launched. At that time your max level will be 80 but your crit rating (and perhaps even agility) will go up.
@gabocs
THis automatical change of gems is weird…
When it was revealed that Mastery gems will be called Fractured, I thought ArP gems would be turned into Mas gems – even though new mastery gems are yellow. This same gem color problem occurs with crit and haste – they are yellow, too. But most of our sockets are red… I mean, i know it is only beta and nothing is final but I would really appreciate the possibility to choose the gems you want your ArP (or AP if you are BM) gems be transformed into
@deepfriedegg
yup 268 crit rating per % at 85 from what I have seen
@Wezmon
Thanks for info. I am not sure if AGI is still going to give us crit% or not. It seems that you are in beta, can you plaese confirm if and how much AGI you need per 1% crit? Thanks
@Jgurl:
exactly. For example lvl78 questing greens from Mount Hyjal will be ilvl272. That means they should be on par with normal ICC10 epics. Lvl81 blue crafted polearm is ilvl316.
BTW, your gear will have to be at least ilvl300 to be valid for new enchants.
I was lucky enough to get an Beta invite but all my ArP and ArP gems turned into crit, all of i, everywhere!! I’m crit central I have a LOT of it! I respecced SV to try it out and I’ve had to stack a TONNE of haste because when I apply serp. sting, exp shot..steady for regen, black arrow.. I can’t use any other shots because all my regened focus is going into reapplying serp. sting! Maybe I’m doing something wrong :/
@Férn, interesting. But it seems about right. Blizzard indicated they want us to have a very limited basic rotation with us to choose carefully usng any surplus focus (from bufs and procs not from basic rotations) for all the rest. For MM and BM it is no different.
Blizzard *wants* us to be permanently on the edge of focus starved. This forces us to be cvery carefull on what shots to choose for what fights.
So it is ‘working as intended”
“Intellect seems to get divided partially into stamina, and partially into crit (or possibly boosting another stat already on your gear if it didn’t have crit)”
Anybody else wish Intellect would get divided into attack power instead of crit? I grabbed the “Careful Aim” Marksman talent to up my attack power. Now I’m guessing that talent is gone or changed. Attack power is still in the game, just not on the gear, so that divide to crit and stamina seems weird to me.
Can’t wait to see how the streamlined talent trees are going to look like…for all classes. Any idea when they’re going to be released in the beta?
uhh…wrong article, heh
@QueenOfBlades
Why would you divide a stat that you are getting rid of into a stat that you are getting rid of }on gear)? You will get a lot of AP from AGI – now it grants 2 AP per 1 AGI.
Careful Aim now increases crit % of Aimed shot on target above or at 90% by 20/40/60% – for big nasty Aimed shot openers from Camouflaged state (increasing damage of 1st shot by 30%)
But this is, of course subject to change…
@Deepfriedegg
The stat is gone “on gear”, but it’s not “gone” completely. I guess I haven’t fully wrapped my head around the overall importance of those stats that are gone from gear, but are still in the game.
I forgot about the change to Careful Aim (good point), that mixed with Camouflage is actually pretty cool.
Frostheim – are you sure your right about the weapon damage. I mentioned this information in a post and somone replied with this. It shows it being about 60 less dps than your info.
http://cata.wowhead.com/item=50034/zods-repeating-longbow
Yes, I am sure. I don’t know about Zods since I don’t use bows, but my heroic stakethrower is 343 dps.
Keep in mind that those values could change as they continue to balance, but I rechecked today and my gun is still unchanged.
Maybe Blizzard finally decided to aknowledge that guns are far superior to bows?
from what i’ve read on the big arpen conversion, it usually turns into crit, but it’ll turn into haste on items which already have crit. however, given the fact that most hunter (and warrior, which is where i’m coming from) gear is crit/arpen in live, it becomes crit/haste for most of that stuff.
@ 2t9 serpent sting bonus:
if i had to guess, they will eventually change the set bonus. they’d previously changed two “dots can now crit” bonuses into 20% damage buffs to those dots, and this was on also outdated gear. when flame shock and rupture got crittified in 3.3.3, they went back and changed the bonuses of 2t8 and 4t8 respectively – in neither case were these sets many people were wearing at the time. if they haven’t given 2t9 hunter the same treatment yet (or 2t9 balance druid or 4t9 resto druid), it’s probably just due to time or oversight, but don’t be surprised if they fix it “Soon” ™.