Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Warlords of Draenor Gem Changes

It is no secret that there are going to be big changes to gems come WoD. They announced reduced slots as well as armor that changes with your spec, leaving a lot of questions up in the air. In the past couple of days, one of WoW's Game Designers, @Celestalon has been tweeting up a storm on twitter about the gem changes. So here's what he had to say:



So there are no longer Primary stats on gems. Guess that answers the question of gear swapping, even for tanks. Something to do with the space-time continuum I suppose. A lot of WoW news outlets are covering this as a brand new development, but all of this was actually mentioned previously in this blog post by Crithto about a month ago. Honestly I had not seen that post either, and only noticed when the blues tweeted about it, and I did some research, and that's why I'm covering it now. So, for now at least, from the tweets and the blog post we only know the following stats will be on gems:

  1. Critical Strike
  2. Mastery
  3. Haste
  4. Spirit
  5. Bonus Armor
  6. ?PvP Power - this one is going to be a secondary stat on gear, but no specifications whether or not it'll be on gems.
That's it. There are other secondary stats that are being considered for WoD, but not as gems (supposedly to reduce confusion, but I don't think that's the case) they are: Readiness, Amplify, and Multi-strike. I'm sure that will make everything more "logical" to people and "clear up" the confusion of hit, parry, and dodge. I digress.
PvE Cuts
I'm going to look at the theoretical possible cuts for these gems. Keep in mind that all of 1-3 will be considered specialization wide, used by DPS, Tanks, and Healers alike. Spirit will only benefit healers, Bonus Armor only tanks. For reference, armor gem slots will require you to match the color, but I'm going to assume that green/purple/orange will still exist.

Therefore, there are only 10 different PvE possible Combination gems (think green/purple/orange), plus 5 different pure gems currently. Now this is if they stick with the old system, and does not take into account the current color system which would limit it down to less possibilities.  I don't know if they will stick with the current color scheme but currently we have this:

Image from Wowpedia
If Blizzard keeps this system, which may prove pretty hard to do, I'd imagine they'd want all the possible combos between the 3 main secondary stats the go cross-specialization, so Crit, Mastery, and Haste all get their own primary color (one of each in red/yellow/blue). The only thing left to possibly place is Spirit and Bonus Armor, which would mean that a gem between either of those stats and one of the 3 primaries would be impossible, which provides troublesome given that they're going to theoretically be used in each of those healing and tanking) specializations now.

Anyway just some rampant speculation for you on this Eve of the New Year. Check out that article I linked above by Crithto, it's a really great read on understanding the gearing changes in MoP. Hope you all enjoy your holiday, and I'll see you in 2014! Remember, no matter how much gold you make on Wednesday, it'll be the most gold you've made all year!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

3 comments:

  1. IMO -
    blue will be armor, spirit, stam, pvp power if they keep it, that kind of thing
    yellow will be the current mastery, crit, haste, pvp power if they keep it
    and the red gems will have the new stats like Amplify, ect.
    and keeping with the current system of cross colors you'd have stuff like amplify / mastery for an orange.
    I also think that we'll probably see something similar to diablo where a JC basically builds a gem into a more potent gem by combining multiple lower quality gems together; but this is just a theory.

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  2. Thanks for writing this up. It will be interesting to see where they land on gems in Warlords.

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