Hit, ArP, Square Peg Meets Round Hole

We’re working towards an Armor Pen. build. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer. When we get new gear we usually have a couple of options, we can put it in the bank and wait until we have all the supporting pieces (where’s the fun in that?), or we can equip them and try to make them work with our current setup.

Last night we were fortunate to get both Distant Land and the Nerub’ar Stalker’s Cord. They are replacing Quel’delar, Ferocity of the Scorned and Linked Scourge Vertebrae respectively.

The staff has no hit and no ArP. Quel’delar has no hit but does have +91 ArP. The belt we’re replacing has no ArP, but does have +40 hit. Our new belt has no hit but does have +63 ArP. Great googly moogly!

The net affect of equipping these items is a loss of +28 ArP and a loss of +40 hit. The lovely female dwarf told us that despite these losses, she really liked our staff 😉 (She dug the belt too).

At this point we’re not gemming for ArP, so reaching the ArP cap isn’t a priority. We always want to be hit capped though. With the old items we were five points above the cap and that’s with three points in Focused Aim, and +32 hit from enchants.

As much as we love our space goat allies, we really don’t feel like following them around ICC all night for their hit buff. That leaves gems as our next option. Now as long as we see our dps going up, gemming for hit is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. When we get the rest of our gear and decide to gem ArP, then gemming for hit won’t be a good option. This is mainly because there are no ArP enchants, so gems and gear remain our best sources for that stat.

Eventually we’ll dig ourselves out this mess, but until we get our four pieces of 264 T10 we may be forced to use more hit gems, or just bank items until we have our set. Salvation will come in the form of our T10 gloves. So if you’ll excuse us, we need to go have a chat with Toravon the Ice Watcher.

P.S. – When we started our gear planning we were curious to see if there were any items with both hit and ArP.  Here’s a link to what we found on wowhead.com.

We found this list to be pretty underwhelming, and none of the items were things that we’d want for our pseudo “BiS” set. Oh and before you ask, we’re not including ICC heroic items in any of our plans until we’ve actually killed the Lich King.