Tilo

Now lets talk about the juicy part, gear and stats.

WTB Expertise, Hit and Crit, PST!

No RPG can be serious without stats and the ways to modify them, even Mass Effect 2 has a rudimentary way to improve the character to your own needs. So if a so called "Action RPG" can give the player options to personalize his/her character not using the options we have in WoW is almost sacrilegious.

The most important stat for ret pallies is Strength, plain and simple, but i guess you heard that before you i'm going to give it a twist: If you are the strongest person alive and you try to smash a piñata with a stick blindfolded, no matter how strong you are there is a fairly chance you will miss the piñata and that will end in no candy for you and your friends!

Yes, loot piñata is a valid metaphore for stats study (AMG another fancy word!), since all the bosses we met and will met in this game are at the end loot piñatas. So in order to hit the piñata we'll need more that strength to do it.

If you are not Hit and Expertise capped you have no place in a raid, sounds harsh and even exagerated but that's the truth, being not hit and expertise capped will end in a lower dps output and frustration, and frustration should not happen in a game.

So if you are lacking hit and expertise try to obtain items that increases them, gem sockets are a great oportunity to be filled with hit gems but not with expertise gems; for expertise i recomend vastly to look for it in weapons and rings, since that way you still improve STR and hit via armor.

Crit should be obtained via crit rating and not by agility, since it gives you more bang for your buck this way.

So the priority for stats should be Hit, expertise, STR, crit rating, haste, agi. After you are hit and expertise capped it goes Str, crit chance, haste, agi.

Now there is a catch, if we follow this priority blindly we'll end with lots of red gems in many obscure places all over our gear and that is not optimal. First lets talk about metagems, metagems requirements and socket bonuses.

The best metagem is the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond and not because of the agility (which gives almost the same amount of crit chance compared to the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond) but because of the requirements of gems. Stats wise 2 blue gems will give us less stats than 1 yellow and 1 blue, and if we count that a little prismatic gem can fulfill the gem requirements that we need the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond becomes awesome. Get always one for your helmets and one Nightmare gem to fill the gem requirements.

Socket bonuses tend to be hit or miss, and because of that we need to optimize them. So the rule of thumb is if the socket bonus gives 4 or more strength then is a good idea to get the right color of gems, but only if it doesn't need a blue gem. Lets say that the socket bonus is +8 str and needs 2 red gems, ok that will be heavenly you inmediatly need to fill those with str gems, but lets say that i has a the same bonus but with one red and one yellow, here the best option will be fill the yellow socket with a juicy orange gem that gives str and crit (or str and hit if you are below the cap). But if we have the same +8 str bonus with a blue socket, then we'll fill that poor blue socket with a red gem unless we don't have a prismatic gem already in use.

Rawr and other tools help a lot with this kind of situations, but at the end those are tools and the one who needs to do the job are us, so use this guidelines when in doubt.

Positioning, hit area and more exceptions to the FCFS.

Ok we have discussed plenty of topics now lets get back to the most important part of all: the fights.

Since we are not tanks and our expertise cap is called the softcap we should not attack enemys from the front, obvious thing but in practice when a boss is repositioned there is a good chance of ending in front of them.

A good technique is follow the pets, since the pets have their behaviour controlled by a simple programatic choice they will always attack from behind, and since we are extremely filled with melee and the effects of abilities can be very flashy you could end disoriented. Lolwuf and Leon will help you.

Another problem we have is melee range, strangely a few of our abilities have an extremely low range, more precisely CS has a very low range of attack, so we need to be very close to the target in order to hit with CS, be aware of this always since we tend to start the fights not with CS but with judge, sure judge will hit but will hit CS? That's the question you need to answer every time the boss is moved.

Cons is another problem, since is not targetable as Death and Decay (nerf dks!) we need to be aware if the boss is going to be where we cast Cons, so lets say if we stick enterely to the FCFS, we use cons and pum! the boss moves then a good chunk of our mana and dps will go thru the drain. Be pragmatical, not dogmatical when you use your abilities.

Trash in ICC is awesome, lots and lots of undead mobs waiting for our lightly spells to hit them, but that doesn't mean they will die just because of our heavenly presence, we need to hit them hard and often. As i mentioned our seals can apply different effects to our judgement spell, in the case of trash (any trash) Seal of Command is superior because of it effect of cleave with every melee attack (except DS). Try to always position yourself where you can hit the more mobs with DS and Cons, so when SoC procs also hit the most mobs as possible. Be aware that if you are using the glyph of Seal of Vengeance (to improve you expertise) you'll have less expertise with SoC, so try to position yourself behind the mobs always!

Avenging Wrath is our best cooldown so it use can lead to awesome dps or to crappy dps, depending of the fight you'll use it as much as posibble or during certain times, be aware of this and of the bloodlust calls since it can be the difference between your best fight or your average encounter. Combined with speed potions is lethal, so bloodlust + AW + speed pot = epic win.

Wow! that was a long writting, i hope it can help you to improve your dps and your game. As always any question or topic not discussed here you can contact me via PM, comments below or tell in game. See ya!