(Click here for gear link)
INTRODUCTION
Hi everyone. First off, I apologize for the incoming massive wall of text. Maybe I can spruce it up with pictures eventually so its not as hard on the eyes. Anyways though enough chit chat lets get down to business.
This has been a long work in progress and will continue to be a work in progress as we go along and things change in the game and new loot is added with new effects. One of the problems that TSO presented to me in the ways of updating the gear thread was the sheer quantity of gear and the number of pieces that were so minutely close in stats. It would be impossible for me to tell you exactly what piece of gear is best for YOU because its completely subject to your own character and what your stats already are. I still want to keep a list of gear, but at the moment there is just too much out there for me to come up with anything that resembles a list. The enormity of the task that lies ahead of me is daunting and will take a lot of time. I am playing around with restructuring the list in a different way since gear is no longer as cut and dry on what is the best and what not. Hopefully I will come up with an easily implemented solution soon so you can all come back here once again to help you find what gear you want and what zones it comes from. At the moment though I just cant come up with a new list that wont take me weeks of compiling to do. This post was originally designed to replace the old gear thread but as I began to write it I realized it could also accomplish much more so that is why it is now its own thread instead of being tied to the gear thread. I want to help you all understand why gear is good for us and what you should look for so you can make your own gear decisions instead of just taking what I put on a list whole sale. I will explain the various procs, stats, and mods that can be obtained on gear and put them into perspective from a warden.
HEALING GEAR
The first thing to understand about choosing your gear is that what you choose is always relative to all the other gear you are wearing. When looking at a piece of new loot you have to see what it offers and then look at what you already have to determine whether you need more of a certain stat. Understanding this is key to putting together a combination of gear that best maximizes your character for the gear that is available to you.
One thing that is important to realize about gear is that at this point in the game in tier 8 base statistics mean nothing to us as a healer. Please take careful note that when I say base statistics I am talking about statistics on an item that are in green text, not the statistics that are in blue text (those are discussed below). The only exception to this rule about green text base statistics are hit points. So out of all the base statistics on an item the only things that mean anything to us are stamina and hit points. Everything else including strength, agility, intelligence, wisdom, maximum power, and resists mean nothing to us. At one point in time maximum power was a statistic we cared about as healers but then our epic weapon Bite of the Wolf came to us in the last expansion and since then power has become an obsolete statistic for us as a warden. Resists are statistics that should not be completely neglected but generally aren't worth gearing specifically for because you can obtain suitable resists with average gear. What is important though is to understand that base statistics on an item should never be used as a determining factor for what to wear. The only exception to this would be is if two pieces are extremely close but one has much more hit points. An example would be a hat with 2 heal crit, +25 heals, and 300 hit points against a hat with 2 heal crit, +30 heals, and 50 hit points. The choice in that situation would clearly be the hat with more hit points.
Keeping the previous passage in mind I will move on to talk about things we should actually look for on our gear. To start, when looking at gear the most important overall stat to maintain and attempt to max is in my opinion critical heal chance. Critical heal chance is basically that, a chance to cast a critical heal. A standard critical heal is a 30% base increase to the value of the healing spell cast. There are AAs and even gear that can increase the critical heal amount even more so critical heal chance is big. 65% critical heal chance would be what I consider to be a minimum. Minimum is not optimal however. I shoot for 100% heal crit or better in whatever group I am in. Once you reach the minimum of 65% self buffed you can move on to broadening your gear selection to include other bonuses but obtaining the proper amount of heal crit is first and foremost in getting geared up. Heal crit is especially important to us as a warden because of how it combos with our epic weapon. Our epic weapon returns to us power 50% of the time we cast a critical heal. That is primarily why I say 65% because that is about the minimum heal crit chance that will guarantee infinite power even through heavy power drain fights. Heal crit chance is also increasingly important because of the new TSO AAs. Almost every healing AA we have includes some type of critical heal multiplier aka heal crit bonus which means that our critical heals will critical for even more. What this does essentially is make the difference between a crit heal and a non crit heal even larger so in order to get the truly big numbers and get the most out of our new AAs we need to crit every heal we can. Aiming to max your heal crit is a great way to go gear wise for raw healing applications. It is important to note that group setup can add to your critical heal chance by as much as 24%. If you are typically grouped with a bard who is spec for Dont Kill The Messenger you will gain 7.5% heal crit chance and if you are grouped with a chanter who is spec for Empathy you will gain 16% heal crit chance. Knowing your usual group and what they offer buff wise is important to being able to choose gear to maximize your performance.
After heal crit chance the next most important stat for us to gear for is +healing amount. +Healing amount is a raw fixed amount increase to the initial tick of every one of our healing spells. It is especially great for us because we are spam casters and the amount front loads so we get the full benefit of the +heal amount on the tick that matters the most, the first tick. Unlike heal crit chance however the cap on +healing amount is a lot more vague and difficult to understand but understanding it is important to making proper gear choices. Here is how the +heal cap works.
50% of the spell's total healing value for single target is the cap.
EXAMPLE
Sylvan Bloom M1 heals for with no +healing & no TSO AAs:
589-720 and 98-120 six times
Total healed on the low end: 1177
Total healed on the high end: 1440
On the low end: 1177/2=588.5
589 being the amount of +heal gear you would need to cap it and the amount you would net.
On the high end: 1440/2=720
720 being the amount of +heal gear you would need to cap it and the amount you would net.
So on the absolutely lowest of the low end on our weakest healing spell we cap at +589 heals. That is what I consider to be the minimum value for +heals. Once you reach the minimum 65% heal crit and +589 heals you can broaden your gear selection to include other bonuses or procs. Once again however, the minimum is not optimal. It is important to understand that base healing increases and some spell specific focus effects will increase the +heals caps on your spells. So using our example spell Sylvan Bloom with TSO AAs we can obtain 20% base healing (10% from Prayer of Healing and 10% from Nature's Aura) and 20% extra critical heal amount (15% from Prayer of Healing and 5% from Nature's Aura).
EXAMPLE
Sylvan Bloom M1 heals for with no +healing and full TSO AAs:
707-864 and 118-144 six times
Total healed on the low end: 1445
Total healed on the high end: 1728
So on our weakest heal with standard TSO AAs you would need +864 heals to completely cap the spell. This isn't even bringing in extra base healing or focus effects on gear or buffs you may have that can add to this cap even more. As you can see, for wardens especially, we will benefit from +heals up to very high values. The question is where do you draw the line on +heals. For me I don't really, but I will look at other more unique effects and procs and prioritize them higher than +heal. Why? Because +heals is easy to get. It is on tons of gear as side effects. Generally if you gear as a healer you will be gearing +heals in the process. It is important to understand how +heals works for us though so you can decide whether 2 crit is worth +50 heals for you or not.
Heal crit bonus is a new statistic introduced with TSO. There are very few pieces of gear that actually have heal crit bonus and most of them are only obtained from high end raiding, however most of our TSO healing AAs include heal crit bonus so it is worth understanding where it fits in the chain of calculations. Heal crit bonus is not to be confused with heal crit chance. They are two totally different effects. What heal crit bonus does is add extra critical amount when you crit. The default player critical multiplier is 1.3, meaning that when you crit you gain a 30% increase to the value. Critical heal bonus increases this multiplier for our healing spell crits. A piece of gear with 5 heal crit bonus will change your critical heal multiplier to 1.35. Lets take our example spell Sylvan Bloom. With TSO AAs we gain an 20% extra critical heal amount (15% from Prayer of Healing and 5% from Nature's Aura) and with our TSO fabled 6 set bonus we gain 10 heal crit bonus. This will change the critical multiplier on the spell from 1.3 to 1.6 meaning that when you crit this spell you gain a 60% increase to the value of the spell. Furthermore, this increase is calculated at the end so it multiplies not only the original spell value, but also the modified base heal value, and any +heal amount you have. Gear with heal crit bonus is extremely rare but should be valued most highly if you come accross any.
After heal crit bonus, the next most powerful effect you can get on a piece of gear is base healing. Base healing increases have been around for a while in the form of proc items but you can now find base healing as static effects on some gear (most notably TSO void shard set shoulders). For the reasons outlined earlier in the section over +heal amount base heal increases are incredibly good for us because they up our caps on everything. Base healing increases are also calculated before a crit so combined with high crit base healing increases become even more powerful. The number of items that offer base healing increases are limited and very few so for this reason and all the others mentioned here I value base healing next to heal crit bonus more than any other stat or proc that you can find on gear. If there is a piece of gear with base healing increase or a base healing increase proc you should be wearing it or you should be trying to farm it. The combination of high base heal amount, high +heal, high critical heal chance, and lots of extra heal crit bonus will amount to numbers on your heals that you would never even imagine you could see land. Since base heal is calculated at the bottom of all those mods it should be valued highly.
Critical mitigation is a new statistic in TSO but it is very important as a raiding healer. As a healer it is important to be able to stay alive in order to keep healing. TSO reintroduced the critical attack mechanic to the raid mobs in TSO (and even a few heroic mobs). In order to survive some of the devastating AOE crits in higher end TSO raiding critical mitigation is required to dampen the damage of the mobs crit attacks. It is for this survivability reason that critical mitigation is vital as a new stat to raiding wardens and should be valued highly on any piece of gear that it is on.
So that is pretty much gearing a warden in a nutshell. These are all your basic building blocks as a healing warden. Critical mitigation is required on the harder mobs to stay alive as a raiding warden. Heal crit bonus and base healing are the most important and the best effects / mods you can get on gear. After that, heal crit chance, +heal amount, and hit points are the three primary stats you should seek to improve in that order. Once you reach the minimums of 65% heal crit chance and +589 heal amount you can start to gear differently and swap in other gear with different effects or procs but you should never drop below the minimums and you should try to keep the primary stats as high as possible at all times in all healing gear sets.
In following sections I will discuss other effects and procs that can be beneficial to us as a warden but you should keep in mind that these effects should only be considered over the primary stats once the minimum values are reached and even then in most cases the primary stats are still best to focus on.
One of the best effects for us to have as spam casters is spell reuse. It is a pretty common effect. Spell reuse makes our spells refresh quicker. For healers anything that offers reuse on all spells or beneficial spells would be what we look for in the item description. Reuse reduction on hostile spells will not be helpful to us in healing applications. It is true that without any reuse it is possible to maintain a hot stack at all times, but reuse (especially large amounts of it) is unbelievably good for us as wardens even still. The ability to recast our spells with the big +heal boosted front loaded ticks over and over as well as spread many hots out across many targets simultaneously will drastically improve your performance as a healing warden so any amount of spell reuse for our heal spells should be considered a very nice bonus. Casting speed is another bonus that is common on a lot of healer gear but unfortunately for us it is not very effective. Most of our spells cast so fast naturally that casting speed bonuses do us very little good. It is because of this that casting speed bonuses should not be valued highly as a warden when making gear selections.
There are a ton of different healing based item procs. Some of them are more common and then there are some that are unique. When evaluating a piece with a proc you have to ask yourself four questions. What will it do for my healing? What will it do for my tank? What will it do for my group? Does it have good primary stats (heal crit chance, +heal, hit points)? These are the things you want your your proc items to have as a healer and the way you should evaluate them.
One of the most common healing procs is Overloaded Heal. Overloaded Heal is a proc that adds a chance to cast a small group heal on every heal you cast. This effect used to be extremely powerful because of a broken proc mechanic that allowed it to trigger as many as 6 times per one group heal, but the mechanic has been changed and it now only checks the proc once per group heal. There are several variants of this proc including Lesser Overloaded Heal, Overloaded Heal, and Empowered Heal. Empowered Heal is the most powerful in this family of procs and heals for the most. It is a sizable proc and will make up a noticeable portion of your outgoing heals. Since the change however none of these procs are worth wearing for the proc alone. If the item has high primary stats (hit points, +heal, crit heal chance) then the proc on the piece could be the difference in wearing it or not. An example could be a piece with 4 crit and +50 heals versus a piece with 3 crit, +30 heals, and Overloaded Heal proc. I would probably choose the piece with Overloaded Heal in that situation. A twist on the Overload Heal proc that you will see on many healer items is called Overflow. Overflow is a group heal proc like Overloaded Heal but rather than a proc on healing spells Overflow will proc on hostile spells. For this reason is is not a very good healing proc because wardens do not cast many hostile spells (even when we're doing dps we're better off with a proc off melee attacks). For a warden I would never value Overflow as a useful proc on an item. There is still yet another spin on the group heal proc called Healing Wave. Healing Wave works much like Overflow in that it is a group heal that triggers off hostile actions but rather than being a hostile spell based proc like Overflow Healing Wave is a melee based proc. Healing Wave compliments the warden AA Natural Boon very nicely and is a good healing proc to wear if you are capable of a lot of melee.
A proc similar to Overloaded Heal and arguably more effective since the changes to Overloaded Heal is the Shelter proc. Other variants of Shelter include Lesser Shelter and Runic Cover. This proc adds a chance to cast a small ward on the target of whoever you are healing. When you cast group heals it checks the proc once individually for each person. This family of procs is slightly more powerful than the Overloaded Heal family and is a bit more useful overall for wardens because we have no wards and getting them with a proc is about the best we can get at the moment. Runic Cover is by far the best and most powerful in this family of procs. As with Overloaded Heal these items are not worth wearing for the proc alone and you should only consider them if they are on items with good primary stats.
There are several procs that are power related. One of the best power related procs for a warden to wear is Mana Leak. Mana Leak is a chance on every heal to take power from you the warden and transfer it to the target of your heal. You would think that losing extra power on heals is a bad thing but with the warden epic we have infinite power anyways so Mana Leak is the perfect way to literally share it with the group. Another good power related proc that will return power to your group is Pond Wash. Pond Wash is a chance on any spell cast (heals, nukes, buffs, everything) to give your group a small amount of power. Replenishing Heal is yet another power relating healing proc common on many items. It is a chance to place a small power over time effect on the target of your heals. It is far less effective than Mana Leak and Pond Wash but it is still way to return power to your group / others. With the warden epic and enough Mana Leak along with Pond Wash and Replenishing Heal you can fill in as a pretty solid power regen for a group. Another common power related proc but not as useful to warden is Manawell. Manawell is a chance to give the warden power on every heal cast, but our epic alone is enough power regen so Manawell is overkill for us.
There are numerous unique item procs in game and these are worth talking about because the unique procs are often times the best but I cant give them all their own special section because there are so many of them. The item procs that increase your tanks mitigation or avoidance are especially high value. The effects that buff your tank are hardest to judge but they are probably the most effective items in game when it comes to dealing with the hardest content. Other item procs worth considering are procs or effects that buff your group. A good example of this would be the wrist item from Veksar that increases your group's spell and combat art damage. Items with effects that give our class utility where there was otherwise none are highly desired and in some cases can outweigh a piece with good primary stats. It is in this area of unique procs where the largest discrepancy and disagreements between what is best and when it is best ocurrs. Some unique procs are more group specific. If you are never healing a tank on raid then the items that buff tank type stats will do you no good and you are probably better off with items that proc power and damage increase for your group.
That about covers all the major effects, stats, and procs that you see on healing gear. I value heal crit bonus, base heal increase, heal crit chance, +heals, and hit points most in that order. The other item procs and effects have to be weighed in on a case by case basis and sometimes only make the gear cut because they are on a piece that has high primary stats. Its up to you to make the decisions for yourselves with the countless amount of gear out there because what is best for you is no longer true for everybody.
DPS GEAR
I am writing the DPS gear section under the assumption that pure caster warden DPS specs are no longer viable. Given the overwhelming majority of melee oriented damage AAs it is pretty silly to continue to cling to this mage type set up of the past. It used to work, but there are just too many new melee AAs to ignore the higher melee damage potential.
As with healing gear, it is important to understand when choosing your DPS gear that your choice should always be relative to what you are already wearing. You always have to take into consideration your other gear, your AAs, and your typical group buffs when choosing gear so that you can maximize and gain the most from your setup. Too much of something is never good and when you reach that point you can always gear towards another mod you are lower on.
Before I get into the types of mods and stats we look for on gear I need to explain exactly how a warden with full AAs gets the DPS that they do. The majority of our damage output comes from our auto attack. We get a lot of AAs that directly affect auto attack damage. We get 75% melee crit and can achieve 85% double attack from AA alone. We also get two different AA self buffs that we can stack together that have a modifier called Weapon Damage Bonus. Weapon Damage Bonus modifies our base auto attack damage. To top all of this off we get an extra 10% critical melee multiplier on our DPS stance which is basically another 10% base auto attack damage when we are at 100% melee crit rates. All this combined makes our auto attack easily 40% or more or our damage. So our auto attack is primarily what makes us melee DPS but strangely enough we can not completely rid ourselves of some of the spell mods. Why? Because when gearing out for DPS you will max the mods you need for autoattack relatively quickly and that leaves only one route left to go for DPS increases, spell damage. Infusion, Glacial Assault, and Wrath of Nature are all large portions of our DPS and are all affected by spell modifications such as spell crit and base spell damage. It is important to understand our class is still a hybrid for damage purposes. Critical spell chance and base spell damage are still important to us because of things like Glacial Assault which is a cold damage proc on our DPS stance and Infusion which we are all still familiar with from the past. Group / raid temps like Precision of the Maestro and Peace of Mind count as spell damage too. Anaylzing your parse break downs is a good way to determine how much spell crit and spell bonuses has a play in your overall dps.
Now that you understand how we deal DPS you have to fully understand our most important source of damage which is auto attack. Your weapon is probably the most important piece of equipment you have for DPS. Two handed weapons are almost always the best options for our DPS. This is because we can not dual wield and we have no AAs specifically for one handed and buckler DPS enhancement. This means that ultimately there is no combination of one hander and buckler or offhand symbol that can ever come close to the damage potential of a good 2 hander. The things you want to look at primarily on your weapon are its delay and its damage spread. I found generally that weapons that have 4-5 second delay are best for us as wardens. With the typical amount of haste I have I find that that a 4-5s delay ends up working perfect with my casting order and CA rotation. What you want is enough delay to get off your casts in between your auto attacks without delaying the next auto attack and without any inactive downtime. I find with my 5s delay weapon I end up normally hasted to about 2 or 3s which is perfect for most of our casts. As far as the weapon spread goes, you want a to find a weapon with the highest high end and lowest low end you can. This is because of the way player crit mechanics are worked. To explain, when you critical an auto attack the game takes whatever you rolled for your auto attack and multiplies it by your critical melee multiplier (which is by default game mechanics 1.3 however it can be raised to 1.4 with the Glacial Assault AA). If the critical attack value the game ends up with is less than the maximum hit of your weapon, the hit is automatically adjusted to your max weapon hit + 1. This ends up giving you the big hits much more often and overall more DPS. Choosing your weapon is a difficult choice and is one that always has to be backed and verified through testing and parses. Which weapon is best can depend on a lot of things like your group setup or your other gear. It is hard to tell which weapon will parse best for you but as a good starting point for a level 80 warden there is the Thex Mallet ( \aITEM -1299561169 1352188948:Thex Mallet\/a ) -
The Book of Thex Heritage Quest. I consider this to be in the top 4 best weapons that I have seen in game for melee wardens so using this as a judge for weapons would be a good starting point.
Choosing your the rest of your DPS gear is all about balance. You will want to choose gear that keeps your melee crit and double attack at the caps but at the same time keeps strength, intelligence, DPS mod, attack speed, critical spell chance, base spell damage, and base combat art damage as high as possible. I know it all sounds like a little much so let me try to begin with where you should start building from and then move on to mods that are less important.
The first things to cover are basic item statistics. As with healing gear, basic item statistics should never be used as a determining factor for DPS gear. In fact, the only two statistics that can even affect our DPS are strength and intelligence. Strength will affect our auto attack and combat art damage and intelligence will affect our spell damage. The thing about strength and intelligence is we will find it on almost every piece of DPS gear there is so it is easy to get and common on most pieces. These two statistics should not be ignored but should not be focused on either. Aside from strength and intelligence though none of the base statistis matter. In a DPS gear set things like hit points, maximum power, and resists are meaningless to us from a DPS perspective so should never be used as a determining factor. Most of our DPS gear choices will be based on what the item offers us in blue stats and procs.
So to move on to actually choosing our DPS gear, as stated earlier our auto attack is our primary source of damage. Mods that affect auto attack should take priority in gear selection so first and foremost in getting your DPS gear going is getting your melee crit and double attack to the appropriate caps. You will need 100% double attack and around 105-110% melee crit. You need a little more than 100% melee crit because your crit chance is based upon the mob's level and most mobs will be yellow or orange to you so slightly higher than 100% is required to maintain a true 100% crit rate. You will find that reaching these values with group buffs is pretty easy because our AAs take us pretty high, but solo may require a bit more melee oriented and less spell oriented gear. For this reason I have a variety of gear for varying group and play setups so that I can always be right at the melee crit and double attack caps instead of way over because that is non optimal.
The other two mods we can get on gear that affect our auto attack are attack speed and DPS. It is my personal opinion that for us DPS is the more important of the two because it makes us hit harder and combined with Weapon Damage Bonus we can get some incredible auto attacks. The goal is however to get around 100-120 haste AND DPS. We can benefit over this number but the gains we will see will diminish so it is not really worth it over 120 or so on either stat. Attack speed and DPS are the hardest things for us to raise solo because there is just not that much gear out there for us with those mods and we have zero AAs to help us, but in raid and in group it is very easy to get both haste and DPS to the appropriate values because both are commonly buffed. It is recommended in every gear set to always include one haste item. Haste is an item effect that affects our attack speed but can not stack so only one haste item is ever required. Outside of haste there are items that have +attack speed which is an attack speed modification which will stack and add to your haste item and other group buffs. DPS is much harder for us to raise as a static statistic but there is much more gear available that procs large amounts of DPS so you can normally balance the lack of static DPS with procs. Basically though, both attack speed and DPS mods are hard for us to raise solo so how much you need and how much you should wear is more group / raid dependent because when you are solo you will never have enough of these stats. This just another example why carrying a variety of DPS gear types is suggested because you don't always know what buffs you are going to have and it is always good to be able to maximize in any group or raid make.
After we get out of the things that affect our auto attack realm we get into a much more ambiguous area of things where what is best for some may not be best for you. Outside of auto attack we basically have combat arts, procs, and spells that do our damage. It really can depend more on your gear set and how many procs you have or how many AAs you have placed into enhancing your combat arts. Since GU52 I have found that combat arts make up a much larger percentage of my outgoing damage than my procs do now and for this reason is important to begin to try to refocus your gear more on combat art increases and slightly less on spell damage increases.
Some new areas to focus on for DPS gear post GU52 are combat art modifications. These include +combat art damage and base combat art damage. Both stats basically serve to accomplish the same goal. They both make our combat arts hit harder. The caps for +combat art damage are figured in the same was as the caps for +heal amount (which is 50% of the total damage on single target combat arts). As with +heal and base heal mods, base combat art damage will up the cap on your +combat art damage amounts so the combination of high base combat art damage and high +combat art damage will amount to crit hits on your CAs that are well beyond what the tooltip will read.
The most important spell based statistic to focus on would be critical spell chance. You will want to keep this as high as possible for Infusion, Glacial Assault, and any spells you may still cast (mostly just Wrath of Nature for me). It is worth noting here that there is a lot of gear out there that has both melee crit / double attack and spell crit. These pieces of gear are of especially high value. Anything that has something that affects both our auto attack damage and spell damage should be valued highly as there are not many pieces that provide this sort of hybrid bonus to us. These sort of items allow us to spread the mods out on our gear a bit more and gives more room for optimization.
The other spell based mod that does us a great deal of benefit is base spell damage. +Spell damage will not affect AA type spell damage procs like Glacial Assault and Infusion however base spell damage does. There are not many items that include base spell damage so they should be valued highly when you find them. Another mod similar to base spell damage worth noting here is spell crit bonus. It works similar to heal crit bonus and melee crit bonus in that it will increase the damage dealt by your critical spell attacks. This is basically like base spell damage when you have high enough spell crit so should be kept in mind when you see a piece that has it.
The last thing to look at are direct damage procs. Damage procs are going to be a large part of your outgoing damage if you get enough of them. They no longer add significantly to our DPS as individual procs but spread 5-10 damage procs out accross your gear set and you are still going to gain a significant DPS increase. Procs that specifically are worded off 'any combat or spell attack' are most beneficial to us because they check off both melee attacks and spell attacks however anything that procs off melee attacks should be considered and parsed appropriately to make a decision.
Since GU52 and the changes to game \ proc mechanics spell based damage and proc damage are no longer at the top of my damage break downs. Combat arts will now make up a significantly higher portion of your outgoing damage so evaluating gear for DPS I look at auto attack mods first, then combat art mods, and then spell damage mods. The changes overall wont change your gear selection for DPS much but will lower your DPS on the whole a lot.
To wrap up, I basically typed all this drawn out information to say this -
Auto attack is number one for our damage. Anything that directly affects or enhances our auto attack should be considered priority in gear selection. After auto attack the majority of wardens will find the rest of the damage we deal is a mix of spell based damage AA procs and combat arts so they should still end up gearing in a hybrid fashion. Lastly, since GU52 combat arts will end up making up a larger portion of our outgoing damage on the whole and previous gear chocies where +combat art damage and base combat art damage are priortized low should be rethought. Still though, a more hybrid approach to gear selection including spell crit and base spell damage will net more overall DPS.
Warden Gear - What to look for and how to decide what is best.
