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 after our auto attack our next few primary sources of damage are all spell based. 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 Cacophony of Blades and Peace of Mind count as spell damage too and our melee gear set probably includes several damage procs which all benefit from spell crit and base spell damage as well. With my gear and typical groups I normally end up being about 60% melee damage (auto attack and CAs) and 40% spell damage (procs, Glacial Assault, Infusion, etc) and you can expect most wardens to be similar with 30-40% of their damage being spell based so this aspect can not be ignored when choosing gear.
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. 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 just 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. I have found that for me combat arts only make up about 15-20% of my outgoing damage which is not very significant versus the amount of total spell damage I do so I prioritize spell crit chance and base spell damage over +combat art damage and base combat art damage.
After melee crit, double attack, DPS mod, and attack speed the most important stat in my opinion would be critical spell chance. You will want to keep this as high as possible for Infusion, Glacial Assault, procs, 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 things like Glacial Assault, Infusion, or other damage procs 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.
I am including damage procs in with the spell based damage area of this write up because most damage procs in this game are considered spells and benefit from all the spell mods we seek. Damage procs are going to be a large part of your outgoing damage if you get for enough of them. There are a lot of procs out there that can do a lot of damage for us. Procs that specifically are worded off 'any 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. The fact that most damage procs are considered spells combos well with the warden hybrid necessity for spell crit and base spell damage so any extra damage procs should be considered when evaluating an item.
To summarize for spell bonuses, we will benefit most from critical spell chance, base spell damage, and critical spell multipliers. We do not gain much (if anything at all) from +spell damage so this should NOT be considered when evaluating gear for DPS. I consider our spell damage to be more important than our combat art damage so when I am evaluating gear for DPS I look at auto attack mods first, then spell damage mods, and finally combat art damage mods.
The last thing to consider for DPS gear are combat art modifications. This includes +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.
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 predominantly spell based and such they should still end up gearing in a hybrid fashion. Lastly, combat arts will end up making up the smallest portion of our outgoing damage on the whole and although +combat art damage and base combat art damage should not be ignored, the more hybrid approach of spell crit and base spell damage will net more overall DPS.
Hi and dps?
