Now, the problem is twofold here. One, Armor Pen does increase your white DPS. It’s not a good stat for an enhancement shaman, oh my no. But if you had to choose between two sets of bracers, with identical stats except bracer B also has armor pen on it, bracer B would grant more DPS than bracer A. When you end up with the avalanche of ArP on mail after Ulduar came out, it becomes quite the effort to avoid the stuff to the point where you’re better off simply accepting that there’s going to be some armor pen on your gear. The second problem is, since we share our gear with a ranged DPS class, we’ll always be forced to seek out those stats that benefit us as caster/melee hybrids on gear for ranged physical DPS.

Cataclysm will make this gear sharing conundrum even more interesting for us shamans. While patch 3.3 promises a mountain of new gear, it will be gear built around the same design philosophy we’ve seen up to now. But Cataclysm promises to upend a lot of current sacred cows with the removal of mana from hunters and the alteration of how stats like armor pen and defense work as well as the inclusion of mastery.

Next week we’ll discuss the caster shaman divide more in depth unless 3.3 drops, in which case, They Who Edit In Shadow will probably want to see some gear lists.

one (or anything else, really), the address as always is . Thanks for listening and enjoy!

overpowering with big heals.

Cataclysm’s endgame is a long time away, but that’s Blizzard’s idea for it right now.