3.3 General Gearing Guidelines

I don't like telling people what to do, so take this post as you will. This is the general approach to gear in 3.3 that I will be using with the logic behind it. I still don't believe in Flash of Light builds as viable in hard content. Normal mode encounters and everything else you can pretty much roll your face on the keyboard and get things done. I'm not saying you can't gem full on spellpower and be a flash guy, but your longevity is going to take a hit in terms of the raw power heals you can produce for extended periods of time. I don't buy the excuse of "well, the other healers just aren't doing their job" when your raid fails if you go FOL spec. That means YOU aren't doing your job.

The armory has been updated with a lot of the 277 ilvl hardmode loot in the past days. There are a LOT of gearing options for us to the tune of 4 ilvl277 items per slot, all itemized differently. The main site has those options listed on each slot's individual page.

Rant aside, here's what I'm going to do in 3.3:

1. Always stay above 675 haste rating, the soft cap in raids
Haste above the soft cap is not wasted using holy light. Any time you use flash, however, you'll get little use out of additional haste. The more haste, the better. If you sub out haste, just make sure you're at or above the magic number and you're pretty much golden.

2. Keep stacking intellect
The BIS gear in 3.3 can put you around 41,000 unbuffed mana. If you're a HL power user, you're probably going to use it all during ICC hardmode. When choosing an item, when do you drop some intellect? That's personal preference, but if it's around 200 or above mana it takes quite a bit of spellpower/haste/crit to make it worth it to me, on the magnitutde of about 20+ spellpower for an item.

3. Spellpower comes with gear
Don't sweat spellpower. It comes with more gear, though not at the high rate that SP gemmers obtain.

4. Haste/MP5/SP items are king
These are the best itemized pieces. Crit has long since lost its crown of best regenerative stat for us. This means you'll be dabbling into mail quite a bit since Blizzard itemizes shamans that way moreso than us. Don't believe mp5 is that good? Try healing without replenishment, which provides 400mp5 with a 40,000 mana pool. You'll be struggling in normal 10 mans with mana. If you can maintain around 300mp5 with gear you're going to be in a very good place. Once you reach the haste soft cap it's generally ok to start using sp/crit/mp5 pieces.