How Will YOU Spend Your 5000 points?

It's no secret that a ton of us mages are going to be running the whole holo-gogs double 2 piece setup. I honestly haven't really determined exactly which 2 pieces you should take from each set if this is your goal, but my initial thoughts are take the new shoulders and legs and use the old chest and gloves. Of course, you can save yourself a Halaa gem and a leg enchant if you do things differently.

The above style is probably really only applicable to mages running on classic style matrices or mages playing AP/frost or AP/fire. WE mages are probably sick of stacking stamina and resilience for which they get zero use; I know I am. Mages running around on 4DPS teams are also likely to pick up the new weapons before set pieces instead of immediately snagging two pieces of the new set.

While there's definitely room for a lot argument on this, the gladiator staff was the stronger mage option last season, but this no longer seems the case. The Endgame was buffed pretty significantly, and the extra damage and resilience from 1h/OH seem to compensate for the few stats points and 42 crit rating on the staff. You might also just be sick of looking at the staff for 3 months, and four more months of the big silly red stick might sound less than appealing.

I think that one thing everyone needs to remember is that our ratings are getting reset so we aren't pulling 1k+ points opening week -- take that into account when planning out your gear path and remember it takes a while to ramp up the point gain. If you drop 5k on the weapon combo, it could be quite a while before you're picking up the set pieces; considering how horrible our set is, I don't see that as a huge problem. ^^

My initial thoughts are come Tuesday I'll be picking up the 1h/OH as I'm not too impressed with the set especially since I play on a 4DPS skill-less zerg team. Then again, that glad wand did get a 13 DPS upgrade...

Seriously, if arena gear were to progress like this every season, in a few seasons that wand would do more damage than scorch reliably...and I'm not kidding. ^^

The other beauty to snagging weapons first is you'll get a few extra weeks to pick up the gems or gold you require to fill out your new arena pieces and star of elunes will return to non-retarded levels. Paying 100-150 gold for gems is cool.

I've actually been working on figuring out if you could use any gear in the game, what would you use and how would you socket it, sort of thing just to see what it would look like. I'll post up a summary tomorrow.