Hardened Elementium Hauberk/Deathplate

According to the latest patch notes, all crafted epic armour pieces will now gain a gemslot if they didn't have one before.

Currently the JP chestplate offers better avoidance than the crafted epic. However, the crafted DPS breastplate has 228 mastery and can be reforged to 91 parry/dodge. I'm wondering if, together with a gem slot, this will now be the best tanking breastplate for us (armour+stamina+mastery).

As a human paladin, I am not at all turned on by the epic crafted breastplate, because of the amount of expertise on it. I get 10 when I seal Truth, and another 3 from my racial, so I don't need much more.

My existing breastplate has 162 dodge and 162 mastery and 2 gem slots. While I could reforge some of the Hauberk's unneeded expertise to mastery, I would still end up with 228 parry and 91 mastery with 1 future gem slot. Since I would prefer to turn dodge/parry into more mastery, not the other way around, it's just not attractive.

It's a pity so much of the itemisation is wasted on expertise.

pretty cool that they'd add a socket, but still the tanking chest is worthless with that expertise, and the dps plate, although better, will not beat out the vendor one. I'd say just save your valor for the epic chest, and buy that as it's a major upgrade to anything. it won't drop from bh, so you'll have to buy it anyway.

Saler wrote:According to the latest patch notes, all crafted epic armour pieces will now gain a gemslot if they didn't have one before.

Are the crafted items under budget at the moment? If not, I suspect the socket will come at the expense of some of the other stats on the piece. Most of the pieces with sockets that I've seen have slightly lower total stats than their unsocketed ilevel-peers.

My guess is that they realize that there wasn't a big enough incentive to make the epics. A lot of the items weren't even upgrades from JP/heroic gear, and the ones who were upgrades wasn't by a lot.

rodos wrote:

Saler wrote:According to the latest patch notes, all crafted epic armour pieces will now gain a gemslot if they didn't have one before.

Are the crafted items under budget at the moment? If not, I suspect the socket will come at the expense of some of the other stats on the piece. Most of the pieces with sockets that I've seen have slightly lower total stats than their unsocketed ilevel-peers.

The crafted items are not under budget.

Hardened Elementium Hauberk has 80 ipoints in stats compared to 2 sockets on http://www.wowhead.com/item=60354, worth 80 ipoints. So yeah, the crafted items will be losing stats.

The tanking chest will be more attractive than it is now if majority of the points are taken from expertise rather than reducing both expertise and parry by 40.

The ret chest gets interesting if it is the crit that gets reduced and retains its high mastery. Should that be the case I would buy the ret chest, reforge and gem for tanking till I got the tier chest then use for OS.

The crafted belt is another one to watch, depending on what they remove for the socket.

They could take the stat budget for two sockets out of strength much like this item: Icebone Hauberk. They could do the same for the crafted tank chest, and the secondary stats wouldn't have to change much (currently, the crafted tank chest only has a combined total of 2 more points than the boe chest I just mentioned. It wouldn't be the best chest to go after by any means, but it would be a heck of a lot nicer than it currently is.

Obviously that's just one way they could do it of course, and they might just stick one socket on it. We just don't know at this point. As Theck said, the belt could potentially end up being a very nice piece indeed.

MMO-champion has datamined the new versions:

MMO-champion wrote:Blacksmithing

• Elementium Deathplate now has 321 Strength (-20) and 208 Mastery Rating (-20). Now has a Yellow Socket (+10 Strength socket bonus)
• Elementium Girdle of Pain now has 233 Strength (-20) and 149 Haste Rating (-20). Now has a Yellow Socket (+10 Strength socket bonus)
• Elementium Gutslicer now requires 4 x Hardened Elementium Bar (Down from 25), Truegold x 5, Chaos Orb x 3 (up from 1).
• Hardened Elementium Girdle now has 233 Strength (-20) and 149 Mastery Rating. (-20). Now has a Blue Socket (+10 Dodge socket bonus)
• Hardened Elementium Hauberk now has 321 Strength (-20) and 208 Parry Rating. (-20). Now has a Blue Socket (+10 Parry socket bonus)
• Light Elementium Belt now has 233 Intellect (-20) and 149 Spirit (-20). Now has a Yellow socket (+10 Intellect socket bonus)
• Light Elementium Chestguard now has 321 Intellect (-20) and 208 Critical strike rating (-20). Now has a Yellow socket (+10 Intellect socket bonus)
• Persuader no longer requires Skin of Shadow to be crafted.

So they reduced the parry and left expertise the same on the epic craftable chest. Which makes it even worse, unusual move unless other tanking classes are really suffering a lack of expertise.

Guess I'll be sticking with my JP one for a while.

Can you find the data for the BS shields? I don't think they had sockets either.

It has made it better, just not as much as we hoped for. Not that you would but sticking a parry/sta gem in it results in -

+10 parry
+30 sta
-20 str

You are trading str for sta and getting a socket bonus.

I just had a look on mmo-champ and wowhead ptr, they haven't picked up any changes to the shields yet.

Not related to the chest pieces, but as good a place as any to discuss craftables!

Thankfully, the belt still seems like the best in slot for ages, right? It looses 20 Mastery for the blue socket. So, you should...

Solid Ocean Sapphire in the Blue socket
Puissant Dream Emerald in a BS meta socket

Which would loose you 20str, but gain 30 stamina and 10 dodge (Socket Bonus), with the mastery loss being offset by the meta?

Chest still sucks i see =(

The DPS craftable looks nice with all that mastery.