When do I want to gem for secondary stats?

[Guest]

I'm seeing Method's warlocks and our beloved Zagam gemming fractured/sensei/artful (mastery) gems. My warlock's item level is at 521 atm, have 2 of the t15 trinkets (Breath of the Hydra and Wushoolay's) but no Unerring Vision.

edit: I have the 2 piece tier bonus and I am destro, trying to swap to demo.

Edited May 7, 2013 by Guest

[Jenaye 9]

For demo, I can only see good things coming out of mastery. Haste and crit are nice to help along with procs from Lei Shen's trink, but a good hunk of your dps is from being in demon form, and raising the damage your imps do, which is why I assume mastery is king. Especially if you can get up a procced Doom? That just sounds like good times.

Haste can only take you so far, as you get to a point where your cast time is less than the GCD, and then you're wasting time doing nothing inbetween. I imagine taking it close to that point, then stacking everything into mastery first, then crit would be the way to go. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, folks!

[Horcored 17]

Generally u wanna gem for secondary stats when 2 points of Mastery, haste or crit is stronger than 1 point of Agility, Strenght or Intellect. A few classes i know from the top of my head are: Ret pala, Shadowpriest, Affi lock, Balance Druid, Fire and Frost mages.

But ofc, there are small differences for this also, something that can be easly found by running a sim of ur char with ur gear.

- Horcored

[Guest]

Icy veins' guide says gem int, but these guys are all going mastery. I'm assuming that at a certain gear level or with Unerring Vision they switch.

[gahhda 95]

Heroic trinkets are the deciding factor that push haste/mastery over intellect for gemming. You don't really need to worry about it until then. It also only makes ~1% difference gemming int or mastery/haste at heroic gear levels, so its not even really a big deal then.

[Zagam 1,982]

Echoing Gahhda's statement, the reason there are discrepencies between how people play is that the difference between them (Haste vs Mastery vs Haste/Mastery vs Intellect) is small and dependent on fight mechanics. Thankfully, these stats have been balanced enough that you get to choose your playstyle. Yes, one style may come out ahead on a particular fight, but that's not going to cause a huge swing in your numbers. Take a look at the top 50 Warlocks in progress. Some are full Haste, some are full Mastery, some meet a Haste threshold and push more into Mastery, some are gemming Intellect. What I did NOT find was anyone gemming Crit. Basically gem and reforge for Intellect, Haste, and Mastery and you can't go wrong.