Let me start with saying that for gearing up I know that ‘every stat is nice for balance’, gotten that much from the guides so far and know that it’s important to get into as much int as possible asap.
So, SECONDARY stats…
Originally I was lead to believe that mast/vers were the ways to go, particularly with NF as the covenant.
Now, talking to a few other druids, and looking into the gear of several I’ve been noticing a lot of haste/vers gear, even going so far as to choosing it for their legendary.
So, is it better to shoot for mastery and versatility, haste and versatility, some kind of haste-cap and then try for mast/verse?
Also, if it makes a difference for pvp/pve as to what I might be seeing where haste is better for one and mastery is better for the other that clarification would be nice as well.
Night Fae balance druids will go mastery/vers because Convoke does not benefit from haste. Any other covenant, mastery/haste seems to be the way to go.
For Night Fae PvE, your stat priority would be Mastery / Vers because:
When using the Balance of All Things legendary, you get high amounts of Crit when you enter a new eclipse which is when you want to use your AP. This is where the majority of your damage comes from. Since you already have near max Crit for when you need it, the value of Crit is greatly diminished.
Convoke the Spirits and Starfall don’t scale with Haste, so the value of haste is reduced in Single Target. In AoE it seems that Haste is still pretty useful because a lot of damage still comes from Starfire.
For PvP your stat priority is typically Vers / Haste.
In PvP, Crit damage is reduced I think? So Crit has reduced value because the power of it is lower. We still typically run the BoAT legendary for damage for the same reason as explained above, so Crit is still not important.
In any PvP situation, Vers is an extremely important stat because it reduces damage taken as well as a flat increase to your damage. By using the PvP trinkets set, you also get a 40% increase to the damage component from Versatility.
Haste is good on any caster because the caster’s toolkit is gated behind how fast you’re able to get spells off.
So typically in PvP any spec’s priority is usually Vers / Haste or Vers / Mastery.
This is one of the reasons that Balance is predicted to not scale well, and was raised by community reps repeatedly in beta.
Two of our secondary stats are trash for us, due to how our legendary, eclipses and covenant work. Even at like 5% haste, my sims still tell me to basically ignore crit and haste.
This is fine this patch. But once we start hitting the new diminishing return caps on vers and mastery, we’re going to have all 4 secondary stats not scaling us as much as a lot of other classes.
So the sky isn’t falling, it’s not that drastic. But if something isn’t done, it’s very likely we’ll fall far down the pecking order in a patch or two. And that’s completely fine too, just putting the info out there.