This is half general musing, half PSA for people who haven’t looked ahead yet.
When 9.0 hits it’ll bring the class and talent changes, as well as wipe all Corruptions away. Then as soon as we set foot into the new Shadowlands zones our Azerite Traits and Essences will be disabled. So while leveling isn’t exactly hard, especially if you’re going in with good gear, it’s worth knowing that your stat priorities could be very different than today. If you want to hit the ground with max power you may want to start stashing some alternative pieces with different stat selections.
Fury, for example, is probably not going to value Crit nearly as much without CSHB. I have no idea what’ll happen to Arms, between having a new Mastery and losing all their Essences and Traits and Corruptions. And in both cases it’s far too early to start guessing. Class changes are still under way and tuning hasn’t even begun.
So what I’m saying is, when you get a Vision or M+ 470 with bad stats and a trash Corruption, maybe toss it in the bank instead of just scrapping it. Especially if it rolled Leech or Speed. It might turn out to be an upgrade once you’re looking to start the leveling climb.
As you say, very early and hard to guess. Archi will probably put out an updated guide on wowhead and icy-veins about a week before the prepatch goes live, which isn’t a lot of lead time.
The best we can do right now I think is at what things were like in Eternal Palace for an idea of life after corruption, and then hearken back to Uldir for the one tier w/o CSHB.
Arms will almost certainly find itself coming back down to Earth when corruptions vanish. Fury operated much the same way it does now before corruptions. Crit values will be lower but nothing should change priority wise.
CSHB disapearing could be a game changer though. I want to say our initial stat priority was something like Haste >>>>> Mastery>Vers>Crit - very different than it is now needless to say. I want to say I remember Archi saying at the time Haste remained our #1 stat until like the 50-55% baseline region - an amount thought unreachable at the time. He had a graph as I recall.
Usually the top end raid gear will last till the new max level, or at least close to it. However the level squish might mix up how the scaling goes, and you’ll want to replace your Azerite Armor with the disabled Traits ASAP. So it’s hard to say.
Really, the whole first month of Shadowlands is going to be confusing. A lot of stuff doesn’t kick in until you reach max level. Even then, in the first weeks people will still be working to unlock more than minimal Soulbind functionality and only just be earning their first legendary items from Torgast.
I mean, when you look ahead to the middle of the first raid tier, it’s a different picture. People will have all three Soulbinds available and fully unlocked. They’ll have three or four legendary items so they can swap between general performance and specialized utility. They’ll have assembled a collection of strong Conduits to pick from. You’ll have a whole set of options and the community will have enough actual play experience to chart good choices for your spec and Covenant combo.
But that’s all two or three months in. It’s going to be chaos early on.
That’s the safe bet. If I had to pick a dark horse for Fury it’d be Mastery. The talent shuffling means the buffed Fresh Meat is up against Sudden Death and the never impressive War Machine.
Sudden Death might remain ahead on raid bosses, but there’s a decent chance Fresh Meat will perform quite well in M+ and open world content. Then the reliable Enrage uptime from Fresh Meat both makes Mastery better and synergizes with Enrage activated talents like Onslaught and Cruelty and Warpaint. So there’s whole new builds possible here.
Of course, things will be different yet again in the endgame when we’re adding Soulbinds and Conduits and a legendary on top of things. But that’s a long ways off.
If I had to guess from what we know currently I’d say mastery might be the play for Arms too. I believe Haste is going to drop through the cellar since Deep Wounds is going to have a longer duration. Then again maybe not because you’ll still want to cram globals into Colossus Smash.
Would definitely be interesting if both specs had the same stat priorities.