Mists of Pandaria: Level 90 Darkmoon Tanking Trinket

Relic of Niuzao Has Changed!

Ok first and foremost the Darkmoon Trinket Relic of Niuzao has been buffed!! If you hover over for the tooltip you will see that it has 1434 Stamina on it. This wasn't present when MoP Launched and has since become one of our Best In Slot Trinkets for pre-raid gear. Even when you drill down to the end of Tier 14 raiding this is (realistically) our 3rd BiS as the one above it in the list has a 1% drop rate!

OMG I've Just Looked At The AH Prices!! 

Ok chill out. No really! There are 3 different ways to obtain this trinket:

- Collect the " of Oxen" cards

- Buy an Ox Deck

- Buy the Trinket

On my server the Deck is going for 32k and the Trinket is going for 23k. So it was time to number crunch, Well basic addition really! The Ox Deck can be created by collecting the Ace through Eight of Oxen Darkmoon Cards (1-8). These are listed on the AH as Ace of Oxen, Two of Oxen etc... (ie numbers as words). After some brief work with some paper and the Online AH I worked out that I could buy all of the cards for 16k. This is a good way to obtain a BiS item on the cheap and also a great way to make some gold (buy the cards, create the deck and either list the deck or the trinket on the AH). 

I will be using mine however I might go back to make a few thousand doing this.

Patch 5.0.4 and MoP Currency Conversion (Valor and Conquest Points)

Oh Where, Oh Where Did My Valor Points Go?

Blizzard has just released it's plans for the Valor and Conquest Points Conversion for:

- Patch 5.0.4

- Mists of Pandaria

- Patch 5.1

Check out the text below for more information. It appears the Valor points will be converted over to Justice points however there is no mention of what happens to your existing Justice points. This might be a great time to start buying your Heirloom gear ahead of the new Expansion so you can hit the ground running with your new Panda Monk 

The currency conversion coming with Mists of Pandaria is going to happen in three stages, and this is how we plan for it to progress:

With Patch 5.0.4 on August 28

• Valor points will be converted to Justice points, and Conquest points will be converted to Honor points.
  • Neither of the resultant currencies (Justice and Honor) will have an enforced hard-cap at this time.
• The current Arena season will end.
• Players will no longer be able to earn Valor or Conquest points (bosses will drop Justice, Arenas will be closed).
• Items formerly purchasable for Valor/Conquest will be available for Justice/Honor.

With Mists of Pandaria on September 25

• Valor can be earned again.
  • Characters can earn up to 1000 Valor per week, and carry a maximum of 3000 Valor.
  • Daily quests, random Scenarios, random Heroic dungeons, and all levels of raiding will reward Valor.
  • Valor will be used to purchase ilvl 489 gear in Mists of Pandaria.
    • The Klaxxi, Golden Lotus, Shado-Pan, and August Celestials factions will sell this gear.
    • Revered reputation with each faction will be required.
• Conquest will become earnable.
  • There is a cap of 4000 Conquest points.
  • Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds reward Conquest.
  • It will be used to purchase ilvl 483 gear from Pandaren battlemasters on the Great Wall.

With Mists of Pandaria, Patch 5.1

• We currently plan to upgrade the Valor system as Ghostcrawler described in Mists of Pandaria Looting Explained in the 5.1 patch, allowing you to upgrade your gear using Valor points. We’ll have additional information once Mists of Pandaria launches and we get closer to the 5.1 patch release.

The Reputation Grind of Old Returns

No Faction Tabards in Mists of Pandaria - The Casual Player Gently Weeps!

Whilst this is a strictly Protection Warrior website I do feel it necessary from time to time to keep you all up to date with certain global changes to our beloved game. Furthermore this will have an impact on how soon the MoP Reputation Gear will  be available to you from launch.

On a slight side note: waking up this morning to the following news made me sigh and Battle Shout at the same time!

The one and only Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street replied to a thread on the official WoW forums to confirm and cement a change to the way we are used to grinding reputation with the various factions within the game in MoP.

At present to grind reputation the easiest way is to goto the faction vendor, equip their tabard and run dungeon after dungeon after dungeon after du....... These level 90 faction tabards will still be in the game, however they will no longer give reputation to that specific faction. We will instead quest and do dailies to slog away at our reputation.

Here's Ghostcrawler with more:

 Ghostcrawler

Quote:

Is there a reason you're FORCING us to do daily quests for rep instead of allowing us to CHOOSE to grind the rep in dungeons?

Essentially because dungeons already reward loot from bosses and valor. Letting them also provide faction seems extraneous. Why not just increase the boss drops or give you more valor to let you buy stuff?

Here's how we got there though:

-- BC had an extensive attunement system. (I'm not passing judgment on that system because I kind of liked it myself.)
-- As part of that system, you were required to acquire a lot of reputation with different factions, which you achieved primarily by running dungeons over and over. This meant you might have a dude that needed to run Shadow Labs 3 more times while someone else needed Mechanar or Botanica.
-- To solve that problem, we let players wear tabards so they could earn whatever faction they wanted while running dungeons.
-- This made things much more convenient for players, arguably too convenient. The factions themselves sort of lost their identity. They were just different bars to fill. Also, sometimes by the time you hit Exalted or Revered with a given faction, you already had better gear from running the dungeon so much.
-- In Mists, we want to provide players alternative content to running dungeons. The dungeons are still there, but even with 6 new and 3 redone dungeons, you're ready for something else after a while.
-- Part of that something else are the Elder faction quests, such as Klaxxi and Shado-Pan. We put as much work into these quest chains as we did the level-up zone quests. The stories evolve and new branches unlock. You earn faction by doing these quests and can also earn valor to layer on top of what you're earning from dungeons, or even in lieu of dungeons if you just don't have enough time or aren't interested in a dungeon at that moment.
-- As I said above, I know not everyone loves questing. (For that matter not everyone loves mount collection or pet battles or achievements or raiding). Strictly speaking, you don't have to do the factions to progress your characters, but we figure a lot of players will.

We could have a long discussion, probably beyond the scope of this thread, about how much time you should have to commit to feel like you're keeping up with end game progression vs. how much extra time you should be able to commit if you're interested in doing so. In Cataclysm, we think we steered too far into the zone of telling players to stop playing because there was nothing else to do.

No developer wants to hear "I want to play your game, but there's nothing to do." For Mists, we are going out of our way to give players lots to do. We don't want it to be overwhelming, but we do want it to be engaging. We want you to have the option of sitting down to an evening of World of Warcraft rather than running your daily dungeon in 30 minutes and then logging out. We understand we have many players (certainly the majority in fact) who can't or aren't interested in making huge commitments to the game every week and we hope we have structured things so that you don't fall very far behind. The trick is to let players who want to play make some progress without leaving everyone else in the dust.

source

Analysis of Prot Warrior Faction Rewards in MoP

The Step from Dungeon Heroic Gear to Faction Rewards

With a new expansion comes a new set of factions to grind rep with. As a reward for gaining Revered with said factions you will be rewarded with some epic EPIC gear. To review what you can purchase and from which faction please see the link above or click here. 

As you can see from the link there are 4 new factions to obtain gear from. Just briefly glancing through the list of items from each faction it can be very difficult to see what is the biggest stat increase for you and hence difficult to know which faction to grind to Revered first.

Avoidance or Hit?

Because the most useful stats in MoP for a Protection Warrior are still unclear (although I'm not sure it will change too much) each faction will boost your stats depending on what gear you start with. I'm not going to provide you with figures as such here as it really depends on YOUR gear and not how I have calculated this however assuming you are in full heroic dungeon gear and have prioritised Mastery here is your stat increase by faction:

Shadow Pan

Increase: Mastery & Dodge 

Cost Of: Parry & Hit

Golden Lotus 

Increase: Master & Dodge & 1 socket

Cost Of: Parry & Hit

August Celestials

Increase: Parry

Cost Of: Hit & Dodge

Klaxxi

Increase: Hit & Expertise & Parry & 2 sockets

Cost Of: Dodge & Mastery

It is also worth noting that:
- The Shadow Pan's increase to Mastery far out-weighs the Golden Lotus increase by 2 fold.
- The hit gained from the Klaxxi rewards account for about 2%.
- The sockets gained from the Klaxxi are red and blue as opposed to the Yellow from the Golden Lotus (hello Mr Mastery Gem!).
- Although the Klaxxi has a hit increase the strength on the gear drops.
- The best overall Stamina increase can be found on the Shadow Pan gear.

Sooooo...... What Faction Should I Grind Rep With?

Well at the moment that is a difficult question to answer. It honestly depends on your gear. However assuming Mastery will still be our go-to stat and also taking into account the Stamina and Strength on the gear I would advise grinding Shadow Pan first with Klaxxi in a VERY close second due to the hit increase and the extra sockets.

It will become clearer as more information on stats is released - Watch This Space!

MoP Protection Warrior's Reputation Rewards List and HC Dungeon Gear List: NOW LIVE!

I have just finished sifting through the mountains of Mists of Pandaria Beta information to bring you:

- Protection Warrior's Reputation Rewards: Mists of Pandaria Edition

- Protection Warrior's Heroic Dungeon Drops: Mists of Pandaria Edition

Please feel free to comment and distribute as you see fit.