I first used the term 'magic effective health' (henceforth EH in this entry) in this post on my guild forum. If that particular phrase hasn't been uttered elsewhere, I'm sure the concept has. Anyway, I won't get into the details of that.

I've been thinking a lot about resistance gearing lately. I have a lot of resistance gear, am capped for Nature, Arcane and Fire, and building up Shadow and Frost, and have dedicated sets for elementals, melee casters, pure casters like imps, and...

Timetheos

Patch 2.4.2: "[item]Nightfall[/item] now has a chance to fail on targets over level 60."

Damn. I still used Nightfall regularly when I wasn't tanking any given encounter. I always dreamed of some theoretical raid consisting entirely of casters and Nightfallers. It was a tiny piece of the old world that I was able to cling onto, comfortable that it was universally useful and not bound by level; the only thing it scales with is raid size.

Why would Blizzard...

Timetheos

1000 spell damage at lvl 60 is exactly as effective as spell damge at lvl 70. It increases all of your spells by that static figure, modified by the individual spell/rank. 1000 AP at lvl 1 is exactly as effective as 1000 AP at lvl 80. It increases your melee dps by (1000/14). +Healing acts similarly. Granted, this is not the case for all healing.dps stats. Spell crit/hit, melee crit/hit, penetration, expertise all, I think, suffer from becoming less effective at higher levels. But the guts...

Timetheos

[item]Blade of the Unrequited[/item]
Romulo, Opera Event, Karazhan

This dagger works out to have the highest potential EH of any 1h weapon in the game. This is because it boasts something very rare in a weapon: sockets. The only other socketed weapon I know of is [item]Cleaver of the Unforgiving[/item], which has one socket. The dagger has 3. This enables very high stamina-stacking (+45 with gems), which leads to its high effective health.

What other fun...

Timetheos

[item]Ogri'la Aegis[/item]
Revered, Ogri'la

This shield tops my gear list as having the highest avoidance of any shield in the game. But does that necessarily mean it's useful? I'd like to think so.

Shield of the Wayward Footman is one of my favorite pieces of gear, because I don't think anyone else knows just how awesome it is. It's like having an Impeding Scarab on your back. It has by far the highest block of any shield in the game, and is very useful in...

Timetheos