First look at Holy Paladin gemming
I’ve been thinking recently about re-gemming for survivability on my Holy Paladin, since I’m only at about 550 resilience in my current gear. It’s not every fight that I feel like I need it, but I’m pretty happy with my throughput (healing is only really a problem if I get CCd or school-locked) and mana usage. I have about 18.5k mana and either JotW or drinking (depending on the comp) in concert with Divine Plea mean we very rarely lose on mana to a team that isn’t aggressively mana burning.
(The deadly libram will also be a great throughput upgrade, I just wanted to replace all my blues first!)
So, as always, let’s go to the Armory and see what high-rated Paladins are doing. My sample this time around is Paladins from the top 200 2v2 teams on Reckoning, and I’ve only included people wearing pvp gear (medallion or human with >100 resil) at the time of the survey. I’ve also explicitly excluded meta gems since there isn’t really any contention there: int + manarestore all the way.
Here’s the initial results. I’m assuming the strength gems are from people caught in their ret gear (but still as holy spec), but I didn’t actually look them up. I’ve also excluded the quality of the gems, since it didn’t really seem important for my purposes. The data set consists of 75 characters between ~2750 and ~2140, with 784 total gems.
Intellect => 149 | 20.93%
Spell Power => 113 | 15.87%
Resilience Rating => 96 | 13.48%
Spell Power and Intellect => 54 | 07.58%
Spell Power and Resilience Rating => 51 | 07.16%
Spell Power and Stamina => 49 | 06.88%
Resilience Rating and Stamina => 44 | 06.18%
Spell Power and Critical Strike Rating => 41 | 05.76%
Intellect and Stamina => 29 | 04.07%
Critical Strike Rating => 19 | 02.67%
Stamina => 18 | 02.53%
Spell Power and Mana every 5 seconds => 18 | 02.53%
Intellect and Mana every 5 seconds => 10 | 01.40%
Haste Rating => 5 | 00.70%
Critical Strike Rating and Stamina => 5 | 00.70%
Spell Power and Haste Rating => 3 | 00.42%
Strength => 2 | 00.28%
Strength and Stamina => 2 | 00.28%
Hit Rating => 2 | 00.28%
Haste Rating and Mana every 5 seconds => 1 | 00.14%
Strength and Critical Strike Rating => 1 | 00.14%
We can do some basic categorization of the gems, too. I’ve divided them into throughput (spell power, crit, haste), longevity (intellect, mp5), utility (hit rating) and defense (stamina, resilience). I realise these categories aren’t entirely accurate because most paladin stats affect multiple areas (for example, via Illumination), but it’s a good starting point.
throughput => 181 | 25.42%
longevity => 159 | 22.33%
defense => 158 | 22.19%
defense/throughput => 105 | 14.75%
longevity/throughput => 73 | 10.25%
defense/longevity => 29 | 04.07%
other => 2 | 00.28%
utility => 2 | 00.28%
defense/other => 2 | 00.28%
other/throughput => 1 | 00.14%
Then maybe it’s useful to see totals for each category, if you count a “pure gem” as 2 points for its category and the hybrid gems for 1 point in each:
throughput => 541 | 37.99%
defense => 452 | 31.74%
longevity => 420 | 29.49%
other => 7 | 00.49%
utility => 4 | 00.28%
From looking at that it seems most people are balancing their gemming across the three major categories, and browsing through the individual results seems to support that. Let’s see one last view over the data, since this is starting to get long.
This table contains a row for each paladin, with a column for each of the three major categories defined above – the cells show what proportion of that paladin’s total gems are used on that category. Hybrid gems are split across both categories as in the previous report, and strength/hit gems are ignored although they do still count in the totals.
name throughput longevity defense
Varluneyna 0.33 0.33 0.33
Heimen 0.45 0.35 0.20
Jeuce 0.38 0.50 0.13
Haydee 0.39 0.11 0.50
Unicornica 0.50 0.50 0.00
Wcstyle 0.60 0.10 0.30
Mchaggis 0.45 0.23 0.32
Aiiden 0.44 0.38 0.19
Braves 0.36 0.45 0.18
Gina 0.50 0.22 0.28
Dercas 0.43 0.43 0.14
Mournhold 0.71 0.29 0.00
Beldara 0.39 0.28 0.33
Oryun 0.59 0.14 0.27
Dimarius 0.56 0.44 0.00
Tygrilol 0.50 0.17 0.33
Sasorii 0.38 0.63 0.00
Solidarityx 0.46 0.46 0.08
Ieetoh 0.10 0.00 0.20
Reepent 0.25 0.50 0.25
Harumaru 0.55 0.45 0.00
Magicpie 0.39 0.39 0.22
Pummie 0.44 0.56 0.00
Holynight 0.44 0.33 0.22
Redemptionz 0.44 0.39 0.17
Derreidos 0.41 0.59 0.00
Femaleftw 0.44 0.28 0.28
Diplomacy 0.50 0.50 0.00
Qiu 0.65 0.15 0.20
Gellin 0.45 0.55 0.00
Stylec 0.25 0.50 0.25
Aurog 0.35 0.45 0.20
Kaara 0.40 0.20 0.40
Mcjordie 0.50 0.35 0.15
Arasof 0.50 0.06 0.44
Bubbliciouss 0.61 0.28 0.11
Eskimopally 0.50 0.25 0.25
Zyrxy 0.38 0.50 0.12
Lostprophet 0.56 0.17 0.28
Valefor 0.40 0.35 0.25
Sylvanisa 0.44 0.33 0.22
Luncarn 0.30 0.70 0.00
Feladence 0.50 0.50 0.00
Smokealarm 0.39 0.33 0.28
Ermad 0.28 0.72 0.00
Appocalypse 0.50 0.11 0.39
Macabe 0.38 0.63 0.00
Fiaraa 0.50 0.35 0.15
Trawn 0.56 0.19 0.25
Moomoobeezy 0.38 0.38 0.25
Oculis 0.19 0.56 0.25
Espectrolol 0.50 0.30 0.20
Romulisa 0.50 0.28 0.22
Clint 0.38 0.42 0.21
Kehrsyn 0.40 0.00 0.60
Sayami 0.29 0.71 0.00
Jdubz 0.31 0.38 0.31
Shadgavena 0.55 0.14 0.32
Serjj 0.65 0.25 0.10
Judgmant 0.36 0.64 0.00
Crispybacon 0.30 0.30 0.40
Guli 0.31 0.44 0.25
Annihilacion 0.64 0.36 0.00
Clapton 0.44 0.44 0.11
Zatin 0.44 0.56 0.00
Tranze 0.38 0.63 0.00
Brianlee 0.23 0.77 0.00
Makitoo 0.45 0.55 0.00
Fron 0.64 0.23 0.14
Zenakuu 0.44 0.39 0.17
Duner 0.36 0.64 0.00
Evir 0.78 0.11 0.11
Zorgat 1.00 0.00 0.00
Svendor 0.63 0.38 0.00
Mute 0.60 0.25 0.15
They’re sorted by rating, if you’re wondering.