4.0.1 will be weird

We all kind of know this already. The pre-cataclysm, post-lk patch is going to be just plain odd. We will have new talents and scaling systems in place that will make us work at level 85, when health pools will be in the 50-100k level and so on.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. There is a talent in the shadow tree for priests that converts your spirit to hit rating. At 85, with the crazy amounts of hit rating needed to cap, this is a nice piece of utility so that priests can double-dip their gear. Add to that the flat 2% damage buff baked into the talent and the fact that you cannot get all the way down the tree by skipping that talent, unless you put points into talents that do not directly increase your DPS (such as Phantasm), and most shadow priests will probably be taking Twisted Faith.

That means Djargenstad will have 923 hit rating under 4.0.1 mechanics in his current gear. That's a bit much, I'd say. I can reforge some of the hit rating away (are the reforging guys available in 4.0.1, or are they Cataclysm-only?), but I'm getting a lot of that hit rating from the 598 spirit that is currently on my shadow gear. Of course, shadow currently scales okay with spirit, between talents and specs that improve stuff, and this is mostly a healing setup that I've retooled to DPS anyway, so that's probably a lot of spirit for a dedicated player.

Either way, it looks like I should be replacing the hit trinket I bought with the int trinket instead. For the record, I have lousy luck with getting trinkets to drop anywhere, so I don't have a broad array to choose from. Currently, the int trinket is kind of "meh". Use it if you have a mana pool problem. But in cataclysm, int will give you a spellpower buff (there are pretty much no +spellpower gems or enchants anymore, just +int, which translates into mana AND spellpower), so the flat 128 int plus 599 on demand spellpower makes this a half-decent trinket. Far better than hit rating, I can say at least. But I definitely need to worry about collecting some haste/crit gear instead of spirit gear for shadow DPS. Or at least I would worry about that if cataclysm weren't dropping so soon.