Gemming for Noobs

I’ll admit it— I was an absolute noob when it came to gemming. My first experience with gems was leveling my DK through The Outlands when I came back to WoW. I saw the little colored spot on my gear and a grayed out bonus and had no idea what it was. Since then, I’ve made just about every mistake there is with gems. Now that I’ve learned from those mistakes, I’m want to share what I’ve learned.

Colors are a suggestion

As soon as I found out what belongs in those little colored slots, I went looking for gems to match the colors I had. I figured if there were colored slots, and there are colored gems, this must be a matching game; square peg in the square hole and round peg in the round hole, as it were. But, any color gem can be placed in any color slot. The color matching serves only to award the bonus. The other enticement to use certain colors comes in the meta gem on your helmet. In order for your meta gem to provide its bonus, you must use the gem colors and numbers it asks for.

For example, to get the bonus from my Insightful Earthsiege Diamond, I must use one red, one yellow and one blue gem. After that, it doesn’t matter which colors I use for the remaining slots.

Socket Bonuses are not always worth matching colors

Often times you are better off stacking a single stat and ignoring socket bonuses. Here it helps to know the relative value of stats on your gear, but keep in mind that this stat value is relative to your specific gear. There are all sorts of ways to find out your stat values; On my Hunter I use Zeherah’s spreadsheet, and Shamans can use shaman_hep.

Here’s an example: I know that on my Resto Shaman, haste is valued at around 1.8 and spell power is valued at 1 (I haven’t run my own stat values yet, but I based this off a similarly geared Shaman). I got a piece of gear with a red and a yellow slot. This gave me a choice of whether to place a yellow Quick King’s Amber for the higher stat value or a red Reckless Ametrine for the slot bonus of five extra spell power; In this case, I was deciding on 10 haste or 17 spell power.

Since the ratio of haste to spell power is 1.8 to 1, I can multiply the 10 haste by 1.8 and see that it is worth 18 spell power, meaning the haste was better for me than the slot bonus. Of course, this example is so close it’s more an example of extreme min/maxing than anything else, but the point stands.

How to choose which stat to gem

Finally, I want to touch on which stat you should choose to stack with your gems. As a DPS player, you should stack which ever stat has the highest relative stat value without hitting any cap. On my hunter, hit gives the most DPS at 2.241 per point, but I’ve already passed the cap beyond which it is useful, meaning it provides zero DPS per point. After that, agility gives me 1.244 DPS per point and armor penetration gives me .935 DPS per point. Based on this, I can see that it’s more beneficial to stack agility.

As a tank or healer, the choice is a little less clear. On my Shaman, I know that gemming for haste will give me the most healing output, but there’s other things to consider, such as mana regeneration, when healing. Deciding which stat you want to gem is going to be based on your experiences. I typically have enough MP5 between my gear and buffs that gemming for it isn’t necessary. Another reason I gem for haste over spell power is that beyond output, haste makes my heals faster from starting the cast to the heal actually hitting its target, which increases my reaction time.

A tank’s choice is whether more HP or mitigation is more worthwhile to them. Stacking stamina gems will allow you to take more attacks before you die, but stacking mitigation will prevent you from taking the attacks. You may also consider whether more expertise would be beneficial—All expertise until you reach 26 serves as both a threat boost and damage mitigation by stopping your parried attacks which doesn’t allow the boss to hasten their next attack.

I freely admit that I know the least about tanks at the point in the game, however, so figure out for yourself what is best for you. In fact, no matter what, whether you DPS or heal, still take the time to find out for yourself what is best for your character and its gear and why it’s that way. It’ll only make you a better player.