Beta: The gears(?) they are a-changing!

Ok, I go away for the weekend and the interweb explodes. New Beta patch, and this time the biggest change for Tanks in general, and Paladin tanks in particular is that our gear has been reitemized in line with the changes to our mechanics in WotLK.

I've taken some screenshots to give examples of the itemization changes:









As you can see, the Spelldamage and Intellect is gone, replaced with Strength. Not a bad change, although Ulu's mana pool has dropped from 5.6k to 4.6k, which means his Blessing of Sanctuary and Judgement of Wisdom don't proc for nearly as much. Also, on the tier set items there appears to have been a drop in Stamina values as well. Once again, not drastic, but they seem to be more threat pieces than MT ones.

Now let's look at a couple of generic badge items:




Once again, the strength's been added, but this time, it's at the cost of defense, dodge and expertise. A little more annoying, but the points have to come from somewhere.

Overall, this puts some changes to Ulu's stats:



He now has 1.1k Attack Power, which is nearly three times what he has in live. On top of that, he still has around 400 spellpower thanks to Touched by the Light. He also now blocks for 601, which means I can't wait to get my hands on Shield of Righteousness at level 75.