Destro gems

[DoomCzar]

Just started getting my S4 destro gear. Torn between gemming offensively and pure stam, yet leaning towards pure stam. Thoughts?

[Redmage]

If you already have good resilience/health in decent amounts, no point of stacking pure stam, you are not to be hard to take down/tank anyways.

Your contribution is still best in offensive, which scales nicely for destro.

I say once you have the basics, go offensive.

[DoomCzar]

11.5k health and 330-something resil (using engineering boots and head for kicks right now). I've heard that some people have more success with destro after hitting 13k health...

[Redmage]

Actually, if you try to hit 13k health..not sure if you can actually do that with Felweave...you will be gimping your spell crit/spell damage if you gem for stamina.

13k health and 11.5k health won't be a huge difference.

[Eterud]

Hmm I'm an destro-pvp lock myself and I personally use 2 gems :

res+sta gems
crit+ spell penetration gems

the crit+spell penetration is all with gems that I had lieing in my bank for quite some time allready so decided some spell penetration aint soo bad with all these high resistances in arena teams and that I could use the crit aswell.
and further the resilence+sta, I have currently *with gems,no enchants yet* 11k health and 341 resilence in destro gear,
wich is enough to kill most s3 geared people.

but the more the meriér!
some extra health+resilence aint gone for when you fight multiple people or those people that are a tad better then most.

[Kirbymaster]

i use 12dam/9dam gems because once you get about 11.5k+ health 350+ resil you have to try and do as much damage as possible. i know quite a few games that wouldve been won with about 60 extra +dam

[Gritz]

I would think for Destro, you'd want to stack as much crit as possible, since your crit rate is reduced by 10-12% right off the bat (400-480 resilience).

[DoomCzar]

The verdict seems to be offensive gemming. Thanks for the input everyone! I'll let you all know how it works out!

[Redmage]

One of the key things with destro geming is to be aware of the fact that resilience has not really gone up with new seasons of gear, where as spell crit rating has continued to climb up.

This means that when S1/S2 were top gear, the common effective Spell Crit rate was (25%-10%=15%) vs S3/S4 (30%-10%=20%) [Rough numbers] has gone up nicely.

This also make spell crit stacking a bit more worthwhile than before.

[Sapper]

Originally Posted by Redmage

13k health and 11.5k health won't be a huge difference.

Sadly, the difference between 11.5k and 13k is like 1 or 2 hits from a rogue/warrior :( I would say go for a mixture of spell damage, depending on how much you have, crit and haste.