Okay, so my moonkin is having a terrible time trying to gear up in ICC. I’m having a hard time finding things like belts & bracers out of the 25-man instance that would be worthwhile, and I had to pick up a crit/spirit dagger off Morrow (paired with an off-hand I had from the ICC 5-mans). All the upgrades I really want are either in the 10-man or from badges.

All my gearing frustration, however, just makes me want Cataclysm to come sooner. So, lets take a look at what has me so excited about gearing my moonkin in Cataclysm.

Here’s a quote from my post at the Blizzcon Class pannel:

Reforging – Customizing gear. Relatively cheap. Given to blacksmiths, leatherworkers, tailors, Jewelcrafters, & Engineers. Reduce one stat for more of another (some restrictions apply).

Now, there are tons of items right now where I go: That would be great except that it has X stat instead of Y stat. We could turn a spirit-heavy resto item into a spirit-light moonkin item (since we were told no spirit for moonkin).

So, I did some digging around, and here’s is some info I’ve been able to dig up on reforging:

It’s too early to go into a lot of detail on the new features, but the basic idea here was to make an undesirable drop possibly more desirable. It still shouldn’t compete with gear that is actually itemized for you.

As an example, letting someone turn stamina into a dps stat is something we’d be unlikely to do (or at least impose a lot of restrictions) since that lets you turn an undesirable stat for most characters into something good.

Think of reforging more as a consolation prize or as a way to work around things like hit caps, and not the kind of thing that clever players are going to be able to use to vastly min max their character power.

Along with this one here:

Imagine reforging could work like enchanting, where there are specific recipes that everyone knows. Example: “Converts Spirit into 50% equivalent hit rating on gloves.” I’m not saying it would work like this, but something along those lines would be pretty comparable to existing features.

I still think that being able to turn spirit into a DPS-friendly stat, or changing hit rating into another stat (OR adding hit rating to an item if needed) could be a very powerful use fo this feature. I would like to think that they would design Reforging so that hybrids like moonkin (who they never really want to design specialized gear for) will benefit a lot from this kind of change. We don’t really need to change stamina into damage dealing stats, but we will benefit from being able to turn healer gear into DPS gear.

What stats moonkin should want in cataclysm:

• Int (will give spell power), hit, haste, crit, & the new mastery stat.

What stats resto should want in cataclysm:

• Int (will give SP), spirit, haste crit, & the new mastery stat.

So, the theory would be that moonkin could potentially take the healing gear with spirit and turn it into something worthwhile for us, and resto could take something without spirit to turn it into something with spirit.

But there’s always a catch. Here are the Potential Problems:

• It may only remove half of the unwanted stat, leaving gear with half the unwanted stat (ie. hit or spirit for caster leather). So, that gear really would be sub-optimal and perhaps make the reforging system not actually all happy like I first thought it might be.  This would leave Blizzard still having to make leather without spirit on it for moonkin, as we wouldn’t be able to remove all the spirit from healing leather.
• EDIT: It may also potentially be designed take more than it gives back, IE. taking all the spirit but only giving you half the value back in another stat, which would mean the item ends up not really being a replacement for well-itemized gear for that slot. If you have to do this for half your gear for end-game raiding, suddenly you are losing out on an awful lot of stats you could have had with better itemized gear in the first place.
• If Blizzard has further incentives for classes to use their highest armor type (in this case, leather for druids), moonkin may be more prohibited from wearing cloth than we already are, and the reforging system may have raid leaders being more reluctant to let moonkin take cloth drops. Add to that the fact we can’t roll “need” on cloth from 5-man dungeons, and things may still be tricky for moonkin to gear up in Cataclysm.
• Blizzard has a long history of not wanting to make item drops that only one spec of one class will want to wear. Since Moonkin & elemental shaman are niche-specs that tend to not be super abundant in raid groups, I’m betting that these two specs will still have a hard time gearing up in Cataclysm raid dungeons, since Blizzard may see reforging as the best way to let us turn healing gear into DPS gear, which could potentially leave moonkin with really still sub-optimal gear and no way to turn all the junk stats into stats we want.

Conclusions:

Reforging has the potential to be a great opportunity for Blizzard to deal with specs like moonkin & elemental shaman that can’t just DPS in healing gear (and shouldn’t heal in hit rating gear), but don’t otherwise share gear with anyone else.

However, the only way for reforging to fill this role is if ALL of spirit or hit rating can be removed from an item and converted into a wanted stat for other specs that share the gear. Otherwise, Reforging is never going to let casters and healers share gear, and will leave us with the same problems with gearing that we have right now. It also needs to give back enough of the wanted stat so that you aren’t losing huge chunks of stats if you are forced to reforge rather than be given good options for your gear. These may also be the only two stats where removing all of it from an item should need to be an option. I’m sure melee classes would benefit from being able to remove all the hit from an item, so that they could turn hit-rating pieces into something useful for them after they reach the hit-cap. In this case, everyone could win.