Help with gear

That title's a call for help, not an offer.

Pretty much all my gear is now of a similar item level and relatively similar stats. I've got a surplus of it, some with more haste than crit, some with more spirit than haste, and all with varying amounts of hit and spellpower. I know the weightings, but still my head hurts.

I'm firmly of the opinion that the differences are so small as to be academic. But what the hell, I may as well get it right.

So, what do you use to help you evaluate gear? Are there any models out there like I've seen for mages? Any speadsheets that work out stat weightings for me? Any sites I should be using, or addons? Pretty please?

World of World of Warcraft

The Onion is breaking with the news that Blizzard's next gen MMORPG is to be World of World of Warcraft. You get to control a World of Warcraft player. "Characters can be directed to drink soda, eat hot pockets," the site reports.

I never get tired of the Onion, even though it only has one joke. Go check out the video.

Epiphany

My race summoned the Burning Legion, caused the War of the Ancients, destroyed the Well of Eternity, then kidnapped and tortured a naaru to insanity.

I am addicted to magic.

I am allied with:

1. a legion of reanimated corpses intent on destroying all life on Azeroth
2. a band of warmongerers fixated on their violent heritage
3. cannibals

I traded my faith for power.

I have a goatee.

I'm not one of the good guys, am I?

Death to replenishment

More proof if every any was needed that replenishment is broken:

We are making a hotfix (any minute now probably) so that replenishment in arenas will only affect the character and not the whole team. It will continue to function as it does currently outside of arenas. We feel replenishment is balanced for larger groups, but just makes too much of a difference on smaller arena teams. Making the rules work differently in PvP and PvE isn’t a solution we like to use often, but in this case we think it fixes the issue cleanly, while still making the talents in question useful to the character who takes them. Alternatives, such as nerfing the amount returned by Replenishment in arena or making it not function at all, seem like more punitive choices from which we want to stay away. Source

My views on replenishment are well documented. Replenishment is bad. Replenishment is the worst thing to happen to Azeroth since Sargeras went loopy.

Well ok, not that bad.

But it's up there with leper gnomes.

Replenishment is so borky they had to REDESIGN THE WAY MANA REGENERATION WORKED. And now they need to hotfix it in arenas. Why am I not surprised?

Vampiric touch's mana mechanic was so broken they had to remove it from the game. And what did they do? They GAVE IT TO EVERYONE.

Oh, my mistake. Poor sad druids and shamans don't have it. Yet.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you try and control mana regeneration with one, generic sweeping mechanic across diverse classes with varying personal mana management options and gearing priorities you will fail.

Replenishment is nothing but a millstone forcing increasingly desperate changes across the board, to the detriment of all. Take replenishment away. Give each class the tools it needs to manage its own mana in its own appropriate ways.

Skada redux

Quick update on skada, the damage meter I reviewed the other day.

As promised, I took it into Naxx for a more thorough road test.

The first thing I noticed when logging in on Merlot was my old paladin data. Oddly, it does not work independently on each character. Is that going to be an issue? Probably not, I don't know.

We zoned into Naxx, I reset the counters, and off we went.

You'll remember I mentioned it tracked overall data and recorded individual fights at the same time. This made it much easier to track my personal performance as well as the raid's overall on the fly. From one window, you can click through to total or single mob breakdowns - and if you can do this easily on recount, I've never figured out how. It's a sad reminder of just how sluggish I am on bosses compared to trash.

The actual data seemed to tally closely with recount's, which is encouraging. But I surprised myself by wanting to see how much my dots were ticking for, and how big my thadius crits were, and that's something I can't find in skada.

I really don't want to have to run two damage addons at the same time (my system's creaky enough as it is) so I hope the skada dev is looking into this. I'll leave an encouraging note on curse.

Overall, I'm still impressed. It works out of the box and it seems to work well, and there's probably a lot more I don't know about buried in the options.

BTW, what happened to my dps in the patch? Have I forgotten how to play or have all the other classes left shadow in the dust?