Comments

Comment by Kanariya

Perhaps a pvp gem of choice for those blue sockets.

Comment by 203799

The spell pen cap in Cata PVP is generally 195 -- you can reach this number exactly with the cloak enchant, two Stormy Ocean Sapphires, and one of these new additions. You can also use one Stormy and three Vivid, or no Stormy and five Vivid.

edit: confirmed under-budget when 4.0.6 went live. Should be 25 spp, only giving 20. Still a good choice for blue sockets, I'll be running cloak/JC gem/2xVivid for now.

edit: fixed in 4.1, 25 spp!

Comment by 102520

This gem is currently under budget, it should be +20 resil and +25 spell pen (as the current pure spell penetration gems are 50). I realize that this gem was most likely added, as Tuarceata mentioned, as only needing the back enchant (75), two Stormy (50x2), and one of these gems (+20) , but it should also be mentioned that it's possible to break the 195 resistance soft-cap with certain races. The most notable being Draenei and Forsaken who have a 85 passive resistance against Shadow spells, resistance being additive, the actual hard-cap is 280.

Assuming you have the soft-cap of 195 spell penetration, their passive 85 resistance is 12.64% damage reduction, therefore the 5 spell penetration that this gem is missing is hurting you by roughly 0.75% damage.

Edit: I wrote my post on bad information, the back enchant is 70 spell penetration, therefore the amount of spell pen that can be obtained by using the back enchant, two stormy gems, and one vivid gem is 190. As the soft cap is 195, it was clearly the original designer's intention to budget this gem at 25 spell pen, but was lost somewhere along the line as an oversight.

Comment by 235937

I was actually looking forward to this gem. Emphasis on the "was".

Let me explain the predicament PvP'ers faced before. Capping spell pen is not an option in PvP. Being 25 or 75 below cap might seem small to PvE'ers, who make weighted stat value distinctions to achieve max DPS, HPS, time to live, etc. For instance, for PvE'ers in Cata, even the old hard-and-fast rule of always hit capping is no longer a certainty, as agility/strength/intellect outweighs it for most DPS classes (though this just means you should reforge to hit cap instead of gemming for it, as it's still the most valuable combat rating).

However, in PvP, having something like a 5% chance for that paladin to resist your trap and thus avoid entrapment can potentially be catastrophic. The same thing with them heavily resisting an Explosive Shot (there is a chance of heavy resist even with low resist value) when they were at low health and might have otherwise been killed by it. It goes well beyond casters, as classes/specs like hunters, death knights, assassination rogues, etc. are all forced to cap spell pen, since many of them rely on elemental CC or significant elemental damage.

As of this post, the gem is currently giving 20 resi and 20 spell pen. The cap, as has been stated, is essentially 195 (only very specific comps will have any player exceed this number). Since no hybrid spell pen gems previously existed, most PvP'ers would go with the +70 cloak enchant and use their three blue gem slots to cap it (achieving 220). They _could_ save their cloak enchant and use the omni slot for that, thus being only slightly above the cap without breaking their gem bonuses (which are very nice on PvP gear at the moment, typically giving either significant gains in resi or your main attribute), but most choose not to, since the gem options of resi and/or attributes are far more useful than the combat ratings available on cloaks.

This gem was meant to fix that problem, allowing players to land precisely on the spell pen cap and use that extra budget on resi. Since resilience has increasing gains (when measured as a reduction of the damage one previously took before each increase), a lot of PvP'ers nowadays are trying to squeeze out as much resi as they can get. This gem would have pushed me over 3600, for instance (players _will_ be reaching 4k resi this season without even losing their gem bonuses, and resi will mostly definitely be nerfed).

Comment by Zeldendorf

IT'S SO BRIGHT AND VIVID
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

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Vivid Dream Emerald

Item Level 32
+2 Armor and +2 Versatility

"Matches any socket."

Max Stack: 200

Sell Price: 82 50

Vivid Dream Emerald

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