No srsly... who stole my headers!?

Sooooooo, a fat lot of nothing is going on on both Live and Beta right now, so I figured we would talk about some data-mined nonsense. First and foremost, they have introduced the engineering helmets (though no one on the beta is an engineer, as far as I can tell) and their stats are somewhat insane. For instance, the Agile Bio-Optic Killshades (probably the funniest name ever, btw) have 341 Agility on them as well as ... wait for it ... 512 stamina. While we do not see any secondary stats (haste, mastery, etc), we sort of assume we WILL see those stats on there before too long. However, the main point of bringing all this up is to make mention that they have 3 sockets in them: a Meta socket (like all helms), a "cogwheel" socket and a "hydraulic pump" socket.

Those last two might be weird sounding, but the idea is simple: Engineers are going to have the ability to make helm-only-gems which fit, presumably, only in helm sockets. Cogwheels give you useful secondary stats (such as Crit, Haste, Mastery, or Dodge) and Hydraulic Pumps give you less-useful secondary stats (such as Hit, Parry, Expertise... and spirit randomly... though we may see Spell Penetration here as well). What is really interesting about all this is that these bonuses are roughly twice as much as epic-quality JEWELER'S-ONLY gems of the same stats (think Dragon's Eye of Cataclysm); for instance, the Haste gem for jeweler's only (we're talking the "limit 3" gems here which are better than epic-quality gems) is worth 67 haste rating, whereas the "Quick Cogwheel" gives 132 haste rating.

I don't know how they plan on implementing this permanently, given that non-engineering gear will not have a Cogwheel and/or Hydraulic Pump socket, but I assume it will be something like an enchant that Engineers get which allows us to add one of these sockets to a piece of gear in place of an enchant. In this way it will be very similar to Leatherworkers and their "Fur Lining" or w/e.

In addition, the epic-quality Blacksmithing weapons have been data-mined as well. Normally, I wouldn't talk about this, but since Feral is getting DPS FROM DPS on weapons finally and we care less about Feral Attack Power (since it won't exist in Cataclysm), we might as well get the polearm, right? The Elementium Poleaxe has 623.3 dps, 341 agility, 512 stamina, 228 critical strike rating, and 228 mastery rating. Would we have enjoyed Haste more than Critical Strike Rating; sure, but this gives us a balance-point to talk about with stats.

What do I mean? Well, the Wrathful Greatstaff has 325.8 dps, 167 agility, 275 stamina, 2 sockets, 106 critical strike rating, and 122 resilience rating on it. We can see while we are gaining 82 item levels, we are also gaining almost 300 dps on the weapon itself, as well as nearly doubling the stamina and critical strike rating. While it is true that the Greatstaff has two sockets... we're talking about the entry-level blacksmithing pattern here; this item looks nutty. I guess I should become friends with a main-spec'd Blacksmith...

Anyway, I'm really getting excited for Cataclysm. I am roughly DONE with Wrath; there is really nothing much left to do. I decided yesterday that I would work on a Resto set just to say I had 5/5 of all three specs... I can't wait for Feral to be somewhat more viable in PvP and at least be back to a point in time where balance-patches come out with some regularity. The last patch we had was Ruby Sanctum... the last patch that affected game-play (particularly as it pertains to PvP) was ICC. This expansion has gotten stale and we still have a few months to go...