Balance Gear Recommendations?

Question from Garrett:

hey friendly, sorry to bother you, but its a question about gear, soloing, etc... and i thought, who'd be better to ask than the great soloing necromancer himself? (besides ditto monster, but he's fire)

anyways, i recently made a balance wizard, and i normally role with fire wizards, so playing him will take some getting use to. on my fire, i can solo some things, but i want my balance to be a soloing machine, and i'm not really good at picking the right gear for my wizards, and i usually go with the crowns gear that gives you loads of health, but... i asked people which gear i should go with, and they said go with the gear that increases your damage, but i tried going with that, and it didnt turn out so well, i'm thinking of just sticking with the gear that gives you a lot of health. do you have any ideas? thank you for listening.

P.S.- i love your blog, read your post every day ;)

Thanks, man!

In most MMOs, poor gear can be compensated with good strategy/timing/skill. And actually, after you get really nice raid-level gear, you can play a little sloppy and still be ok depending on the situation.

In Wizard101, I've found that wearing NO gear can be compensated the same way. So, if you're good with strategy, then you don't really need the best gear out there. If you're not so good, better gear definitely makes things easier, and that's almost always to the tune of more health. It's my number one stat.

After soloing Angus with no clothes on, I can honestly say the things I miss most are Health and Power Pip. So, if you have to choose, those stats are where I'd go . . . unless you're casting outside of your class, then power pip is meaningless. (You really shouldn't be casting outside of your class for damage after Krokotopia.)

Mana is pretty insignificant outside of levels 1-10 . . . most rings come with it bundled with health, so . . . not a worry.

Universal shielding is super nice at high levels if you can get a hold of it, but I wouldn't trade health for universal shielding unless it was a high enough universal shielding and I was taking a lot of damage. For example, say you have a piece of gear with 4% universal shielding alone and you're wondering if that's better than a piece of gear with health alone. You have to figure how much damage you're actually blocking with the universal shielding during a typical fight. Say you take two hits for 400 points of damage each, a 4% universal shielding rating would only block a total of 32 hitpoints of damage . . . you're better throwing down an elemental or spirit shield. Now if you can bump that up to 20-30% universal shielding, that might be a different story. (part of the reason old school crowns gear was so hot.)

You are a balance wizard, so until you get Judgement, your spell damage is average. +damage rating is nice, but not nearly as nice as taking the extra round to blade and trap stack when needed, and because of that, I highly recommend that if you're looking at amulets or pets, go with some gear that has a blade or trap card. Blade cards are definitely > than trap cards . . . especially if you're using "AoE" spells like sandstorm. If you can get your hands on a dragonblade casting balance pet, then you're doing really well!

To recap, here's my order of importance with stats:

1- Health and power pip
2- Blade and trap card gear
3- Damage
4- Universal shielding
5- Class specific shielding (unless you're a death wizard, then move this up to the number three slot)
6- Mana

After a while, when you get up near the Celestia range, you'll find that some of these shift position a bit and you'll start seeing gear with +healing incoming and outgoing and +crit block and +to crit. Pay attention to the amount of power pip percentage your character has because if you go over 90% power pip, then you'll be cheating yourself out of some other stats you could be mixing into your gear profile like these because at this point damage and crit rating will edge over power pip. If you have a pet with spritely (which is highly recommended) and play with healers, then +healing incoming gear will overtake shielding.

*insert small rant: KI seems to have forgotten that death shielding is uber important for death wizards and with some of this new high level gear criting death with no death crit block and with no death shielding, it can make using sacrifice and empower extremely painful*

Hope that helps and thanks for reading. :) Be sure to check the comments for the discussion that's bound to happen.

Happy Dueling!