First of all, my healers are all exceptional players, and have never had an issue keeping me up, so I'm free to be a little more...inventive with my builds. Thus far I'm playing a full healer build maximizing self heals to aleviate the damage a bit more as I socket/gear for more damage than survivability.

Looking at the gear from Ulduar (10 man) I noticed the armor penetration on the gloves from Ignis, and the idea of stacking ArP crossed my mind. So far I've been gemming expertise to hit close to hard cap (47 atm with food buffs), and with the potential leg drops of Auriela (sp), helm off Freya and some of the tier pieces it looks like I'll be able to hit hard cap without sacrificing my gem slots.

I'm debating if it would work to replace the reds with ArP or strength gems to up my DPS. I was thinking about dropping my monarch crab or Shard of Contempt (maly trinket won't drop for me) for a grim toll (to also compensate for the hit loss from the expertise upgrades), and see if I can push a decent amount of armor pen instead.

The only issue I believe is if my base AP (currently just short of 3300 unbuffed) is too low for armor pen to start pulling ahead of strength, or the fact that ArP gems only provide roughly 1.3% penetration per gem (giving me around 7-8% fully socketed). With the grim toll proc though it could be a nice bit of burst damage to go along with hysteria, if anything.


Any thoughts?