What Jewelry for Lowbies now?

[Elfdruidess]

Dmg Shield and Regen were the big hits. AC isn't really that important for lowbies since with modern lowbie gear/augs nearly all of them are well above the AC hard cap (it doesn't become a soft cap until level 51).

AC hard cap aside, I guess you're right that AC can match 1st patch at a much lower player level than HP/Mana Regen.

After 1st patch, only AC available before reaching Staurolite at lvl 55, is Peridot with 10 AC.

After 2nd patch, by Gold (rec lvl 20, 30% of full stat), you can get back the 10 AC with Peridot + Taaffeite (10 AC + 25 AC = 35 AC, 30% = 10 AC). It does mean a Taaffeite is needed for a lvl 20. But at least it's doable.

Whereas with HP/Mana regen, although Sapphire and Ruby are now changed to 10 from the original 7, by Gold (rec lvl 20, 30% of full stat), you can only get 3 HP/Mana regen, or only 43% of the original 7.

You need to get to Velium (rec lvl 50, 60% of full stat) to almost match 1st patch with 6 regen or Palladium (rec lvl 60, 80% of full stat) to surpass 1st patch with 8 regen.

However:

I consider using any HP aug (even if it's a Taaffeite) in slot 11 for a lowbie as a waste of the extremely precious 8 slots which should all be reserved for Regen and DS.

Therefore, I would only consider Peridot in slot 10 for AC. In this case, Gold (rec 20) will only yield 3 AC, Platinum (rec 35) 4 AC and Velium (rec 50) 6 AC. This is why I consider AC (again, hard cap aside) being hit hard by the 2nd patch.

- Edit -

In case you think I only have melees in mind, I leveled a shaman to lvl 25 with HP regen and DS exclusively. Even when I leveled a necro to lvl 40 a few expansions ago, I was using a Tolapumj's Robe and a low delay weapon.

[Elfdruidess]

This method leaves you a choice (if you want to put on Dwerium at 64 you can), but it's a silly choice (made slightly less so because Dwerium is much more common that Palladium).

Icon Fashion choice as well . For those who prefer Purple over Green, they may want to change to Purple as soon as the stats are acceptable. (Wonder how many people are as Icon Fashion conscious as that. At least I am :P.)

What that means is all of the settings below Dwerium are really just there to give tradeskillers something extra to make (and sell). They could have just made Dwerium a standard unscripted recommended level 70, removed all the lower metals, and gotten mostly the same results as we ended up with.

And miss all the Icon Fashion fun? Look at all these colors you can level up with: http://lucy.allakhazam.com/itemlist....rchtext=+trio+

[Bobaten]

I admit, having only made dwerium/palladium prior the the patch, when I logged in and made my level 52 warrior a set of velium trios on Wednesday my first thought was "ooh, pretty".