by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro. I’m Dannie “IAmDiR23” Ray and this is our weekly State of Balance.

What is the single most powerful legendary shoulderpiece?

You would likely have to think about it, right? The same would likely apply for most of our equipment slots, but what about jewelry? In particular, what about our rings?

If I were to ask you what is the single most powerful pair of rings in the game, I’m sure that 95%+ of the answers would be the same: Ring of Royal Grandeur + The Stone of Jordan.

We are going to look at each of these rings individually to see exactly how strong they are and will see if these two are really heads and shoulders away from the competetition.

Stone of Jordan

The Stone of Jordan has a 15-20% to your favorite element, up to 30% Damage against Elites, and if that wasn’t enough it also has +Maximum Resource on its secondaries. The benefits that a Stone of Jordan provides are varied and each one is great on its own. The combination of three affixes that can’t be normally gotten on rings and a great range on the Damage against Elites make the Stone of Jordan a must have for almost every build out there.

Sadly, getting this BiS item is pure RNG. So hopefully you will have a bit of luck and get this godly piece of jewelry  to wear on your favorite finger.

Ring of Royal Grandeur

• Secondary
  • Reduces the number of items needed for set bonuses by 1 (to a minimum of 2).

The Ring of Royal Grandeur (or RoRG) trades a secondary affix for that special gem. Basically, the RoRG counts as a set piece of every set of which you already have two pieces equipped.

So if you had 2-piece Captain Crimson and 2-piece Aughilds, you could just equip the RoRG and you would automatically get 50 All Resistance, 10% Resource Cost Reduction, 15% Damage against Elites, and 15% reduced damage from elites. All of that just for the hefty price of one secondary.

The thing with the RoRG is that it depends of what sets do you have equipped, it can be even more powerful than on the example below but it could also do nothing. The power of the RoRG is extremely relative to your spec and the rest of your gear, but in almost all of the cases it ranges from good to COMPLETELY AWESOME AND BEST IN SLOT!

At least with Royal Grandeur you can sort of “Target Farm” it, but running Act I bounties isn’t an epic boss fight or some interesting quest that has you doing different things all over sanctuary. It is just doing bounties on the same act over and over again and waiting for the RNG gods to cast their blessing upon you.

The Problem With This Pair

SoJ+RoRG is BiS for nearly all builds out there. While there are other really strong items in the game like Reaper’s Wraps, Cindercoat, Harrington’s, etc. None of them feel as mandatory as the Godly Ring Pair. The main reason is that while most of the other items are either super situational, have plenty of good alternatives for them on the slot, or simply are to specific to certain builds; these two rings are awesome in almost every spec you can imagine.

Devaluation of other rings:

If you wanted to wear any ring other than the Godly Pair, you would effectively be paying the cost of opportunity of not having the leet bonuses from one of them. This means that every other ring becomes significantly worse in comparison.

Sets with Rings lose a lot of their luster, and great items like the Band of Rue Chambers, Rogar’s Huge Stone, and the Band of Hollow Whispers; suddenly become a bit of an afterthought.

The Bastions of Will, Focus and Restraint, are a prime example of devaluation. The set bonus is great and would open up very interesting builds. But between their set affixes being unoptimal and the fact that you are losing out on the Godly Pair, that 50% to your spenders looks a lot less interesting that it is.

Why would you want 5o% to your spenders when between the 30% elites damage and 20% elemental damage you have almost made up for it with a single SoJ? When you add in the extra set bonuses from RoRG then the greatly designed Bastions of Will fade into obscurity.

Only really game-changing rings like the Tall Man’s Finger, Unity, and maybe the Wyrdward can give you enough to put your SoJ+RoRG combo on the sidelines for a while.

Hellfire Ring and loss of Content:

The Hellfire Ring is another victim of the godly pair, and with it the entire key-collecting, uber-killing, organ-hoarding mechanics were pretty much worthless for most of the populace. Only the most hardcore of power-levelers would ever consider the Hellfire Ring. It’s not that the ring was worthless, but a combination of being hard to get and not being as good as the Goldy Pair. Those two factors made investing time on the uber minigame very unoptimal, you were better of running Act I bounties for the RoRG.

Patch 2.1 is going to fix that by giving us a BiS Amulet for our uber troubles, but the RoRG’s special ability would’ve been a great fit for an uber-ring.

The Solution

Nobody likes a nerf, so instead of bringing the SoJ and RoRG back in line, we could simple accept that Rings and Amulets are super powerful in comparison to other item slots. The inclusion of jewelry-only  legendary gems further helps this cause. You could easily make some of the other rings more special so that they become contenders,  a +35% block chance would make you think again about passing on a Justice Lantern. A secondary of +10% to int/dex/str/vit on the Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac could be tasty.

Maybe Band of Hollow Whispers can give 15-20% cold damage, while Skull Grasp does the same for Physical Damage. Manald Heal could increase all your healing effects by 20%, and the Band of Rue Chambers could increase Spirit Generation by 80-100%

There a lot of cool stuff that you can do with rings, but we need to restore the balance to our fingers. The Godly Pair is weighing to hard on our hands right now and something needs to be done about.