The legendary meta gems arriving in World of Warcraft's patch 5.2 is the logical follow-up to the legendary gems (Crystallized Dread, Terror, and Horror) which were released with the launch of Mists of Pandaria. However, unlike the previous legendary gems, the legendary meta gems will work inside of any meta slot, not just sha-touched items. The steps required to obtain these legendary gems are currently unknown, but we do know their statistics and a vague idea of how the quests will work out. We'll update the guide with more information as it becomes available.

Legendary Meta-Gem Stats

  • Capacitive Primal Diamond: 324 Crit Rating / Capacitance – Chance on hit to gain 1 charge, at 5 charges hits your current target for (280 + 75% AP) Nature Damage.  15 base RealPPM, no ICD, PPM affected by specialization.
  • Courageous Primal Diamond: 324 Int / Chance to cost no mana on beneficial cast.
  • Indomitable Primal Diamond: 324 Stamina / Chance on being hit to reduce incoming physical damage by 20% for 15 seconds.
  • Sinister Primal Diamond: 324 Crit Rating / Chance on dealing damage to gain 30% spell haste for 10 seconds.
  • Tyrannical Primal Diamond: 665 PvP Power / 775 Resilience (PvP Gem, Obtained through Alternative Method).

Obtaining the Meta-Gems

Well, you'll need to complete all of the previous quests, and then (I Need a Champion) Wrathion will ask you to talk to him upstairs. You'll need to reach Exalted with the Black Prince (From the mobs on Isle of Thunder) and gather some tokens (20 Secrets of the Empire and 40 Trillium Bars) from the Throne of Thunder (Secrets of the First Empire). At which point you'll need to unlock the Thunder Forge (The Thunder Forge) and complete a task, which is presumably to obtain a lance. Then in Spirit of the Storm Lord, you'll kill the new outdoor boss and thrust the Lightning Lance into it before it dies to get the Tempered Lightning Lance.

At this point, it's not really known where the quests go from this point – you'll need to collect some Titan Runestones and defeat the Thunder King. All of the above steps should be able to be done in the LFR, although I'm not 100% sure at this point.

PvP Gem

There is a PvP legendary gem, the Tyrannical Primal Diamond. Blizzard has confirmed that this gem WILL NOT require any raiding to obtain. So have no fear uber elite PvP'ers of the world, you shouldn't have to step into a raid to obtain what looks to be the best PvP meta available for most classes. In addition, my understanding is that the effects from the legendary gems (the procs) are less effective in PvP, so that you don't have near immortal Warriors running around with 20% physical damage reduction.

The Best Gem for the Class

Capacitive is designed for physical DPS, Sinister is designed for magical DPS, Courageous is designed for healers, and Indomitable is designed for tanks. There is a lot of chatter going on about if Capacitance is better for melee than 3% critical strike damage and to be honest, I'm not 100% sure.  The best way I guess is to think it'll proc three times in a minute, so do the math (280 + 75% AP) and see if that's going to run to be more damage than 3% critical strike damage.  One additional note, the attack can crit and uses your spell crit/hit rates. Capacitive also has a coefficient by spec on the proc rate, so it can actually do its damage proc more or less than 3 times per minute. For any class not listed, the proc rate is 15PPM (or 5 damage hits per minute):

  • Assassination: 1.535
  • Combat: 0.99
  • Subtlety: 0.98
  • Feral: 1.934
  • Windwalker: 1.084
  • Beast Mastery: 1.604
  • Marksmanship: 1.594
  • Survival: 1.449
  • Enhancement: 1.093
  • Retribution: 1.923
  • Frost DK (2H): 1.309
  • Frost DK (DW): 1.572
  • Unholy: 1.34
  • Arms: 1.771
  • Fury (TG): 1.784
  • Fury (SMF): 1.951

So you take 15 and multiply it by your spec and that's how many times it should proc per minute. So for instance, a feral druid should see 29 procs per minute, which translates to about five or six actual damage attacks per minute, which is quite nice. You can read more about the methodology of the proc rates and coefficients in the following blue post:

"Q. Why is the PPM different by spec considering that realPPM is supposed to give every class/spec roughly the same proc rate already?

Ghostcrawler: Three reasons. A) RealPPM procs still scale more frequently with haste, which many specs have drastically more or less of. B) The proc that it gives you in this case scales directly with AP, which many specs have drastically more or less of. C) It's not terribly uncommon for A or B (but not usually both) to occur on a trinket, and we can swallow that much variance. And there are typically other options for trinkets if one underperforms for you; there isn't here, and we want the legendary metagems to be equally awesome for everyone. As a sidenote, we didn't do that spec variance yet for the Sinister (caster DPS) one, but are still considering doing so. The situation there doesn't seem quite as skewed as it did for the physical DPS, so we haven't yet, but still very well might. "

We'll have more information about the legendary metagems after the patch goes live! What do you think about these brilliant gems? A grind for nothing or something to make your hat fanciful? Let us know in the comments below.


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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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