Intellect Plate: Ideas for the future.

WoW Insider has an article about intellect plate that bears looking at. Spell plate has always been the odd-man out in itemization for WoW, serving a single spec among 30 (soon to be 34.) In Wrath and Cataclysm, Blizzard's done a fine job of paring down the types of gear found throughout Azeroth. At this point, we have Spirit Cloth, Hit Cloth, Agility Leather, Intellect Leather, Agility Mail, Intellect Mail, Strength Plate, Tank Plate, and Intellect Plate. It's fairly elegant, actually, compared the bizarre mishmash we used to have (I remember trying to find tanking gear with + spell damage on it as a non-raider in Burning Crusade.)

While Balance and Druid Restoration have been able to merge gear types, and likewise Elemental and Shaman Restoration, there's no other plate-wearing spec that cares about intellect at all nowadays. So what's to be done? We've all been in runs where we get a million different intellect plate pieces and even the Paladins don't roll because they're Prot/Ret or Ret/Prot - or the Holy Paladin in the group got it long ago because there's no gear competition for stuff that's only made for you.

• Do nothing: This is actually a serious option. While Paladin healers are one spec among 30, the Paladin is certainly a popular class. There's also a population (albeit one that is shrinking) that still think of Paladins as healers first and foremost (something I used to be vehemently opposed to on principle - I'm a tank, damn it!) Though the gear is useless to most people, it is still used.
• Find another spec that can use it: One of the major oversights, I thought, in the design of the Death Knight class was that they only went with two of the four basic group roles (Tank, Healer, Melee, Caster.) Death Knights have a history in the lore as spell-casters. Though I love the Death Knight class as it is now, if I had a time machine (and had exhausted all the more important things I'd do with it) I would go to Blizzard and suggest they make Blood the melee dps spec, Frost the tank spec, and Unholy the ranged caster spec. Slap some intellect plate on those bad boys and BAM - you've got another spec to use that gear and you're filling a role that doesn't exist - a ranged dps plate spec.
• Have Holy Paladins just wear Mail: This is an option many people have put forth, but it's one I'm strongly opposed to. The identity of a class is tied to its armor, particularly Paladins - who are "knights in shining armor." You can't tell healing paladins that they now have to be "knights in jangling armor." It also means that you'd have to have tier pieces that look identical but are of different armor types. Plus, I'm sure the caster/healer shamans don't really want the competition.
• Find a way to make DPS plate work for healers: You'd need a lot of passive bonuses to make this work. Theoretically, you could give Holy Paladins a kind of reverse 4.3 Mental Quickness (which makes Enhancement shamans only get spellpower from attack power, making intellect useless to them) that converted Strength to Intellect, but totally cut down their attack power so that they wouldn't be able to heal at full power while simultaneously smashing people's heads in.

Blizzard's managed to do some impressive work cutting down on the types of gear they need to create to make everyone happy. Who knows what the future holds? Perhaps some day we'll all be playing our Battlemages, casting spells at our enemies while a Demon Hunter tanks and a Monk heals (I'm most confident in that last one.)