Long time PvE player, but have never played PvP and have seen areas that require PvP in order to advance (such as some rafting items which have materials that appear to only be available through PvP). QUESTION: Do I start into PvP with the same gear used in PvE? I have seen there is gear from PvP vendors which Ican only assume is for the improvement of PvP, but I want to know how to best start off...

for many (most?) specs you would use the same gear in PVP that you have been using in PVE. for example I use Death Knell for sin/shadow regardless of the pve or pvp.

 

so for a starting point, assuming you have your set bonus and 306 gear you are starting in a good place. some stat allocations may be different for your spec between PVE and PVP if you min/max but you likely already have the gear you want for PVP.

 

the biggest thing I would verify is your tactical is what you want for PVP. Vuulk has some good guides to check out.

remove accuracy and replace with crit down to (105% acc with stim). if you don't have any important weapon/white damage attacks, you can drop all acc enh/augs. all the classes I currently play use both, so I haven't tried going without acc.

 

I believe mastery isn't capped in pvp the way it is in pve either, so there's no threshold.

 

basically, burst is everything in pvp, so crit is most important to 3.5k (iirc). there's a post around here discussing the stat.