Is this for real ? (HUGE nerf to secondary stats for ALL specs)

[HumbleDuck]

People's obsession with numbers makes me laugh.
It was required, equipping a 840 while keeping the 885s in your bags was not fun.

[Summer]

People's obsession with numbers makes me laugh.
It was required, equipping a 840 while keeping the 885s in your bags was not fun.

I don't really think the sky is falling or anything but it's not just obsession with numbers. I play a fire mage and for me if 10 % suddenly melts off my crit it means going from "OMG PYROS EVERYWHERE" to "fireball... fireball... fireball.... wonder how many casts I can go without crit.... fireball...). So it's not just a numbers issue, it's a fun issue too. I think a lot of other specs will also run into issues with resource generation suddenly being slow or not being able to reach haste points without drastic measures (such as unequipping legendaries).

I'll wait and see how it turns out before panicking but for sure there should be a blue post up discussing where they're going with this (since we all need to be buffed somewhere else to compensate).

[Tyrgannus]

I'm in favor of this. People throwing away ilvl 895 in favor of ilvl 860 is not what Blizzard had in mind.

[Prometheous]

I'm in favor of this. People throwing away ilvl 895 in favor of ilvl 860 is not what Blizzard had in mind.

Not at all, but there are better ways of fixing it. Like adding main stat back to rings.

[Zapporius]

Bring back weapon skill!

[clevin]

I don't really think the sky is falling or anything but it's not just obsession with numbers. I play a fire mage and for me if 10 % suddenly melts off my crit it means going from "OMG PYROS EVERYWHERE" to "fireball... fireball... fireball.... wonder how many casts I can go without crit.... fireball...). So it's not just a numbers issue, it's a fun issue too. I think a lot of other specs will also run into issues with resource generation suddenly being slow or not being able to reach haste points without drastic measures (such as unequipping legendaries).
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If they do this they'll need to adjust how much things like haste matter. I've just gotten, on my Destro lock, to a place where I have enough haste that Immolate ticks often enough that the 15% chance to generate a shard leaves me with some shards. If they hiked the chance to generate a shard that would keep me at the same place....but if at 858 my shard generation drops back to where it was when I was 830... I'm out.

[Magicpot]

annoying. This will double dip nerf me as resto shaman. On top of reducing my mastery significantly, it'll chunk off my crit too, so I'll have to gear towards more crit to not go oom, losing even more mastery.

[Irian]

This is worrying to me as many classes that are reliant on a secondary are going to receive a drastic nerf from this change, and some classes that struggled at low gear levels are going to struggle even harder now. Looking at all warlocks, ret paladins, shadow priests, moonkins here in particular that I know of.

I'm not going to raise alarm yet but this could spell very bad things for those classes if it goes live without other changes.

[clevin]

Not at all, but there are better ways of fixing it. Like adding main stat back to rings.

It's not just jewelry though. If an item has crit/haste for me the level needs to be at least 10 and more often 15 levels to be better than a piece with Mastery/Vers or a lot of Very and a little crit or haste. The problem is that haste is almost 1:1 with int for me and crit is something like .8 or .9 to 1. So if I drop 250 int but get 300 haste or 350 crit, it's worth it. If I get say, 600 or 800 of a stat like that and drop 300 int? No question.

This also flies in the face of the reasoning behind dropping reforging, gemming and a lot of other things that they argued made gearing too complex. It should almost always be easy to tell if it's an upgrade just by level and it's not.

[ShiyoKozuki]

They want iLevel to be the most important "stat" so that people don't have to wear something 15 iLevels lower because they value one secondary stat over other secondary stats.

Yeah so fun, don't look at a piece of gear and compare it just equip whatever has highest ilvl 100% of the time, woo!

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Then why even have secondary stats, if they're supposed to be irrelevant and ilvl is supposed to be king?

Let's just get rid of all stats and have iLvl be the only number on gear.

This is how I feel as well. Why not remove the tooltip from gear and replace it with "ILVL: X"? No reason to show stats.

[Raxz]

I concur with the "nerf to fun" sentiment. Frost DK has an annoying amount of downtime if you don't have enough haste. Or like... DK in general. And many other classes have similar issues.

If they're going to nerf secondaries from gear, they need to front load them more, so that it's not hard to reach these bare minimum levels required for your class to play right. Yet they are actually nerfing baseline secondary stats on the PTR. (See: all Agility classes, shamans getting their haste talent nerfed from 10% to 6%, etc.) How can they so blindly do the exact opposite of what needs to happen?

Also another approach to make ilvl stronger would have just been to make all secondaries more useful to all classes, by giving everyone different weights (i.e. fire mages like crit a LOT, so make haste, mastery, and vers give more for fire mages than usual but not so much that crit is no longer their favorite) but I guess this would be more complicated.

[clevin]

Yeah so fun, don't look at a piece of gear and compare it just equip whatever has highest ilvl 100% of the time, woo!

The problem is that you need to do a fair bit of math or use something like Pawn just to see if something is better. 5 Ilevels? Fine. But 10+ and it might a side grade or downgrade? That's silly.

This is how I feel as well. Why not remove the tooltip from gear and replace it with "ILVL: X"? No reason to show stats.

You'r both being childish. There's a range from completely overpowered to irrelevant and for most of its life, WoW has put secondaries in the right part of that range - important, but with the primary stat being definitely better. It's one thing when 1 int is worth 2 crit. Crit still has value there, but it's not challenging Int. When they'e 1:1, you get silly things like higher level gear from harder content being a downgrade.

[einaschern]

Yeah so fun, don't look at a piece of gear and compare it just equip whatever has highest ilvl 100% of the time, woo!

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This is how I feel as well. Why not remove the tooltip from gear and replace it with "ILVL: X"? No reason to show stats.

It's because people are used to equipping higher ilvl because even if it wasn't preferred stats, it usually came out to an upgrade. Stat weights were wonky, but not this wonky (for many classes).

That and with ilvl being the easy judge of someone's gear, people will tend to prefer it. People think "I may do more DPS wearing 870 gear, but groups won't take me unless I'm 880, so I wear 880."
Whether that's wrong or right is another discussion, but that's why ilvl matters to a lot of folks.

[laplacedemon]

They can't stop inflating gear is the problem.

In WoD, ICC heroic 25 man dropped 277 and launch heroic raids dropped 200.

In Legion, launch heroics drop 825 and we already have 890 geared chars, so they've already progressed as much as toons did in the entire lich king expansion.

They just need to slow their roll with the ilvl jumps.

It might seem big when you only look at the numbers, but percentage-wise 200 to 277 is a 38.5% difference, while 825 to 890 is a 7.8% difference.

[Emerald Archer]

Yeah so fun, don't look at a piece of gear and compare it just equip whatever has highest ilvl 100% of the time, woo!

Anyone with basic knowledge knows that won't be the case at all.. It's going to stop things that are like 40ilvls higher being a downgrade. Anything 5-10ilvls higher or lower will still have to be thought about.

On my MM hunter, if I have an 880 Mastery>Haste piece, and have an 885 Vers>Crit piece drop, i'm damn well still going to take the 880.

It's just preventing that shit feeling for people like fire mages "I really want to replace this 840 chest piece, but it's got crazy good stats for me, i'll farm mythics all week.. ok nothing i'll do a mythic 10+ and hopefully my end of week chest has something good," *week finishes* *Opens chest* "880 chest piece! oh wait.. worst stats.. so it's not actually an upgrade.."

That's a terrible feeling.

[Arborus]

As a Boomkin with Emerald Dreamcatcher, already having a hard time to reach haste breakpoints without sacrificing much of the other stats\int\ilvl, this worries the shit out of me.

Not really excited of going back to shitty haste levels after struggling to reach a decent 34% haste value.

While I agree that it's a pain to juggle gear to hit the breakpoints- 34% is quite a bit more than what's needed for 2x Wrath. If you have latency issues- setting lag tolerance to something higher (I use 500ms) has helped me to get 2x Wrath at more or less the exact breakpoint.

[Heladys]

Then why even have secondary stats, if they're supposed to be irrelevant and ilvl is supposed to be king?

You might want to invest in a dictionary. They aren't intended to be irrelevant, they're intended to be *secondary*.

[volescue]

People's obsession with numbers makes me laugh.
It was required, equipping a 840 while keeping the 885s in your bags was not fun.

This doesn't really fix that. If the 885 still has haste on it and your class needs crit to get to a baseline, you will still be picking the crit. If anything, it means you may have to sacrifice even more higher ilvl pieces because hitting that baseline is even more difficult.

[Deleted]

to be fair at the moment a Chest item with a socket is worth 25 ilvls over one without a socket for fire mages.

No it isn't. it's more like 10 levels, assuming it's the same item. Though that's an unlikely conundrum since the bis fire gear is from m+ anyway where you're unlikely to land the same piece that way.

[adamzz]

People's obsession with numbers makes me laugh.
It was required, equipping a 840 while keeping the 885s in your bags was not fun.

Nerfing all secondary stats won't fix that. It will just make classes that rely on crit or haste breakpoints bad and unfun to play. And since you get less crit and haste you need to stack even more crit or haste gear to reach those breakpoints.

This change makes the problem worse not better.