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

[Alvito]

Then they should add primary stats to necks and rings if they really want to do this, a lv 895 ring without crit is still inferior to a lv 845 one with crit for fire mage

Almost any piece of gear without crit is inferior to a much lower item with crit, int on the item or not.

- - - Updated - - -

Getting Ilvl back to being king is good.

If every class gets nerfed due to rebalancing sec stats, its just numbers and no real change in the big picture.

The whiners whine about any change every time - regardless.

When everybody gets nerfed in the same way across the board it isn't bad for people further along in progression. For newer toons or players still progressing at lower versions of raids mythic + this is going to be a big hit.

[Spirthealer]

to hell with secondary stats anyway, should do away with them.

haste is the only cool one.

so nerf them until they no longer exist, just main stats forever.

And this is why we have a facebook based game... because to hell with depth and game play lets just make it a 2 button smash and loot...

[DisposableHero]

So, I think someone forgot to tell blizzard that sprinkling a 10% blessing of kings back into the game on a few classes and a consumable from an underused profession would have accomplished the same thing with none of the butthurt.

[Mawnix]

And this is why we have a facebook based game... because to hell with depth and game play lets just make it a 2 button smash and loot...

Ah yes because a spec completely depending on secondaries to be viable is certainly a well of depth. Truly.

[Deleted]

Getting Ilvl back to being king is good.

If every class gets nerfed due to rebalancing sec stats, its just numbers and no real change in the big picture.

The whiners whine about any change every time - regardless.

What you don't seem to realize is the impact on gameplay secondary stats could have. If it was the case that all secondary would have an impact similar to versatility, I would agree with you, it's just number. But truth is haste, crit and mastery can change a way a spec or talent plays. Just jump in pvp or timewalking dungeon to realize this.

[Sansnom]

They want/need to make primary stats (Str, Agi, Int) more important. As far as effect on dps, they have not balanced anything yet. So they could easily change other factors to make up for any loss. (I know, this is way too optomistic considering it's Blizz - but in theory...)

I thought the whole purpose of the original change was to make secondary stats important. Now they are saying primary stats then secondary, which could potentially means going back to primary stats and not caring about secondary stats too much.

What this tells me is that Blizzard, not the for first time, does not really know what they what to do and keeps flip flopping. Left. Then right. Left again. Back to right.

[Mawnix]

I thought the whole purpose of the original change was to make secondary stats important. Now they are saying primary stats then secondary, which could potentially means going back to primary stats and not caring about secondary stats too much.

What this tells me is that Blizzard, not the for first time, does not really know what they what to do and keeps flip flopping. Left. Then right. Left again. Back to right.

They said this at Blizzcon this year and nearly everyone agreed. This isn't something random. We've known for nearly a month now something was coming.

[Thagrynor]

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.

Well, the main problem forcing this issue is that when you have 1234895723048957029384523 difficulties of the same content, each higher difficulty needs to have more powerful gear, otherwise, why bother with the harder challenge? This means that gear will inflate faster and faster and faster. In ICC, you had basically 2 difficulties (normal and heroic, though one could argue it was 4 since there were unique challenges for both 10m and 25m versions of each of those 2 difficulties) and within those 2, you had a much smaller difference in ilvl. The change is now because each tier has so many difficulties, they need to start the next tier at much higher than before since they need to make Normal basically higher than Heroic and Heroic better than the previous Mythic. If they don't, there is no incentive to run the new "harder" raids since the gear would be a downgrade from the further progressed earlier "easier" raids.

Short of removing difficulties (which they should do anyway, I mean, really, this is a little out of hand), they can't really stop inflation.

[Justpassing]

Might aswell just remove all stats but ilvl.

[Puri]

I think it's justified. This is the first tier of content in Legion and a lot of my characters have stat percentages comparable to what they had during Hellfire Citadel in WoD.
We've still got Nighthold, Tomb of Sargeras and Argus Raid to go. Secondary stats are going to be absolutely nuts by the end of the expansion unless Blizzard does something about it.

It's completely justified, but that's not the point. Reaching 50%+ crit on my firemage before stepping into a single raid was ridiculous.

But this did not happen completely unexpected. In the beta forums people complained about secondary stats being stronger than primary stats, the stat weights for many classed did not change at all since the later beta.

No, the point is simply that they change such thing mid-xpac, and that will have great influence on classes and specs. It should never have gone live as it did, but making such gamebreaking changes mid expansion is just a big no-go from my side. Even if they buff primary stats, it still will screw spec balance.
So we have - what Blizzard said they want to avoid - that people might regret spending large amounts of AP (and therefor time) into a spec that became less competitive.

They should just live with the mistake (btw, during Wotlk with the itemlevel inflation something similar happened - remembering the "I am now at the armor pen and crit hardcap, should I go for 100% hast first or put everything into mastery" threads), and give the players that amount of power and tune the encounters around that. I also firmly believe that the relative player strength during wotlk made this xpac so favoured among players (obviously also with the negative sides of clearing dungeons with 50 itemlevel more than they were created for and complaining afterwards that they were too easy).

[rda]

No, the point is simply that they change such thing mid-xpac, and that will have great influence on classes and specs. It should never have gone live as it did, but making such gamebreaking changes mid expansion is just a big no-go from my side. Even if they buff primary stats, it still will screw spec balance. So we have - what Blizzard said they want to avoid - that people might regret spending large amounts of AP (and therefor time) into a spec that became less competitive.

They should just live with the mistake (btw, during Wotlk with the itemlevel inflation something similar happened - remembering the "I am now at the armor pen and crit hardcap, should I go for 100% hast first or put everything into mastery" threads), and give the players that amount of power and tune the encounters around that.

Yes, the root of it all is that they made a wrong decision. I guess the biggest lesson is that - however boring this sounds - they should listen to the beta testers more and test more themselves. Because mistakes like this are costly - there really is no good way out now, they are going to have either one fairly big issue or another fairly big issue.

Maybe indeed they should just live with the mistake, like you say. But I'd leave it to them, it is possible they see something that is not readily apparent to us here (mainly what's going to happen in further tiers), that makes fixing the mistake or half-fixing it better than not doing that.

[Mawnix]

Maybe indeed they should just live with the mistake, like you say. But I'd leave it to them, it is possible they see something that is not readily apparent to us here (mainly what's going to happen in further tiers), that makes fixing the mistake or half-fixing it better than not doing that.

Tbh the fact that I'm already sitting at 25% crit, 23% Haste, 38% Mastery, etc. is pretty problematic to me as a DK.

And that's without any of my trinkets having a secondary stat associated with them outside of their procs (Angerboda, Nightmare Eggshell).

I still recall back to Wrath when I was sitting at a flat 20% Haste following gemming and BIS gear. I'm surpassing that the first tier of this expansion.

I mean, if they're not reduced, you're right: what's going to happen in the next few tiers? Nighthold up to Mythic boosts gear another 20 iLevels. Tomb will likely follow the trend of increasing loot by 30. Argus raid is another 30.

If we're already at this point, we're going to have incredibly high stat inflation later. I think this is a "bandaid" solution if anything since they need to go deeper and reevaluate how each class values secondaries, but it's better than having so much inflation it harms a spec more than aiding it.

FYI, I'm supposed to be at 20% Haste as a Frost DK and if not that, 32%. Like.. there's no middle ground. It's annoying.

[Thagrynor]

Getting Ilvl back to being king is good.

If every class gets nerfed due to rebalancing sec stats, its just numbers and no real change in the big picture.

The whiners whine about any change every time - regardless.

This isn't the case though. Some classes are less reliant on secondary-stat based procs. For example, my Enh Shaman will lose a fair deal of Mastery because of this change. At 82-84% Mastery (which is where I am at now), I get a decent number of Stormbringer procs to allow Stormstrike, which is where a huge amount of my damage comes from. With this change, I will drop roughly 10% Mastery. When running Timewalking dungeons, I drop down to about 71% Mastery and trust me when I say that the difference in the number of procs can EASILY be felt. There are some boss fights I go without seeing a single proc in Timewalking. And I know that RNG is RNG, but when the difference of 10% makes a very noticeable difference in procs and thus, in over DPS, it will start to impact the fun because I won't be able to put out the DPS I was, which means losing access to certain content due to lower DPS, which means fewer opportunities for fun.

This isn't a "no harm, no foul, everyone is just adjusted down numbers wise" situation. This isn't a "stat squish" like they did before. It is a straight nerf to certain stats in an effort to make others more important. Now, I am hoping they adjust proc rates/proc growth to make up for it, but I seriously doubt that since that will simply magnify the problem even more. The only way to force the issue with higher ilvl > lower ilvl is to make is to make primary stats worth much more (in their conversion to AP/SP and to the secondary categories via increasing how much crit/haste/whatever a stat gives) and adding the primaries back to jewelry. To combat the whole "we don't want jewelry to only be rolled on by certain classes due to primary", just make all jewelry have swapping primaries between all 3 primaries. They've done this on gear before, so I don't see how that is an issue. Then, all classes will still be able to roll and it will still make primaries the guiding light when it comes to gear, which means ilvl will be more important again. They would also need to add primaries to all trinkets to ensure that high ilvl is better, unless they are ok accepting that a couple slots will be open to the "lower ilvl is better than higher ilvl" situation we are currently in.

[Zimakai]

My only question is, how does this resolve neck and ring slots that don't have main stats? It would not solve the lower item level problem on those slots.

[DagrDK]

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

Exactly this. Put main stats back on rings and necks. That way, an 895 neck with so-so stats will be used because it has 200+ strength over the 850 piece with perfect stats. Screwing with secondary stats across the board does nothing but screw with everyone's breakpoints.

[Viking]

Another change that will accomplish nothing in the broad scheme. Nothing is fun like blanket nerfs that make your character weaker for arbitrary reasons that aren't even addressed by said nerf.

[bewbew]

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.

Agreed.

I also think they will rise the ilvl of Normal and Heroic Nighthold, because these are about to become obsolete before the raid even opened.

[Sabii]

Blizzard says at blizzcon and a QA they want ilvl to be more important than secondary stats. Say they're going to fix this in 7.1.5.

Puts plans in to motion, people think it was a ninja change and came out of no where.

[tikcol]

This just proves it. This dev team, objectively can't balance WoW. Horrific job so far.

[Drobu]

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.

They really need to slow down the power creep. I would guess that is a big part of their tuning issues. When players go 70+ item levels in 3 months after an expansion launch rather than 70 item levels over the course of an expansion, you're going to have issues. And there have been several tuning adjustments already.