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  1. #1

    Are They Removing Too Much of the Gear Game?

    Let me first say this is all speculation (just like this entire subforum) at this point, because we don't even have a beta. But just based off some of the things they've announced either as features or ideas they are kicking around I'm a little skeptical about what gear will be like in WoD.

    WoD will be removing Hit, Dodge, Parry, and Expertise. They are reworking haste to scale toward breakpoints. Most armor will detect your spec and give you the appropriate primary stat. Reforging is maybe-probably going away and gems/enchants are going to be more rare and on less gear.

    In return we're getting tertiary stats which Blizzard has said "won't effect class balance". This will go 1 of 2 ways - they most certainly will effect class balance or they will be so minor that they are almost completely ignored in favor of getting the stats you actually need.

    I mean, I agree that spending 1000 gold every time you get an upgrade isn't a great time. Reforging 3+ pieces of gear because you have too much hit is stupid. But it seems like all of this happening all at once will mean that gear becomes more or less irrelevant. As long as you're wearing it, hey, congratulations you're winning! Personally, I largely like the way it is now.

    I play a moonkin and have no alts so I can only speak about my experiences, but I actually do feel like I have choices in the way I customize my gear. Sure, AskMrRobot has its "omg 100% guaranteed optimal" button, but it really is more complicated than that. Right now I have the choice between gemming haste/hit/crit, I've changed leg enchants out to min/max hit rating, the decision to give up run speed to meet the haste breakpoint I'm SO close to is something that has come up. When the internet tells me to give up a bunch of crit to gain more spell power I have to take into consideration that more crit = more starsurges which will up my dps in terms of movement so the sim might not be reliable for some fights. Once I hit certain crit levels int becomes far, far more valuable than the 2-1 secondary-primary rule because I lose too many procs with crit, so I have to judge that while gemming. That sort of thing.

    The other thing I see happening is the reaffirmation in BiS lists - something Blizz has gone on record to say they don't like. If you can't gem or reforge an item to make it more suitable for your needs then it will make all but very specific items undesirable for your spec. For instance, if it were like this today, I would never roll on a mastery piece. Of course the solution there is to even out the value of secondary stats - but doesn't that just add to the problem of blurring the lines between a good upgrade and a bad one, making the actual gearing process even more irrelevant?


    I guess I feel like its not always just a matter of "going to a website, uploading my character, and spending gold" so these systems don't work as intended. I will admit that the current system could use some work and I certainly don't mind hitcap going away, but I think the purposed changes for WoD are going too far in the other direction and gear is running the risk of becoming stale and boring. Maybe that's just me though, i don't know. What do you guys think?
    Last edited by crunk; 2014-02-01 at 03:57 AM.

  2. #2
    I play a moonkin and have no alts so I can only speak about my experiences, but I actually do feel like I have choices in the way I customize my gear. Sure, AskMrRobot has its "omg 100% guaranteed optimal" button, but it really is more complicated than that. Right now I have the choice between gemming haste/hit/crit, I've changed leg enchants out to min/max hit rating, the decision to give up run speed to meet the haste breakpoint I'm SO close to is something that has come up. When the internet tells me to give up a bunch of crit to gain more spell power I have to take into consideration that more crit = more starsurges which will up my dps in terms of movement so the sim might not be reliable for some fights. Once I hit certain crit levels int becomes far, far more valuable than the 1-2 secondary-primary rule because I lose too many procs with crit, so I have to judge that while gemming. That sort of thing.
    This is all cool and stuff but if simcraft tells you that int>crit than you choosing crit is you choosing to be non optimal (unless you are making up for it another way but you seem to be speaking about single target only).


    More on topic : I think those changes are great by themselves and even better all together.

    Hit/Expertise is a bland and boring stat, it doesn't add anything, it doesn't change your gameplay in anyway (except for some rare cases like affli lock at some points these past years) and just allows you to actually play the game. Now you don't have to worry about it and can just focus on the real secondary stats.

    Removing reforging is a tighter subject, it has pros and cons. It's great to remove some of the bad stat you got on your gear but it's an extra step before being able to equip your gear and you have to redo all your reforges when you get a new piece which is tedious (don't care about the cost).
    I also think it gives Blizz an excuse not to try harder to balance secondary stats for each spec because why bother we can reforge away.

    All in all it can turn out as a great change if they balance the stats enough so that we can equip whatever we want, there will still be BiS list but they never disappeared anyway.


    The one thing I'm worried about is WF/gem/tertiary stat, too much RNG has a bad effect on heroic progression and on the competition between guilds. We'll have to wait for drop rates.

  3. #3
    The primary stat thing isn't that big a deal in terms of "the gear game." No spec can use more than one primary stat anymore-- it's not like the old days where plate wearers got crit and dodge from agility.

    It's basically this. You're a moonkin. If you wanted a resto offspec, no problem-- switch specs and you're probably good for casual content. You'd want a real resto set with lots of spirit for anything serious, but it would work if you just wanted a quick LFR queue. If you wanted a guardian offspec, all your gear is worthless and you have to start from nothing to get a set together. So it's basically for the convenience of hybrids who can use different primary stats, so your holy paladin or mistweaver monk can DPS casually (for example, dailies) if they need to without having to keep two full gear sets-- at the worst, they'll want to swap out their trinkets and spirit jewelry. If you're serious, though, the sets will have fixed secondaries, enchants, etc. so you will eventually want unique sets for high end play, in the same way that even a mage or hunter will often keep two gear sets if he uses both specs.

    Also, they are adding new secondaries to replace the removed ones-- new secondaries that are useful to all roles, to facilitate the unification of gear. Hit and expertise were useless to healers, dodge and parry to non-tanks.
    Last edited by Dawnshadow; 2014-02-01 at 04:11 AM.

  4. #4
    @Recom

    yeah, I mean different fights call for different things, I wasn't speaking just single target. "Optimal" means different things in different situations, and while I'm not the kind of guy who regems for every fight I do look at maybe the next handful of fights I'll be progressing on and deciding which way to go. That sort of thing. The way gear is now can facilitate that.


    I didn't even think about all the RNG on item rolls. I've seen my guild go on a losing streak of 5/12 mail pieces in one raid and not a single shaman or hunter in the group. I know that particular instance wont be a problem with Mythic, but I agree bad RNG happens and has the potential to be very frustrating in progression.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by crunk View Post
    @Recom

    yeah, I mean different fights call for different things, I wasn't speaking just single target. "Optimal" means different things in different situations, and while I'm not the kind of guy who regems for every fight I do look at maybe the next handful of fights I'll be progressing on and deciding which way to go. That sort of thing. The way gear is now can facilitate that.
    I hear ya, as an elemental shaman going full mastery while simcraft has haste>mastery for single target.


    Quote Originally Posted by crunk View Post
    I didn't even think about all the RNG on item rolls. I've seen my guild go on a losing streak of 5/12 mail pieces in one raid and not a single shaman or hunter in the group. I know that particular instance wont be a problem with Mythic, but I agree bad RNG happens and has the potential to be very frustrating in progression.
    I suppose you're in a 10m guild ? I'm so glad I joined a 25m for that very reason, fuck 10m loots !

    One thing I forgot to write earlier is that with the new number of players, they may very well tweak how loot drops.
    Bosses in mythic will most likely drop 4 items (remember 25m currently has an additional loot to make up for the hassle it is to maintain it) but the number of different items on one boss will be lower since you don't need to have 2 plate, 2/3 leather, 2/3 mail and 2 cloth but only one of each and some additional tank and heal specific gear. This leaves room for other gear with different stats (and hopefully SOME RINGS god damit) so getting what you want might not be as difficult as it would be today.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by crunk View Post
    WoD will be removing Hit, Dodge, Parry, and Expertise. They are reworking haste to scale toward breakpoints. Most armor will detect your spec and give you the appropriate primary stat. Reforging is maybe-probably going away and gems/enchants are going to be more rare and on less gear.

    In return we're getting tertiary stats which Blizzard has said "won't effect class balance". This will go 1 of 2 ways - they most certainly will effect class balance or they will be so minor that they are almost completely ignored in favor of getting the stats you actually need.
    They're also adding three new secondaries in place of hit, expertise, dodge and parry and reintroducing armor as a stat.
    Tanks will have the same number of secondaries to deal with as they do now, while everybody else actually has more.

    As for BiS lists... do you really believe those were seriously affected by reforging? All it did was change what items appear on the list.
    In WoD however, even though there are items that are nominally "best", your chance of actually getting all(or any, for that matter) of them is miniscule. Since a BiS list is reliant on having all of the gear on it, doggedly following it will be suboptimal play.

  7. #7
    Deleted
    To be honest i think the changes are going to make the game a lot more interesting - reforging is not "fun", and neither are breakpoints or caps. Moreover, it's not particularly exciting when every single player who has the same spec as you is gemming, reforging and enchanting the same stats as you - it just means that gear boils down to being purely about item level and raw power - it doesn't actually affect how you play the game, your rotation/spell choice/etc.

    I've been reading @Celestalon's twitter feed over the past few months and he's mentioned that they want all secondary stats to feel useful to all classes and specs instead of having certain stats which are just vastly underpowered. (Obviously there will always be a "best" stat for every spec), but fun comes from variety IMO. I'm hoping that giving players less freedom to put their own choice of stats on their gear will mean that classes feel less homogeonised. Maybe every spec will be viable with every secondary stat, but the RNG gods would determine whether you need to play a "crit" playstyle or a "haste" playstyle, or a "mastery" playstyle and so on. Maybe in turn that could mean the optimal way to play your character will change as your highest secondary stat changes as you get more upgrades.

    The truth is that times have changed, and players have got far more sophisticated tools and guides available these days compared with TBC when the only resource available were the spreadsheets on Elitist Jerks, and maybe only 5% of the player base actually put in the effort. Min/max'ing has become so much more formal (accessible?) than it used to be that it's now just a standard baked-in way to play the game - i.e. if you don't follow the guide and install the addon then you are considered a "bad" player.

    I think the game needs to evolve towards less predictability in order to make it feel like players are the ones making the decisions. We've reached a point where a "good player" is just someone who installed an addon and followed a guide. Guides and tools will still exist, and they'll still be great for players learning their class, but they will just be guides instead of procedural instructions which dictacte playstyles. Unpredictability and RNG forces players use their own judgement and make their own (informed) decisions rather than blindly following everything dictated on icy-veins/noxxic/AMR and pressing a keybind when an addon flashes up etc.

    Anyway, that's just my opinion

  8. #8
    Your also ignoring the new secondary stats, not just new tertiary stats.

    Overall, we have more stat choice in WoD, with some pretty damn interesting effects.

  9. #9
    Legendary! Vargur's Avatar
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    I can't believe how many people are basing their calculations on simcraft and................. askmrrobot.............
    I personally didn't care how much gold I've spent on reforging, it was part of the "gear game" and it felt awesome. I love micromanaging as much as I love macromanaging, but having things handed on a silver platter is not managing at all and it's bad design. It's either give us all the same skills and no levels or gear and see the true player or give us things to manage, they should never opt for the in between route.
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  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Vargur View Post
    I can't believe how many people are basing their calculations on simcraft and................. askmrrobot.............
    I personally didn't care how much gold I've spent on reforging, it was part of the "gear game" and it felt awesome. I love micromanaging as much as I love macromanaging, but having things handed on a silver platter is not managing at all and it's bad design. It's either give us all the same skills and no levels or gear and see the true player or give us things to manage, they should never opt for the in between route.
    Micromanaging wasn't even hard. It was "Do I have X Haste to get this breakpoint?" and if you had too much you reforged/regemmed out of it into your next best stat, and if you didn't have enough you regemmed/reforged your worst start into it. That was all the micromanagement there was, and all it took was about 30 seconds and a calculator, or about 2 minutes and no calculator.

    How exactly is that interesting or fun? I'd rather them put in new stats that do something interesting instead of just sitting there punching numbers into a calculator to figure out exactly what to gem/reforge, because that was just work where I wasn't actually playing the game.

  11. #11
    You mentioned in your own post that perhaps this is a little too much too soon, but isn't it better to make the full decision and all the changes now, rather then string them out over the course of two / three expansions for the sake of it?

    I'm a little sad to see reforging go, as a Healer it's actually quite nice to be able to balance my own Spirit against Mastery, Critical Strike & Haste, but I understand that for DPS and Tanks, it's more of a chore then an interesting choice.

    I like the idea of the new system. It puts a nicer curve on having an off-set for Dailies or Dungeons, and it also means the new Secondary & Tertiary Stats are going to be a little more exciting.

    - - - Updated - - -

    You mentioned in your own post that perhaps this is a little too much too soon, but isn't it better to make the full decision and all the changes now, rather then string them out over the course of two / three expansions for the sake of it?

    I'm a little sad to see reforging go, as a Healer it's actually quite nice to be able to balance my own Spirit against Mastery, Critical Strike & Haste, but I understand that for DPS and Tanks, it's more of a chore then an interesting choice.

    I like the idea of the new system. It puts a nicer curve on having an off-set for Dailies or Dungeons, and it also means the new Secondary & Tertiary Stats are going to be a little more exciting.

  12. #12
    Epic! Uoyredrum's Avatar
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    It's a change for the better. WoW has too much bloat in a lot of areas, stats being one of them. This will help that.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Toiran View Post
    Overall, we have more stat choice in WoD
    Not really, the "choise" is gone along with reforging. If you want the optimal stats then you just have to grind gear until you get it.

  14. #14
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    Yes. However, very few people actually play the "gear game" and very few people actually find it fun. They just do what robots/Noxxic/hopefully a better guide tell them to, then keep playing.

    Net impact on vast majority of players will be trivial/nonexistent. However, there may be a residual impact like every simplification process, where that lingering sense of awe/intimidation about content & player power gets blunted even further.

    For example, raids used to intimidating and awe-inspiring to the average player. Now, they're queueable faceroll for that same segment. More of the game has been made more accessible to them (good), but some of the sense of investment in the world and the wonder/spectacle/aspiration aspects have been blunted or excised (bad).

    Overall, it's just the march of progress. We're moving towards simpler, less mathy, more quick-and-responsive design in MMOs to accomodate less-invested players or people who go insane spending 30 minutes sorting out enchants when they could be spamming 3. That's not 'good' or 'bad', it's just adaptation.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by VoodooGaming View Post
    I'm a little sad to see reforging go, as a Healer it's actually quite nice to be able to balance my own Spirit against Mastery, Critical Strike & Haste, but I understand that for DPS and Tanks, it's more of a chore then an interesting choice.
    That's pretty much their reasoning for removing it. You can still balance it to a degree through gear choices. But for dps and a lesser degree tanks, it's just a stupid task that costs money for no good reason and is required pretty much every time you get a new piece of gear before you can even use it.

  16. #16
    Deleted
    I'm not entirely sure what the point of removing most enchants and gems is. Removing reforging now that haste, hit and expertise caps are gone is fine by me (and actually preferred maybe even).

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Thorakh View Post
    I'm not entirely sure what the point of removing most enchants and gems is. Removing reforging now that haste, hit and expertise caps are gone is fine by me (and actually preferred maybe even).
    Same thing as reforging, really. Blizz wants you to get stuff and equip it right away, not have to port to town for 10-20min every time.

  18. #18
    They're dumbing gear down like they've dumbed everything else down.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Jengals View Post
    They're dumbing gear down like they've dumbed everything else down.
    No. They are removing redunant stats and adding new ones. If anything the gearing will be more complex now without reforging as well, since you'll be aiming for specific items.

    And seriously, let the 'dumbing down' argument die. The game is better more and more complex as it goes on. If you seriously think gearing resistance and defense is harder then dealing with complex mechanics and multiple abiltiies is dumbing down then I don't know what to say.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Jengals View Post
    They're dumbing gear down like they've dumbed everything else down.
    You may want to read what the new things are before making stupid statements.

    To the OP, no, they aren't removing the gear game. If anything, they are making it more nuanced.

    Yes, they are removing, Hit, Expertise, Dodge and Parry. But we are getting new secondaries in their place:

    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    Readiness: X% Readiness increases the cooldown recovery rate (aka, divides the cooldown by (1+Readiness)) of *some* class abilities. The number of abilities affected by Readiness will vary by spec (will be listed in spellbook, like Mastery). Coefficient likely to vary too.

    Multistrike: X% Multistrike means: Each ability has two separate (X/2)% chances to hit each target an additional time for 30% damage. Multistrikes count as hitting the same target twice with one cast, not multiple casts. (i.e. Mind Blast won't generate 2 shadow orbs) Multistrike is split into two (X/2)% chances, so that you can occasionally get a triple-hit (fun!), and the cap is 200%, not 100%.

    Amplify: X% Amplify means: +X% Crit Damage Multiplier and Multistrike Damage Multiplier, and +X% more Haste/Mastery/Readiness/Spirit/Armor from gear.
    Add in tertiary stats of Cleave, Movement Speed, Sturdiness (less damage to gear), Avoidance (less AOE damage taken), Lifesteal, Health gain on damage taken (don't remember the name of this one, Inspiration or something?) and there are going to be more stats on gear and if you really want to min-max, more things to go after.

    Amplify alone will probably cause more headaches to the players and developers during the course of Warlords. Not to mention Readiness. At what point is it better to stop caring about how much crit, haste and mastery you have and instead focus more on Amplify because it increases all of those stats in addition to crit damage and multistrike damage? How much Readiness is good/needed for progress, especially on tanks and healers for their cooldowns? How good is Multistrike going to be compared to crit and at what point does the synergy of Amplify with these two stats make it better to go with one rather than the other?

    With no reforging, there's going to be lot more theorycrafting on what's the better route to go, and while you can wear an upgrade you get immediately and not worry about how your new gear's stats will interact with the rest of your gear and be fine, if you truly want to min-max, it's going to be quite a lot of math.

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