Anyone else really miss reforging?

[Deleted]

This is a response from someone I would definitely never give a trial to.

Just reading the responses like these, from all the sheep who go and read a guide on how to play their char and attempt to follow the steps exactly .... that's fine, you guys do win, the developers took great strides to make sure the game was dumbed down for you.

Come on now, you act like there was a choice when there wasn't most of the time.
Most if not every class has its goto stat. For instance, haste for frostmage and crit for firemage. Everything else was gimping yourself. This is not being a sheep, this is simply optimalisation.
It would make even less sense now to go something different cause of the passive boost to a certain stat for each spec.

[Bigcountry11782]

DO i miss reforging.....NOPE!!!!

[Nutri]

Nope!

but one could argue if it really had to go with the removal of hit/exp. Could have still been useful.

Now it's like the good old days. Pack an enchant and gems in your bags and equip that upgrade right away.

[DechCJC]

No, now when I suck ass I can feel good knowing that there's nothing I can do about it except practice, rather than constantly think over what stupid changes I can make to my gear to perform better.

Having said that, it does kind of suck to have a lot of a stat that's pretty worthless to me - It makes me feel like the spec is balanced around the usage of all of your secondary stats but in some cases they're really awkward and worthless to use so I feel like i'm losing a huge chunk of my effective dps just because (i'm looking at you, MM hunter mastery for PvP).

[Serissa]

Is this stat 0.000001% better than other? ok reforge everything to this stat. Oh did this new chest changed stat weight? ok re-reforge everything to new stat.

Horrible design is horrible. /facepalm

[pyrostorm9001]

Happy its gone!

[Fkiolaris]

Reforging did have some good uses that many people ignore for whatever reason. On top of my head, from the classes/specs I was playing, it was very useful for frost dks and destro locks.

Frost dks as you all know can either be DW or 2H. Back in November when I stopped playing, these two playstyles (that are within the same spec) had completely different stat priorities for the secondaries: for 2H haste was king and you did not want any mastery, while for DW it was the other way round. So if you preferred one playstyle over the other, but got unlucky with the weapon drops (ie you got significantly higher ilvl weapons of the other style) then reforging was there to help you make the transition without having to re-gear 100%. Case in point, I had a 476 2H and I got 4 (yes, four) 1H weapons of 516+ to drop from HSc and raids before I got another weapon from SoO. With reforging, I swapped my stats in the meantime and kept playing without gimping myself. In WoD I am not sure how significant (and significantly different) the secondary stats are, but if they are as before then a Frost DK in the same scenario will either have to ignore 4 good drops or play as a gimped character until they re-gear on practically all slots.

So yes, in that respect, reforging will be missed.

[Nightcrwler]

Mixed feelings. With Hit/Exp gone it would have made it less of a pain. I'm going to miss stacking haste :-(

[Deleted]

I thought i would miss it, but now that is gone.. no, not really. In hindsight it was pretty more of a chore than a helpful tool.

[Deleted]

If crit = haste = mastery for each spec then reforging would have actually been interesting to alter gameplay focus, but since it was obvious certain stats were just crap and others were the dominant ones for each spec it really did not add anything to gameplay for me.

[Lord Havik]

I look at my druids gear, and want to reforge all of it so badly.

If I could change just one thing about wow, it would be to bring back reforging. I seriously miss it that much.

Am I alone in this?

I miss it as I do not think Blizzard is capable of balancing classes around which gear is available and most of the stats on WoD raid gear is iffy at best for my particular choice of class and spec.

Reforge was a way for classes which were gimped by bad itemization to self balance through reallocation of part of an undesirable stat to one which is desirable.

Some may believe its removal was good because now they can just wear whatever they find and it will be fine. They are wrong. They are now completely at the mercy of itemization (which stats are on the available gear) and will have to essentially do everything they had to do for reforge (look up a website, punch in their character, get optimization info) only now, it applies to entire pieces of gear rather than individual stats. Now BiS lists are the new askmrrobot and are mandatory. Don't get the drop you needed? The items you need don't drop til the last boss? Too bad, you are now a drag on your team because your selected class, spec or role can't get what it needs to be viable.

To make matters much worse, if Bliz decides to change your class so that some stat you were stacking is suddenly devalued, you will have to get an entirely new set of gear rather than simply reforging what you had. Classes which value mastery and have no mastery on their tier will be drastically handicapped compared to those which have tier which matches their best stats. etc. Now, Bliz has tried to convince us that now all the stats are close enough together that it does not matter, but that is simply not the case. Check any simulation and you will see that each build has a best stat and a worst stat; some of which are separated by 1-2 whole points. (Difference between roughly equal stats are measured at less than .10 points difference) Which means that many specs will have stats which are just utterly worthless, even detrimental, but are forced to take items with those awful stats because that is all that was on the raid's loot table.

And of course you will still have to gem and enchant your new items should you get something with a gem socket and/or can be enchanted. If you thought you would never again be called out for not being gemmed/enchanted, think again. In fact, gem, enchant, flask, potion and food choices are far more important in WoD than in MoP; with fewer gem/ench slots and classes having specific food and flask needs (no longer just picking your primary stats). In WoD, you may be just as likely to be called out for not using/buying the right food/flask as you are to be called out for not having the right enchant or gems. The primary reason for this is the inability to stack optimal stats via reforging and so you must gain that stat through other, consumable means.

It's a gold/time dump with or without reforging. I preferred having it as opposed to simply not being given the option.

[Deleted]

good players miss it, bad players don't.

Sweeping generalisations R us.

Bad players don't even realize that all of these tools that they blindly used to have tell them what they needed to do were made by theorycrafting in the first place, which isn't always correct and didn't account for in game fight mechanics or game play preferences. Reforging would be especially useful now, with haste breakpoints and hit/exp cap gone.

You also have this backwards. In the first place reforging was an NP-complete problem. Which means there is no known way to compute the answer from a simple forumula. The only way to work out the best solution was to try all of them and see which one is best. When you're using an addon it's not doing that as your computer would slow to a crawl while it figured out the answer, all of the answers thrown up by sites like Robot or addons were worked out elsewhere and the answers stored in a lookup table, or they were approximations. When you start looking at breakpoints for stats, and when each piece of gear can have 4 or so reforgeable stats then you start having to do a *lot* of calculations.

[tl:dr - as there was no simple way to figure out the best answer, all of the answers were 'fuzzy' ones]

yes while theory crafters could get it wrong, as lots of them are doing the theorycrafting and there is no better sport that geeks love on the internet than finding out where someone else is wrong and pointing it out (see internet forums) errors were corrected pretty quickly.

Reforging was most useful in working out break points. "What is the best possible way to forge my gear so I hit this cap/breakpoint *exactly*" Now that those have gone away reforging is much simpler and comes down to "whats my best stat, how do I get the most of it" - which is pretty straightforward to do when we have the choice of I need crit - this gear has x crit and this one has y crit y>x and the other stats are the same.

One last point. Unless you are in a top 10 guild and really pushing progression then getting the absolutely best possible reforge didn't matter. i) the answers you got weren't exact anyway, and ii) the difference in DPS/HPS/DTPS etc between the best setup and the next 10 best setups was tiny. Probably less than the difference between the 2nd best food and the best food for one person in a 10 man raid. Like fudge a little of the encounters movement so you lost a couple of GCDs in a 10 minute fight, that would have been a bigger difference.

People got all OCD about reforging and some people said site x was no good and some said addon y was no good, when really they were comparing iOS and android, they were both good and which is best is personal preference.

I don't miss reforging. I'm glad it's gone. It was a PITA to reforge stuff all the time and a gold sink and I like the idea of being able to equip items right away. All I need to do is have some enchants and gems in my bag and my gear is optimal as soon as I need it.

[Voltarius]

I don't miss reforging at all. I found it annoying whenever you get a new piece of gear, you needed to reforge (often using an addon orso). There was nothing fun about it, it was merely mandatory.

[l33t]

Yes, I do.

Although I won't miss it if Blizzard would transfer hit into mastery instead of crit. Crit just does not go very well with lots of specs.

[tss]

I think it kind of stinks that, now that we have no important hard caps to reach with hit and expertise, and no longer have dodge and parry as stats on gear, we don't have the option of optimizing what's left. I don't think Blizzard recognized any potential doubling-down on the issue by different systems (stat system and reforging) that would make a great solution to a QOL issue feel like a missing feature. Reforge could actually be truly useful now!

Then again, now that I think of it, with the universal main 3 stats on all gear, it would make optimizing off-spec gear way too easy and to varying degrees trivialize new on-spec drops, especially for specs that share similar secondary stats. I don't think reforging after a re-spec instead of changing your actual gear would be a good thing at all. So that's understandable, and I certainly hope that's their unstated reason rather than a happy logical coincidence.

[Deleted]

Check any simulation and you will see that each build has a best stat and a worst stat; some of which are separated by 1-2 whole points. (Difference between roughly equal stats are measured at less than .10 points difference) Which means that many specs will have stats which are just utterly worthless, even detrimental, but are forced to take items with those awful stats because that is all that was on the raid's loot table.

People do this all the time and I find it sad.

"because stat A is slightly better than stat B in this simulation stat B is therefore utterly worthless and should never be used"

er no. Stat B isn't quite as good. Way to hyperbole. By definition no stat is worthless as every stat improves some aspect of your toons performance.

Also SimCraft isn't perfect and most people use it to try to pick with FOTM class/spec to play or to figure out stat weights. Only they use patchwerk parses to do so which isn't representative of most of the encounters. It's a bad tool to use for both of those things. A bit like trying to eat soup with a fork.

It's a great tool for working out how much dps you can throw out with your exact gear and seeing how close you can get to that, or also good at working out BiS gear sets, as long as you understand the limitations. i.e. like reforging it'll give a 'close enough' answer and not always the most optimal. There's not any better tools, so we're sort of stuck with it, but it's not perfect, and people tend to take what it says as gospel, and way overexaggerate differences between best and 2nd best results.

Oh and given the way the model works and how Blizz likes tweaking things in Beta we wont get good data from SimC probably until 2-3 weeks after WoD goes live, so spending too long comparing results from beta isn't too smart either.

[Jessicka]

While I don't miss it, I do feel this new system of killing 200 frogs before you can equip the item is much worse.

[ThunderTaco]

I was worried when they announced it.

But now that hit / exp is gone and that stats are kinda close together, I don't miss it at all.

- - - Updated - - -

While I don't miss it, I do feel this new system of killing 200 frogs before you can equip the item is much worse.

Before, you only could max one item per week. So you had to wait for 7 days before using a new piece. You can still wait and farm some frogs every day. You get the choice.

[Deleted]

I look at my druids gear, and want to reforge all of it so badly.

If I could change just one thing about wow, it would be to bring back reforging. I seriously miss it that much.

Am I alone in this?

Forever alone.

[Deleted]

Not really. Right now (had a helm upgrade yesterday), with gem sockets on almost every piece (as will be more uncommon in WoD), the only real difference is that a one step gets taken out of the equation "Go to Stormwind -> equip new gear -> export new character to AMR -> calculate optimal settings -> import -> upgrade -> auto-reforge -> buy new gems and enchants -> apply new gems and enchants". I'm actually stoked for when that will be boiled further down to "Equip new gear -> export -> calculate -> solve enchants later if I don't have them", because it turns out time spent ticking off a list instead of being in the raid isn't all that exciting for me or the other people waiting.