Astral Leather Specialization? Seriously? 5% intellect?

[Róg]

I'm ok with the change as long as they dont do what they do now, and put spirit on practically every single leather piece. We would be massively over hit capped based on current itemization.

I know I should trust them to get it right, but I really dont. Itemization has always been terrible.

[emni]

I'm ok with the change as long as they dont do what they do now, and put spirit on practically every single leather piece. We would be massively over hit capped based on current itemization.

I know I should trust them to get it right, but I really dont. Itemization has always been terrible.

That's why Spirit is the only base stat you can reforge. You can just drop some hit in favor of haste or crit if you wish so. And DPS rings, necks and cloaks will still have hit on them.

[Abbeel]

Why do people keep looking at changes through Northrend-tinted glasses?

My glasses have a little painting of Arthas on the inside, giving me a thumbs-up.

I'm glad they did this. Now let's hope they find a way to gear shaman/druid gear in such a way that we don't have 900 hit rating no matter how we flail around the gear at 85.

[juzalol]

If reforging will convert stats on 1:1 its fine. If you lose rating when reforging (ie. 50 spirit -> 40 haste) you end up having massive amount of hit or losing lots of stats because of constant reforging to maintain the 5% int bonus from wearing just leather.

As long as blizzard doesn't fuck up the leather items(which it has for the last 10 tiers for balance druids) this change will be good.

[scorch109]

So having a tier that 9/10 people wear 5/5 of is fucking it up?

[Nurvus]

Why do people keep looking at changes through Northrend-tinted glasses?

This sums up more than 90% of the threads discussing any changes to the game.

My new sig.

[Koumaru]

Spirit will still scale with buffs

Nope. Blessing of Kings doesn't affect spirit now, and priests' Divine Spirit buff is just plain gone. Both the mana regeneration and hit rating you gain from your shroomkin's spirit will be the same in a raid as they are solo, unless the devs change something back before launch.

Welcome to Cataclysm. Fun stats have been removed from the game, now everything is only int, int, int.

Now that INT gives haste, health, mastery and hit in Cataclysm, as well as more crit and mana regen than is gained by crit rating and spirit, I'm just going to roll in "of Intellect" gear for the entirety of the new expansion.

[Irony]

Man, too bad they're not changing int to give Sp. That'll be the day.

[Imhullu]

You're basing a CATACLYSM EXPANSION RELATED BUFF to current gear... herpa derp.
Im sure come cataclysm your leather will be good, and you will want to wear that.
If not, will swapping out that one piece for cloth be so good to lose the 5% int provided from this armor mastery? I highly doubt it.

[Araun]

If reforging will convert stats on 1:1 its fine. If you lose rating when reforging (ie. 50 spirit -> 40 haste) you end up having massive amount of hit or losing lots of stats because of constant reforging to maintain the 5% int bonus from wearing just leather.

As long as blizzard doesn't fuck up the leather items(which it has for the last 10 tiers for balance druids) this change will be good.

there was a bluepost saying that reforging will be 1:1 but you can only reforge 50% of the stat, so 100 spirit would be come 50 spirit and 50 (somethingelse).

I think this is a fine way of doing it. I guess you would have to replace quite a lot of items to make up for the 5% int, unless there's a big gap in ilvl.

[Criminalle]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I thought it was supposed to be an incentive.
Critical strike or haste rating would have been a better choice in my opinion. I also
think its interesting that while they hold a carrot out to the leather wearers to leave the clothies
armor alone, they gave clothies the same benefit yet its impossible for them to not wear all cloth.

You kind of are missing something, the goal of this change want to make u want ur gear more but it was to penalize u for taking someone else's.
Take this scenario. In WOTLk for the most part, Cloth Dps gear and elemental mail was Itemized equaly, you could find the same pieces offering the same stats in both cloth and Mail form. Now if lets say the Cloth one dropped first or most Elle or Resto shaman would just roll on the cloth, cause it gives what they want, haste + crit.

Now there's a catch, you pick up 1 piece of cloth u loose 5% int. So it doesnt make ur gear more attractive but deters, impatient greedy people who have just as good itemization from taking other gear types just cause they can equip it

If you want to know the answer to balance druid poor itemization problems the remedy that blizzard has come up with is, being able to use your spirit on gear as hit, Hit rating will scale with instances in cata so it wont be a fixed number. They also allow u to reforge stats so if ur capped on Hit rating u can change yur spirit into haste/crit/Mastery(not 100% on the mastery)

I think the 5% is a fine number, It wont stop people from rolling on ur gear in Pugs tho, this is cause most Puggers are idiots and wont even know about the Armour specialization buff. i fully expect to see shamans in mail, leather and cloth. especially since they can benefit from spirit now

---------- Post added 2010-07-24 at 02:36 AM ----------

That's why Spirit is the only base stat you can reforge. You can just drop some hit in favor of haste or crit if you wish so. And DPS rings, necks and cloaks will still have hit on them.

Im rather sure that spirit will be on EVERY single piece of leather. Think about it:
-spirit is now hit rating for druids, so their wont be any hit leather.

-Blizard has already said Hit rating will Scale with content with each content patch we will need more Hit=> Spirit

-Imagine a mage has items with a total no% of 600 stats( HYPOTHETICAL), 300 haste or crit, 260 hit, and 40 the other stats
For a druid, 300 could be haste or crit, ad the other 300 is spirit, u keep 250 of that spirit for hit and reforge the other 40 to crit or hatse.
and there u have it, itemized gear with only spirit + haste/crit.

That was fully hypothetical but u got the point

[Fergand]

The idea isn't that you should absolutely never ever under any circumstances wear Cloth... The idea is that the cloth gear is going to have to be a lot better than what you've currently got for it to be worth the loss...

5% is actually a bigger deal than you're making it... Since all our spell power derives from Intellect now, it will be equivalent to getting 5% more spell power as well, which is a far bigger deal than 5% more intellect today in Wrath.

Also consider, you cannot look at is as 'Is _______ cloth 5% better than _______ leather?'. The 5% is the collective of all your gear, If you choose the cloth piece over a leather piece, you'll lose the 5% intellect bonus from every other piece of gear, which will add up to a very big difference, possibly meaning you'll have to be faced with replacing green leather with purple cloth for the choice to be worth while...

From my understanding, it's pretty unanimous that Spell Power > Just about anything else for casters. Which will be the big part of this.

I would like to see a feature that shows exactly how much of a loss you'd suffer from losing the 'armour specialization' bonus by mousing over the item in question.