Do You Want Gear That's Easier To Understand?

[Mermeoth]

I don't think game is supposed to hold your hand in every way

[bullseyed]

No idea why I need to go to icy veins to understand what stat is best for my class.

Note that only bad players would need to do this.

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Anyone saying it’s easy to determine gear by looking at the items in game has never run a simulation before. The Azerite traits, essences, benthic affixes and trinkets make it very difficult.

Personally I enjoy min maxing and running sims is no problem but for most players I think the bloat is leading to many making inferior item choices.

The simulations are made by looking at the information in the game. The only difference is the people working on such things are smarter.

For example, 3% crit damage on boots is very obviously a highly desired item.

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The OP was saying the 425 no matter what, should be better than the 420.

And he should stick to LFR.

[gioderpington]

On my mains for mythic raiding. I definitely hate it as it is. Rings with gem slots are worth an additional 30 ilvls, other gear between 5-30 depending on slot and spec. Avoidance and leech is super important for tanks, sometimes to the point where I see people using 40 ilvls lower on some fights.
It'd be so simple to just make it dynamic. It rolls a gem slot? It's base ilvl is ,420 with an adjusted of 440, the 440 ilvl gets rolled into the average instead.
On alts, I dont really care as much, unless I get to higher ilvls by luck and I start to see I have 5% haste and I need 20% to function lol

Overall, i think wotlk was the closet to ideal stats. Better gear should have gem and enchant slots for adjustments and preferences. Tons of varying stats for different classes, loved having armor and magic pen. Not so much Hit, felt more like a stat tax then anything.

Then maybe not 1%, honestly if you are doing mythic raiding past the 4th boss, you'll need to optimize, especially if your group isn't cheesing fights by stacking counter classes (ie, using all multi dotters with strong damage reducers on court)

[bullseyed]

But that is okay, if that item is unique and fits a specific build it should hold its value. These items now are basically just stat sticks, without any sort of uniqueness to them. Aside from the Benthic pieces, which are BIS for most DPS.

I know as a 435 ilvl equiped warlock, I sim at almost 50k dps. I have about 5-6 items that are 445-455 in my bag, and the 425 with socket pieces are better. And I'm still using the crafted BoE ilvl 400 trinket, because its better than a 430 Azshara trinket. The game is just out of sync with itself. And they need someone to pull it back into reality.

They set the stats for gems too high. They could reduce old gems from +40 to +20 and new gems from +50 to +25 and essentially fix the issue. But that would devalue the work people did grinding sockets, so they'll wait for a tier or expansion to make the change.

The item budget for some damage procs seems a little high as well, but that was likely a reaction to them being too low in BOD.

[StillMcfuu]

I raid mythic, push keys and still do emissary quests (because chance at rank 4 baby!), but I've never had a more difficult time understanding gear.

Now honestly, maybe I'm just bad (which some of my guildies could make a case for) but I HATE having to simcraft gear, look up azerite traits, stack haste over everything, toss out 455ilvls for 425's with sockets. So....

Do you want gear that's much simpler to understand that what we have now. Basically a 425>420 ALWAYS. Maybe I'm just getting sick of using 3rd party websites to decide if a trinket is garbage or not despite ilvl.

No, I actually like the current system.

I think what helps separate players is the work and understanding they put into their gearing. I do wish that we could remove some RNG from it, and I do have some issues with Benthic effects being more powerful than gear that is +30ilvl comparably, for the most part the current meta of balancing and simming secondary stats is the best the game has had it gearing wise.

Honestly, they would have to majorly rework builds to not have any stat synergy to be able to get away from secondary stats being more powerful then primary at endgame. You'd have to strip out white damage consideration, on crit effects, etc... They would have to find a way to massively devalue secondary stats and within the current game's framework I don't think it's even possible. There are even examples in classic wow where concentrating on a specific stat became infinitely more valuable then others, even if the others provided what seemed on paper a great benefit.

[CrawlFromThePit]

I raid mythic, push keys and still do emissary quests (because chance at rank 4 baby!), but I've never had a more difficult time understanding gear.

Now honestly, maybe I'm just bad (which some of my guildies could make a case for) but I HATE having to simcraft gear, look up azerite traits, stack haste over everything, toss out 455ilvls for 425's with sockets. So....

Do you want gear that's much simpler to understand that what we have now. Basically a 425>420 ALWAYS. Maybe I'm just getting sick of using 3rd party websites to decide if a trinket is garbage or not despite ilvl.

I don't really think the issue is understanding gear. I think the issue is itemization in general is completely broken and stats value on certain (or most) classes. Gear itself is fairely straight forward, we understand what most items do, I least I believe so. Now how does that affect your character exactly is the tricky part, and that's not the job of item description to be honest, trying things and experimenting is a big part of RPG games, if anything I strongly believe sims should be deleted from existance and force people to actually play with items.

[nToxik]

Sounds like you are playing the wrong game if you don't want to invest a little time in learning the game mechanics.

[henrike]

With this I would agree, and argue that is an essential element of gear - or was - that is missing today. There is so much of it, that it makes it meaningless, unable to form any connection to your gear, contrasting with the previously mentioned situation.

It goes even deeper than that. You don't hang on to anything you receive for very long, item levels greatly standardized what gear appears to be (and there's no meaningful way to determine what gear is actually good without a lot of third-party digging), gear is visually homogeneous and, as you said, most gear doesn't have unique attributes. I was shocked when I picked up a Trident last patch and realized it didn't even use primary stats, it just hit you with a cool buff. It had been ages since I saw something like that.

[Atticon]

My 2 cent on this is that maybe the game's itemization isn't the problem but the community's obsession with min-maxing and cookie cutter BiS'ing is.

[Lothaeryn]

Anyone saying it’s easy to determine gear by looking at the items in game has never run a simulation before. The Azerite traits, essences, benthic affixes and trinkets make it very difficult.

Personally I enjoy min maxing and running sims is no problem but for most players I think the bloat is leading to many making inferior item choices.

Honestly, simcrafting isn't hard to do, but Azerite traits muck up the system for me. Certain builds with azerite rely heavily on secondary stats to work optimally and trying to find the proper itemization to hit those breakpoints is pretty much preventing me from removing extremely out of date gear, just in the case I could theoretically use it and do higher dps with another trait build.

[Monster Hunter]

I raid mythic, push keys and still do emissary quests (because chance at rank 4 baby!), but I've never had a more difficult time understanding gear.

Now honestly, maybe I'm just bad (which some of my guildies could make a case for) but I HATE having to simcraft gear, look up azerite traits, stack haste over everything, toss out 455ilvls for 425's with sockets. So....

Do you want gear that's much simpler to understand that what we have now. Basically a 425>420 ALWAYS. Maybe I'm just getting sick of using 3rd party websites to decide if a trinket is garbage or not despite ilvl.

No, just no, the gears been simplified way way way to much. Belive it or not there are alot of people who enjoyed that's aspect of the game and it should be part of the skills needed to be a top end player.

[crakerjack]

Simming gear isn't hard at all, atleast for me. I just use simcraft and copy/paste the lines into raidbots. I wait for it to process everything and then I use what it recommends. I don't have to think about anything.

[Dacu]

I raid mythic, push keys and still do emissary quests (because chance at rank 4 baby!), but I've never had a more difficult time understanding gear.

Now honestly, maybe I'm just bad (which some of my guildies could make a case for) but I HATE having to simcraft gear, look up azerite traits, stack haste over everything, toss out 455ilvls for 425's with sockets. So....

Do you want gear that's much simpler to understand that what we have now. Basically a 425>420 ALWAYS. Maybe I'm just getting sick of using 3rd party websites to decide if a trinket is garbage or not despite ilvl.

No, please no. Gear is really easy to understand. You don't have to sim unless you want to mix/max. You can just look at your specs "best stats" and stick with that, you'll do fine. If you're worried about not being able to push high content with subpar stats, then you're gonna have to put in the additional effort.

[Zyrinx]

I'm kinda seeing the OPs point here, I mean there's really no way to tell which azerite traits are better by reading them.

50 crit that stacks to 5 or a direct damage proc that fires more at low health (for example, numbers made up).

How would.one ever know? Every azerite ring is basically what used to be a trinket proc, so you have what 12 of them?

[OokOok]

I raid mythic, push keys and still do emissary quests (because chance at rank 4 baby!), but I've never had a more difficult time understanding gear.

Now honestly, maybe I'm just bad (which some of my guildies could make a case for) but I HATE having to simcraft gear, look up azerite traits, stack haste over everything, toss out 455ilvls for 425's with sockets. So....

Do you want gear that's much simpler to understand that what we have now. Basically a 425>420 ALWAYS. Maybe I'm just getting sick of using 3rd party websites to decide if a trinket is garbage or not despite ilvl.

people like you ruin WOW. IT WILL NEVER be easy in your mind, you will always want to take the short cut and have it be even easier than before. WoW is in the easiest and most simple state it's ever been in, the gear is even easier than classic to understand lol.

But still you want it easier, no, quit. Go play FF6 on steam, gear is literally just armor and weapon damage, you can't get any more easier and it's right up your IQ level to grasp.

[Fayntic]

No. Gearing, comparing gear, min-maxing, finding the most optimal gear set... is all part of an RPG. It's one of the things that makes the game interesting because it gives you something to think about every time you get a new gear piece.
That proces is taken away somewhat by simulationcraft, however, simulationcraft is made by players who just programmed their theorycrafting into a machine.

By saying a higher ilvl item should always be an upgrade over a lower ilvl it takes away everything. You might aswell remove gear as a whole if you're going to do that and replace it with something like paragon levels.

Moreover, I would actually love to see it get more complicated by making defensive options more important for non-tank specs. Maybe even bring back elemental type resistances on gear.

[Tiwack]

The problem isn't the gear, it's the way stats are beneficial to you that's the issue. Main stats are secondary to secondary stats across the board this expansion, in part thanks to the squish and in part thanks to blizz rushing the expansion out before proper testing and balancing was done. Admittedly they made their own jobs a lot harder with all the new azerite stuff combined with the newly introduced scaling everywhere. No amount of reforging, sockets or enchants will fix your issue that's focused around ilvl and the main numbers that used to be the bigger ones that you went for when deciding on upgrades. Thus we've got more calculators and spreadsheets than ever before.

[Pony Soldier]

I would actually like a gear system that is a bit more in depth and customizable. Reforging and gemming did just that. I thought they were good systems I don't know why they got rid of them. Now I find it to be a little too simplistic and I think it just promotes more grinding in a way as in getting RNG gear with stats that you don't want or primarily use so you give the WoW slot machines another try to see if you get lucky with stats that work better for your spec.

You can't get much easier than it already is.

[Kauko]

Its not that hard to deal with it... But I do agree that they should do a better job with stats. I just don't get what is the point of all the stats if you almost always have to stack one. Just make other stats more viable.

[ChairmanKaga]

I'm kinda seeing the OPs point here, I mean there's really no way to tell which azerite traits are better by reading them.

50 crit that stacks to 5 or a direct damage proc that fires more at low health (for example, numbers made up).

How would.one ever know? Every azerite ring is basically what used to be a trinket proc, so you have what 12 of them?

This is why I don't understand the sentiment in here that gear has become simpler over the course of the game. If anything wasn't it simpler years ago with things like stacks Hit until X, resist gear etc versus all these overlapping procs?