WW weapons are only stat sticks?

[nightmann]

Why is that concerning? You say "effectively unchanged" but if a higher ilvl offpiece drops do you not roll on it because its "only stats"? Do the casters in your group not care about ilvl on their weapons? At the end of the day an upgrade is an upgrade, yes melee are slightly less dependent on weapon ilvl now and as a result the upgrades on the artifact ilvl are slightly less important but honestly why did it ever make sense from a balance perspective that melee had this extra scaling dependency that casters never had to deal with? I think the change is mostly irrelevant but if anything it's probably something that's long overdue.

Yeah except int has a higher coefficient scaling to spell damage to makeup the loss of spellpower on gear. Not to mention 2k+int on your avg staff. Other melee classes still have wep damage scaling abilities: warrior, dk, rogue, dh. So they clearly scale with gear better than monks and will therefore be preferable. The whole point to melee was you sacrifice range for more damage potential, otherwise what's the point.

[Babylonius]

Yeah except int has a higher coefficient scaling to spell damage to makeup the loss of spellpower on gear. Not to mention 2k+int on your avg staff. Other melee classes still have wep damage scaling abilities: warrior, dk, rogue, dh. So they clearly scale with gear better than monks and will therefore be preferable. The whole point to melee was you sacrifice range for more damage potential, otherwise what's the point.

You're insinuating a huge amount from pretty faulty information. WW has SotW which scales with WD, everything else scales with AP. You're making it seem like the weapon is all we will be upgrading throughout the expansion. You could say similar things about any single socket; like our boots only provide a small amount of AP, so what's the point in upgrading them?

[Lucrece]

It's way too soon to talk about scaling anyways. If it's a problem, there's nothing stopping them from integrating weapon damage back into our ability coefficients.

Monks were doing pretty decently in raid testing, and alongside DH's they are gods of mythic+ dungeons. Upper middle of the pack in raiding.

Be happy this is not a repeat of Highmaul where they'll smash your ankles in like some scene of Misery and leave you crippled for the rest of the xpac.

Demonhunters and unholy DK's are going to have a rough ride if they release strong as they are. WW's will fly under the radar as a result and not be like enhancement shaman and WW sledgehammer nerfs in WoD.

Fire mages will probably remain OP because in the entire history of the game Blizzard has done nothing to curb mages and rogues from being broken OP.

[Tehterokkar]

Kind of weird that Blizz decided to go with AP based attacks purely apart from the Artifact. Makes WepDmg scale really poorly for WW.

Meanwhile MM hunters are praising Wepdmg as the next messiah because it's stat weight on a normalized scale is roughly 3.1(highest out of any melee/hunter spec).

[Gemini Soul]

They are stat sticks in a way, but upgrading your weapons Ilvl wise is going the be where we get our biggest chunk of AP from per upgrade (1 relic increases Ilvl on both MH and OH and thus give us more AP) but what i do find rather odd is that in the expansion where they do this chance to most other classes is also the expansion where they remove Primary stat that happens to give us AP/SP from Rings and Necks.

[Super Kami Dende]

Right now I do practically the same damage with no weapons at all in slots, and with 725s in slots. It's a 1-2k difference for everything, notwithstanding fof since you need weapons equipped. 0->725 is a bigger jump than 750->850. I imagine the stat difference will be maybe 100-150 less agility, maybe 1-2% mastery/crit difference. So in other words, nothing. Sounds to me like grinding to increase ilvl benefits one thing: strike of the windlord, which will get nerfed, and having your artifact ilvl only have a significant affect on one 40 sec cd ability and a marginal affect on everything else seems ideologically horrible.

0-725 is about 5-6000ap difference. 750-850 is about 9000-13000ap.

[Gemini Soul]

0-725 is about 5-6000ap difference. 750-850 is about 9000-13000ap.

He's talking about weapons only @750 the fists give 219Agility each which equates to 438AP @852 they give 566Agility each which equates to 1,132AP which is only a 694AP difference.