Should more complex stats make a return? (block%, MP5, hit, defense rating, etc)

[BadguyNotBadGuy]

Get rid of vers, bring back armour pen and spell pen, multistrike and mp5

[Deleted]

Except it wasn't really more complex or interesting for that matter. It was just gear to x% of y stat before caring about other stats. Not exactly what I'd call interesting.

[Deleted]

One of the great things about Vanilla, TBC, and to a lesser extend WotLK and Cataclysm was the fact that gearing was much much more interesting that it is today. Today, there are maybe 1-2 "best stats" and all we do is try to find gear that fill those best stats. But when we had to balance our gear and take into account hit percentage, and as a tank, crit hit block, defense rating, etc, gearing felt much more meaningful.

I feel that Blizzard went a bit too far by removing most stats, including hit%. I know the goal was to make the game easier to understand, and allow the player less focus on getting the "right gear", but itemization and gearing are major staples in an MMO. Thats part of the fun of the game, and part of the fun of killing bosses.

The existence of tools and websites like Mr. Robot, shouldn't be an excuse to remove complexity from the game. The whole philosophy that WoW is easy to get into, but hard to master was due in part by the complexity of the gearing game. Theorycrafters were all over the tank defense calculations and it became fun for higher end players to do those calculations to be the very best they could be. Now... its just, "does the piece of gear have haste and mastery, and is there more haste than mastery?" "No?" *discards item*

I know we all have our opinions, and I've been playing since vanilla too, but itemization was very passable to say the best. Sure I did enjoy my time, reforging was okay, but became a bit annoying with pretty much everyday having to reforge your gear completely to put it up to par, and hit % was just... meh. My opinion of course
I do miss multistrike, was pretty fun as an ele shaman or holy priest. But I feel like this simpler itemization isn't that bad, although I do miss the spell power/ mp5 stuff, gave it a lot more flavour, actually all stats do but the way they were implemented.. not that great in some cases, sorry for incoherent post btw

[McFuu]

One of the great things about Vanilla, TBC, and to a lesser extend WotLK and Cataclysm was the fact that gearing was much much more interesting that it is today. Today, there are maybe 1-2 "best stats" and all we do is try to find gear that fill those best stats. But when we had to balance our gear and take into account hit percentage, and as a tank, crit hit block, defense rating, etc, gearing felt much more meaningful.

I feel that Blizzard went a bit too far by removing most stats, including hit%. I know the goal was to make the game easier to understand, and allow the player less focus on getting the "right gear", but itemization and gearing are major staples in an MMO. Thats part of the fun of the game, and part of the fun of killing bosses.

The existence of tools and websites like Mr. Robot, shouldn't be an excuse to remove complexity from the game. The whole philosophy that WoW is easy to get into, but hard to master was due in part by the complexity of the gearing game. Theorycrafters were all over the tank defense calculations and it became fun for higher end players to do those calculations to be the very best they could be. Now... its just, "does the piece of gear have haste and mastery, and is there more haste than mastery?" "No?" *discards item*

Honestly stats are more complicated now. Previous stats just meant hitting soft/hard caps, so it made gearing very easy. Stats now are far more complicated and need to be simmed out. It's hard to tell if Haste is going to be better than Vers or Crit, until you play it. And often between tiers or leggos, they may emphasis a different stat. I think Stats are in a good place as of now.

[Wavebossa]

Bring back magic school resistances
Bring back multistrike
Bring back Def rating (so i can tank )

DO NOT BRING BACK HIT RATING (was just an annoyance)



I remember running 2s back in TBC and getting walled by SL/SL Restokin god comp.
You know what we did? Used our black temple shadow resist gear and stomped.

I like having options like that.

[Jastall]

Fuck Hit. I never want to see this pointless, dumbass stat again.

Multistrike was fine, I guess, even if stolen wholecloth from Shamans.

Defense rating was the same as Hit. Stack it, until it becomes completely useless. I hate that kind of stat.

Armor Pen could return but Blizzard always had a hell of a time balancing it.

And anyway, there's nothing complex about stats given that 99% of people will just look up their best ones online then copy-paste the results. Wherever there's 4 or 8 stats won't change this fact. Plus it's funny to say that hit/defense cap was complicated (how?) when nowadays simming is damn near required to know how much of a stat you want.

[Resentless]

The "old" secondaries weren't complex.
They were more annoying than fun because if I found an upgrade, but it dropped me below 8% hit, it wasn't a real upgrade and required other pieces to balance it out, so it sat in the bags and waited (or I would pass the roll on it to someone who could use it, because I'm not a shitbag lootwhore like some people).
Reforging helped a little with finding the right hit, but then it just became another task, where you check a site or addon and just do what it says.
Oh, I have enough hit, ok, so I reforge the worst secondary to the best.
Not exactly compelling.

I say get rid of secondaries altogether.
Then there's no need to complain about itemization, how one stat is god for one spec while trash for another, etc.
Have primary stat, then let that control all secondaries passively at a fixed incremental rate.
No more loot drama, just "is it higher ilvl? yes? well then, slap that bitch on!"
No more "my spec needs all the mastery ever and all I get is haste/vers trash!".
Blizz will never be able to balance the 4 simple secondaries ones they have today, given the various effects haste, mastery, and crit have on certain specs that favor one over the others.
Make it baseline, go full arcade mode, and grind/kill/grind/kill.

Right?
Meh.

Ok so the first bit I agree with... but the second bit I assume youre trolling.

They should just make new secondaries that actually DO something. Multistrike was interesting even if it fucked up some stuff (though I only played 2 months of wod, that stat was kinda cool). Hit and expertise were "fun" at first because it was a cap to work towards but beyond that point they were dead stats that you just reforged out of them. Maybe armor penetration could return, though I know blizzard had problems with that as well. Just stats that are more than "more damage, more chance to crit, do things faster stat". I'm not entirely sure what, but thats blizzards job

[Jujudrood]

Ok so the first bit I agree with... but the second bit I assume youre trolling.

They should just make new secondaries that actually DO something. Multistrike was interesting even if it fucked up some stuff (though I only played 2 months of wod, that stat was kinda cool). Hit and expertise were "fun" at first because it was a cap to work towards but beyond that point they were dead stats that you just reforged out of them. Maybe armor penetration could return, though I know blizzard had problems with that as well. Just stats that are more than "more damage, more chance to crit, do things faster stat". I'm not entirely sure what, but thats blizzards job

Yeah, while that would be nice, it's just not really a feasible option, in terms of true parity.
Like, let's say hit comes back.
Everyone needs 7.5 or 13 (melee/spells, or thereabouts anyway), then afterwards, it's a dead stat, same with exp (melee only to offset the hit diff for casters).
If they made it interesting, it would be better, but how?
Maybe you always hit, but hit rating increases other things a little, like crit or the added-back-in multi, because more rating means you're better at it, in general, so hit effectively takes the place of vers (makes you a little better all around as opposed to a pointed stat).
But, does that really get interesting? Probably not.
If your spec favors crit, you want crit over hit, even if hit bumps crit ever so slightly in a similar fashion that vers increases overall damage ever so slightly.

It's tough to come up with interesting stats that are not true throughput stats (think MP5, which didn't outright affect throughput, but would in effect allow you to heal longer/use more costly spells/cast more often, so it was indirect).

From earlier:
That's an incredibly tough beam to balance, though.
Let's say tertiaries are the "new secondaries".
Well, tanks, stack leech, everyone else stack speed.
Both have a direct/indirect effect on your output (tanks healing themselves a little more, everyone else moving a bit faster for mechanics and such).

Ultimately, it boils down to some liking the balance of numbers, others not liking it, and the majority not caring for it at all.
I would venture a guess that, if they did an in-game poll asking people if they would like to see hit/exp/etc come back with reforging and gave options of "yes", "no", or "indifferent", indifferent would win out.

[Phookah]

No thanks, caps that just have to be arbitrarly reached aren't interesting.

Multistrike felt fun, but was effectively just crit renamed.

[Cazz17]

I think I smell Elemental Shaman here

I love multistrike from playing frost mage, but yes ele shaman is also a part of my love for it :P

[God Save The King]

That's an incredibly tough beam to balance, though.
Let's say tertiaries are the "new secondaries".
Well, tanks, stack leech, everyone else stack speed.
Both have a direct/indirect effect on your output (tanks healing themselves a little more, everyone else moving a bit faster for mechanics and such).

I would say the primary difference between WoW and D&D is that WoW is a combat-based game and revolves solely around it.
I've run D&D campaigns where an entire day has no combat moments (either by design or by clever player actions), so having all these extra numbers to weigh and increase are meaningful.
WoW is "how much damage can I output and what helps me achieve this".
Finding stats that are solely non-combat related, or at least have such a small effect (like leech on a dps, which can contribute but won't break the bank) would be a difficult task because people a) find the "best numerical one for them", or b) disregard them since they don't really do much of anything.

Yeah, that's not at all the point I was trying to make.

I wasn't saying it can only be leech/speed, I actually included "or other stats", and "the list goes on". The sky is the limit. Okay leech/speed isn't good because everyone stacks it, fine, get rid of it, no biggie. Try again.

And your final point was already debunked by my suggestion, the point is to make stats that do not directly increase damage, but give choices in what type of character you want to be. You can focus more on a leech like skill to stay alive, or an avoidance like skill to stay in bad, or a speed like skill to move, and so on. The actual stats are arbitrary, whatever you can think of that works. You focused way too much on the arbitrary stats and completely glossed over the point I was making.

[Azalar]

Multistrike was fun at first, but it grew increasingly annoying over time. Too much number clutter.

[david0925]

more isn't really more complex when you're just adding more numbers to simulators and rule of thumb that people follow

[Jujudrood]

Yeah, that's not at all the point I was trying to make.

I wasn't saying it can only be leech/speed, I actually included "or other stats", and "the list goes on". The sky is the limit. Okay leech/speed isn't good because everyone stacks it, fine, get rid of it, no biggie. Try again.

And your final point was already debunked by my suggestion, the point is to make stats that do not directly increase damage, but give choices in what type of character you want to be. You can focus more on a leech like skill to stay alive, or an avoidance like skill to stay in bad, or a speed like skill to move, and so on. The actual stats are arbitrary, whatever you can think of that works. You focused way too much on the arbitrary stats and completely glossed over the point I was making.

My point is that finding those "other stats" is a difficult thing to do because WoW is about output and throughput.
Anything that doesn't contribute directly in one way or the other has two paths: a) people find the mathematical "best" and go for it, resulting in what we have today but just more of it or b) people don't care and just live with whatever they get but now have even more "unbalanced numbers", because it will all come down to numbers in the end.
I drew that comparison between D&D and WoW because WoW is a combat-based game and adding something to it that doesn't directly affect it is just "novelty" at that point.
I really can't think of any stat that would offer a difference into what "type of character you want to be".
If WoW was heavily into situational things, where raid bosses were "combat to 70%, then group choice moments" where a character with a given stat higher than others may take the "roll" to proceed, then yeah, the more stats the better, but in the end, that raid boss is a number and the goal is to hit the numbers out of it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

My real point, which admittedly is lost in the shuffle (result of responding at work while doing other things, mind wanders a bit), is that finding those "fun" stats, those "character defining" numbers, is probably an incredibly large task, especially taking into account the playerbase and the state of the game, which is more a combat sim than anything else RPG-like.

[Atherions]

All these old stats were just things that were much better than anything else until you hit the cap, and then they were worthless. Getting 540 defense to be crit immune, 102,4% avoidance to be crush immune, 9% hit to be capped, 6,5% expertise to be capped, having enough spell/armor pen to reduce resistances to 0, weapon skills to 310 to remove the glancing blow damage penalty. They were removed because they did not add anything, only made gearing a hassle. I do agree that versatility is the most boring stat they have ever come up with. But i generally much prefer the stats we have now.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

No they should not. Game is complicated enough with Titanforging.

[Selah]

Nah, stats are pretty boring. Unless they're going to do stats in an interesting way where investing in stat X as a combat Rogue changes how it plays compared to how it plays when you invest in stat Y. Problem is with that, people will just pick that highest performing stat which is no different than it is today. I'd rather they spend time improving talents.

[Accendor]

yes, there should be way more stats.

[kail]

I'm prob going to get shot for this, but I do miss spell resistances as a tank. Was neat to keep some off set items for bosses that dealt insane magic dmg. Also, I wouldn't mind seeing armor pen come back, would have it's value dependant on the spec if they deal more magic > phys. Ret paladins and UH Dks wouldn't need it, warriors and rogues would love it.

I don't want the stat mechanics to go further into D3 style where you care only about 1-2 secondary stats. Oh, and versatility is shit.

- - - Updated - - -

No they should not. Game is complicated enough with Titanforging.

Nothing about current wow is complicated. Netherlight maybe, but gear stats have been getting more simple over time.

[Temp name]

Hit was an annoying binary check. You either had enough and was fine, or you didn't and you sucked.