I miss building my character and interesting stats.

**Vainiak** · 2020-05-20, 07:14 PM

Bear with me on this one, this is a long story. Over the years we have had a multitude of stats

Hit rating, Expertise, Dodge, Parry, Block, Crit, multi-strike as well as resistances and the occasional proc on a weapon or set bonuses. We had have meta gems, spell penetration, magic damage and well you get the point.

Now i have always been a super casual player but back in BC I played a prot Paladin. My guild at the time asked me to gear up my tank and help them raid.

I was freshly a dinged Draenei at 70 and I fondly remember beginning the gearing up process.

Your first targets you went for was to be uncrushable in raids and make sure you hit your hit cap, block and expertise cap. Thankfully, i was a Draenei and the racial at the time was the 1 percent hit rating aura which made the race interesting and gave you a nice advantage.

What did you do to achieve this? You looked to normal dungeons and farmed them until you were geared enough to start farming heroics.

You would look at the loot table for each dungeon and farmed it until you were lucky enough to get the loot/stats you wanted. If you were lucky you would pull together a dungeon set to gain and advantageous bonus and maybe a weapon stat stick or a weapon with a nice proc with maybe a multi strike or magical damage ability.

Then you could look to professions. I levelled up engineering for the goggles. It was the only way to get an epic helm outside of raids that you could put a meta gem in. It took some work but i crafted it and it felt amazing and lasted.

Putting that meta gem in and gaining that unique bonus made you feel like a god and desperate to get back into dungeons.

In the process of grinding normal's you were also unlocking the attunements to gain access to certain HC's so you couldnt just skip them.

Once in HC's the real work started. You could only gain epics form the final boss and they were hard to begin with until you were geared. Each pull had to be measured and CC and threat were a thing so DPS could just go all out or they would die.

You also had to be fully gemmed and enchanted to gain as much as an advantage as possible and I remember not getting into groups without being ready.

You grind out you HC's and you get the epics you need or the recipes to craft them. You get uncrushable and you can start doing raids.

Again, you jump in raids you target the gear you need or recipes to craft them and you start to juggle you stats about because you dont need as much hit etc and thats when you start to feel like you're progressing and you have a sense of achievement and progress.

Then the next tier would come out and the only catch up mechanic was a badge vendor with epics and some recipes on them but you had to farm HC's to get the badges and it took time and felt great once you started filling in your blues. Once fully epic, less CC was required HC's became fun because you could pull larger packs.

There was no instant catch up that made progression irreverent and if you were freshly dinged you had to put the same work in to catch up. If guildies were way more geared they had to step up and help you.

Compare this to wow today. Your main stat doesn't matter as its dictated by the highest Ilvl that drops. You have 4 secondaries that are so uninteresting, crit, haste, vers and mastery.

They removed sets, most enchants, gem slots on items (getting that one super rare weapon in HCs with 3 gems slots felt amazing). They also made professions irrelevant.

You have gear chucked at you left right and centre that it doesnt matter and targeting interesting stats and pieces are gone.

Theres so many levels of difficulty that it becomes tedious and more like a chore because in essence all your are gaining is and ilvl increase you dont actually care about the stats.

There is no character building, there is no interesting sets with cool interactions with talents. Just one talent build and youre done. There is no sense of achievement. The game just becomes a chore just to do you daily grind with no real reason to do dungeons. I think my only interest in raiding or dungeons is for transmog only.

I recently logged back into my Paladin and checked Icy Veins for the what stats i should target. Guess what, it doesnt matter they are all weighted the same and thats so boring. Why would i even bother doing mutliple tiers of mythic plus just for an increase ilvl? I have the transmog, achievements are nice but kinda boring as well.

Anyway, Ret needs haste so you stack haste, you stack a little crit and then its between mastery and vers. Mastery increases holy damage and vers increases all damage, increases healing and reduces damage so why would you take mastery at all if the stat weights are identical?

In my opinion vers is a horrible stat. They should just make that a pvp stat or something or rather than mastery be a damage increase it should have an interesting effect so that you have a reason to juggle the four stats around to build your character.

TLDR- I miss progression and building my character with targeted gear and interesting stat juggling. Despite being casual i want to work for my gear and progression with less catch up and more character investment. More importantly, i miss the journey.

Thanks for reading let the flaming begin!

**Nerovar** · 2020-05-20, 07:23 PM

I can definitely relate to this. For many people, at some point the core gameplay loop of WoW simply broke in between all the "quality of life" changes, pruning, RNG and simplified mechanics. Also by lessening the effects stats have on your character they create more and more pressure to make gear interesting in other ways e.g. by inventing new systems that allow you to build your character in different ways (like azerite, essences etc.) and there certainly players out there who like this sort of design but to me it's just boring and it usually gets removed after one expansion anyways. Also why change a system that has worked perfectly well for years?

**Djuntas** · 2020-05-20, 07:28 PM

Unfair to mention prot paladin in TBC bro...That was such a gem yes. AMAZING fun, and unique...No other class could do what they did, and no tank comes close. I had an alt in TBC, and it was sick...Lots of options yes. Anyway...I mostly just wanna get ride of the need to sim characters and crazy min-max we can't understand without using external websites...thats all for me.

**TigTone** · 2020-05-20, 07:33 PM

I feel where you are coming from.

Which is why i hope diablo 4 is amazing so I get that Itch scratched which will never really happen in WoW.

**Aeluron Lightsong** · 2020-05-20, 07:37 PM

Catch up mechanics should exist in some form, life has a way of screwing you over and suddenly being gone and having to catch up like the way of 'old' would get way too much. Sure it may not happen to you but it happens to others. Stats haven't really changed too much other then stuff being added. I'm not that big on making gear super interesting(Outside of visuals and maybe a weapon that the endboss might drop. This includes interesting trickets to).

I mostly just wanna get ride of the need to sim characters and crazy min-max we can't understand without using external websites...thats all for me.

You aren't going to get rid of people min maxing and while things should be explained ingame, someone somewhere is going for the lazy argument "DO YOU WANT TO SPOONFEED YOUR PLAYERBASE1111." I don't agree with the OP at all with stat juggling, if its not in my control I get a bit frustrated and loot becomes "meh" but that started after Mist when reforging was taken).

**crakerjack** · 2020-05-20, 07:51 PM

OP, you're delusional. There was no catchup mechanics? Hello?! That alone is why you deserve a bonk on the head. It's almost like you bias is so strong that you forgot about welfare PvP gear. Every alt I leveled, I would immediately get them the current welfare PvP gear whether it was gladiator, merciless, or vengeful. Sure it had resilience, but the stats were so strong that you'd still top parse in pugs. Variety of stats? You were forced to get hit/expertise cap and then you typically chased your main stat whether it be agi, strength, attack power, spell damage, healing or MP5. Remove the rose-tinted goggles.

**SkagenRora** · 2020-05-20, 08:02 PM

There is a wrong and a right way to build.. So i rather have it as simplfied as possible, so i can't do it the "Wrong" way

**Saltysquidoon** · 2020-05-20, 08:20 PM

Eh, I'll never be convinced that hit and defence were interesting stats.
You were either at the hit cap (or white cap for DW) and the defence cap or your character didn't function and so in reality, they were effectively binary.

Even then with the other stats it's not just like you weren't using external tools to make sure you were hitting your breakpoints in any case.

**Baconeggcheese** · 2020-05-20, 08:35 PM

I don't agree that the stats you mentioned are "interesting", and in the case of hit, expertise, and resistances I'm quite glad they're gone as they added more frustration than anything.

Multistrike was a bit fun, but mostly because as a caster you got to see mini versions of your spells flying at the target after your main cast. Realistically though its just another version of crit, so its not terribly interesting. And having double crit is anti-fun imo (Destro still has this via mastery).

**Zka** · 2020-05-20, 09:09 PM

Kind of agree with OP.

Never enjoyed gear as much as I did in BC when I maintanked for a guild.
I had several very different gear sets, for example:
- maximum EHP set against hard physical hitting bosses like Archimonde or Gruul
- maximum HP set against Kelthuzad 25
- passive crush immune set against dual wielders - can be done in blues - practically negates tank deaths in Malchezaar phase2
- passive crush immune set just for fun
- aggro set for 5mans and DPS race bosses, hit and exp maxed, then block value stacked
- maximum block rating set - also happens to contain high block value - extremely good in 5mans. For example the big pulls of shattered halls consist mostly of medium hard hitting mobs. If I block most of their hits, it's decreasing damage taken dramatically. Full blocks were common, turning blocks into avoidance.
- dps set because prot wasn't completely shit at dps with the right gear, also I could dpstank soft bosses like the priest add in the Maulgar fight, holding aggro like a boss, despite this shitty add hits like a noodle and generates no rage normally

I cannot recall any other period of the game when any role would benefit so much from using different gearsets. This happened because stats were more diverse, tank survivability was one of the main focus of game tuning and also crushing blows were a thing.

It's absolutely a shame that so many gear customization options have been removed over time. Enchants, gems are almost extinct compared to BC/LK. So many people were lazy to properly enchant and gem their gear, Blizz just decreased the number of these customization options to further close the gap between proper players and lazy fucks.

**Ghostile** · 2020-05-20, 09:12 PM

Hrrr... Defense and hit were More pain in the ass than interesting

**Kralljin** · 2020-05-20, 09:35 PM