Which era of PvE itemization did you like best?

[garicasha]

What era of PvE itemization did you like best, Without considering how the gear was acquired!

(I will count the Cata addition of the bonus for wearing "your" gear as part of itemization, as well as the introduction of "legendaries for everyone...but again not considering how the gear was acquired, just whether it was interesting once you had it.)

I will also count racial bonuses such as + to weapon skill as part of itemization

Vanilla
Craziness by modern standards
--Weapons of different speeds
--Counterintuitively good/bad items such as Edgemaster’s Handguards
--Separate healing and caster dps gear
--No rating, 1% of a stat
--Tier sets requiring up to 8 pieces, bonuses at 2/4/6/8

Burning Crusade
—Still crazy by modern standards
--Addition of gems
--Some improvements by adding the rating system
--I think caster DPS and healer gear were turned in to one (didn't play BC classic)
--Weapon speeds were normalized in either BC or Wrath not sure exactly. Daggers also got special modifiers to prevent tanks using them at some point.
--8 pc Tier sets remained

Wrath of the Lich King
—The most egregious quirks of itemization had been removed IMO
--Tanks still had separate gear
--Spirit and MP5 were still stats
--Some professions gave itemization bonuses / extra sockets
--Holy pallies and elemental/resto shamans were MUCH easier to gear than druids, priests, warlocks, and mages

Cataclysm
--First expansion with the bonus for wearing “your” armor type
--Addition of mastery stat (ty elbob)
--Addition of reforging

Pandaria
--Legendary cloak for everyone
--Thunderforging or Warforging showed up around this expansion
--Spirit converted to hit (ty shanthi)

Warlords of Draenor
--Addition of multistrike and versatility
--Removal of tank stats and hit / exp
--Legendary ring for everyone

Legion
—Modern system with haste/crit/mastery/vers as the only four stats
--I think, I'm not sure, but I think in the middle of Legion was when pieces started to swap primary stat
--Legendaries that could be swapped for different effects

Battle for Azeroth
--Azerite gear
--Titanforging

Shadowlands
--Creation Catalyst, which although it's more gear acquisition you could also argue that even a non-tier piece is "itemized" as a tier piece if you want it to be

Dragonflight
--We all find out tomorrow!


Unanswered questions:
When did spirit and MP5 go away?
When did tier bonuses go to 2/4?
When exactly did main spec swapping from agil/int/str begin?

[Elbob]

multistrike came out in wod along with vers and the removal of tank stats and hit/exp, mastery came out in cata, mop also brought reforging. Just notables you might want to add.

edit: i lied reforging was cata too.

[Nymrohd]

MoP
Reforging helped make sidegrades more impactful, thunder/warforging combined with Valor upgrades kept people coming even during farm, tier and trinkets were amazing without facing the slot limitations of legion and without going completely off the rails like with HFC in WoD. Meanwhile Valor gear offered a meaningful progression to more casual players that was slow enough to never really create an issue for the hardcore who could use it together with the coin to make up for RNG. Crafting could have been better. Tons of enchants and gem slots helped those professions be important.

[Sialina]

I honestly like the current iteration the best, I do have some soft spots for part of the old systems though, multi strike was fun but I understand why it had to go, I also liked the way you had a weapon you could unlock new appearances for throughout legion (I didn't like that we just had one weapon and the systems around that, just the appearance/tint part)

[garicasha]

I do agree that modern gearing is much more elegant.

If I could have brought one thing from modern WoW in to vanilla I probably would have brought modern itemization...although it was fun in 2004 trying to figure out what was best, with 2022 knowledge of all the weird stuff...I would've just rather skipped the loot drama. Although I suppose you sort of couldn't without making things like Edgemaster's Handguards worthless or massively changing the value of trinkets.

[baskev]

What era of PvE itemization did you like best, Without considering how the gear was acquired!

(I will count the Cata addition of the bonus for wearing "your" gear as part of itemization, as well as the introduction of "legendaries for everyone...but again not considering how the gear was acquired, just whether it was interesting once you had it.)

Classic:
Craziness by modern standards
--Weapons of different speeds
--Counterintuitively good/bad items such as Edgemaster’s Handguards
--Separate healing and caster dps gear
--No rating, 1% of a stat
--Tier sets requiring up to 8 pieces, bonuses at 2/4/6/8

Burning Crusade
—Still crazy by modern standards
--Addition of gems
--Some improvements by adding the rating system
--I think caster DPS and healer gear were turned in to one (didn't play BC classic)
--Weapon speeds were normalized in either BC or Wrath not sure exactly. Daggers also got special modifiers to prevent tanks using them at some point.
--8 pc Tier sets remained

Wrath of the Lich King
—The most egregious quirks of itemization had been removed IMO
--Tanks still had separate gear
--Spirit and MP5 were still stats
--Some professions gave itemization bonuses / extra sockets
--Holy pallies and elemental/resto shamans were MUCH easier to gear than druids, priests, warlocks, and mages

Cataclysm
--First expansion with the bonus for wearing “your” armor type
--Addition of mastery stat (ty elbob)
--Addition of reforging

Pandaria
--Legendary cloak for everyone
--Thunderforging or Warforging showed up around this expansion

Warlords of Draenor:
--Addition of multistrike and versatility
--Removal of tank stats and hit / exp
--Legendary ring for everyone

Legion:
—Modern system with haste/crit/mastery/vers as the only four stats
--I think, I'm not sure, but I think in the middle of Legion was when pieces started to swap primary stat

BfA: (I didn't play it hardly at all so I don't really know)

Shadowlands:
--Creation Catalyst, which although it's more gear acquisition you could also argue that even a non-tier piece is "itemized" as a tier piece if you want it to be

Dragonflight:
--We all find out tomorrow!


Unanswered questions:
When did spirit and MP5 go away?

hate that spirit etc left. And reforging was great in my eyes. So shitty gear was less shit.

But harde to say....i think i am going to take a look at your list, and take expansion i did not like because of what they did to gear.

I dislike the legendary everyone gets the same claok/ring thingy's. they felt like borrowed power ( like preach video talked about).
Also legions legendary and artifact. Both had great idea's behind them. But failed at their excecution.

BFA and shadowlands also did not have great tier stuff etc.
BUT bfa did have azurite gear witch was fun.

think for me it was wratch/cata. Still have tier sets, stats galore, reforging etc etc.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Mostly miss BFA titanforging

[shanthi]

Don't forget that in MOP, Spirit converted to hit rating, making it a useful stat for DPS casters too. That was a pretty big change.

[Pro-lifer]

Reforging?

[jeezusisacasual]

Mostly miss BFA titanforging

I agree with this as someone who only clears content one time and refuses to farm anything it was nice when it happened for either you or your team but i guess some people play for entire season get mad that they did not win on the lotto ticket and thus it was gone.

[tomten]

I have parts from pretty much all of them that I would like to see combined.

[Biomega]

Overall probably Cata or MoP were my favorite.

This list is a nice showcase, though, of a central problem WoW has: they are very often more interested in making new systems than they are in improving old ones. Makes sense, of course, since it's so much easier to sell a new thing as a marketing tool than it is to sell an old but improved thing.

Reforging, for example, was an amazing feature that primarily ran into one problem (though there were others): stat caps (hit rating most of all). Without stat caps, it could have stuck around in some way, but they decided against improving on it and just scrapped it.

Same with Titanforging. The egregious ilvl jumps were a problem, since getting mythic raid gear from a WQ as a lottery was just shit. But instead of simply reining that in and making the jumps more reasonable, they just scrapped it.

And so on, and so forth.

[garicasha]

Part of the issues is different things for different levels of hardcore.

The removal of Titanforging was primarily to keep the ultra-hardcore from gouging their eyes out doing infinite farming for additional ilvl.

Reforging was for the problem that they wanted people to use gear that dropped immediately, and all the hardcores would just sim their gear and completely reorganize their stats with every piece. It wasn't all that compelling you just did what the sim told you.

[enigma77]

Legion

Titanforging was a great addition to the game and I resent its removal

[Biomega]

Part of the issues is different things for different levels of hardcore.

The removal of Titanforging was primarily to keep the ultra-hardcore from gouging their eyes out doing infinite farming for additional ilvl.

Reforging was for the problem that they wanted people to use gear that dropped immediately, and all the hardcores would just sim their gear and completely reorganize their stats with every piece. It wasn't all that compelling you just did what the sim told you.

Those are all true, but also not something that can't be overcome. For TF, for example, having proper bracketing can help alleviate a lot of those problems - meaning mythic raiders wouldn't go grind normal raids every week (let alone old content) because their regular gear would already be better than what those could TF to. It's only because it was an effectively unbracketed lottery that it turned into a grindfest. And, similarly, you wouldn't have someone do a blue-level WQ and end up with a mythic-raid-level item.

Same with Reforging. The biggest problem was the stat caps - they made it incredibly complicated, because you had to juggle enormous amounts of possible combinations balanced around your stat caps. But with a different stat makeup, that's also very different. You'd still have some combinatorics going on, but you could e.g. make it so it's a min/max optimization and the effective gains aren't enormous; you could also make sure to keep synergistic stat effects in check so you have more clear lines for people, making it easier to pick the stat they want without having to whip out the calculator.

No one is saying "just bring those systems back, and all will be good!" - the whole point was, those systems COULD at least conceivably have been improved and "fixed". Instead they just kept removing them and adding new ones over and over and over again.

[Relapses]

For me, it's a tie between MoP and WoD. MoP had Reforging which I think gives it an edge but WoD also had the best form of Titanforging where gear would only roll a few item levels higher.

[Chilela]

It may be worth noting that Cata started the trend of pieces having a fixed amount of Stam + Primary stat with item level. For example, any given plate helm with 359 ilvl had the same amount of stam and primary stat as every other plate helm with the same item level, whereas prior to that, you could more easily trade off survivability for throughput on similar-level gear.

That said, my vote goes to WotLK. As fun as early iterations of itemization were, Wrath was the sweet spot, where truly bizarre itemizations didn't exist, but they weren't quite as homogenized as they were in Cata and beyond.

[Antilurker77]

I just wish gear would go back to (multiple) fixed gem slots.

[Biomega]

That said, my vote goes to WotLK. As fun as early iterations of itemization were, Wrath was the sweet spot, where truly bizarre itemizations didn't exist, but they weren't quite as homogenized as they were in Cata and beyond.

Just curious: do you think there was a POINT to that kind of itemization? Beyond the obvious "it's not homogenized", was there actual, relevant functionality behind having stats be all over the place? Does varying stam vs. performance create meaningful choices, for example? Or is that just an illusion where sure there's a few items that are off the general line but it's not a real strategy.

I think there's a good reason they went with more streamlined stam/main itemization going forward; in fact, IMO they could just remove that from gear entirely and just have your stam/main scale off of your equipped ilvl directly. It's simply not an interesting choice save for very few edge cases like e.g. trinkets, though even there we've often had the situation where main-stat trinkets were so absurdly good they tended to dwarf all secondar-stat ones (see how much they had to buff old secondary-stat trinkets in S4 M+, for example).

People often point to things like homogenization as something to be avoided, but there's a reason certain things are homogenized over time. It's necessary. Differentiation only makes sense insofar as it's actually fun and useful. If everything was completely different for everyone, we'd have chaos. That doesn't mean EVERYTHING should be homogenized, but it does make sense for certain things.

[Natureseer]

Cata brought the spirit->hit conversion which made spirit gear very useful for the hybrid casters (balance, ele, shadow)