[First time posting about theorycraft issues here, please be gentle.]

Previous discussions have talked about the issues of the itemization formula Blizzard has chosen: it gets more expensive to increase the amount of a given stat on an item as the amount of that stat increases. This means that to provide meaningful upgrades, item levels have to climb rapidly--"mudflation". There was a fair bit of discussion about this when TBC first came out, because Karazhan and SSC loot were not huge upgrades in the way MC/BWL//Naxx loot were, due to item levels and poor stat allocation. Obviously, 2.1 featured massive stat reallocation that resolved many of the problems--Karazhan loot, for instance, provides nice upgrades over level 70 blues--and people are not complaining anymore, having happily returned to killing dragons, demons, etc. However, the itemization formulae are still in place and the core issues have not changed. If I have followed discussion on the board correctly, this is part of the issue behind shadow priest complaints--there are a very small number of stats that are relevant to a shadow priest and these stats are running into problems with the itemization formulae.

I think Blizzard realizes this and is attempting to provide more stats to raise, thus enabling meaningful upgrades without drastically inflating item levels over time. Examples of this phenomenon are resilience in PvP, the changes to haste rating for channeled spells in 2.1, and the "ignore armor" bonus on the warrior tier 6 DPS set. (Speaking as a paladin healer, I also think that this is what Blizzard is trying to do with spellcrit and mp5--balance the effectiveness of both to provide for more meaningful upgrades in paladin gear, but I'm not convinced they have found a good balance of usefulness for spellcrit and mp5.) Basically, with the current itemization formula, if you have a given item level increase and five stats to raise, you can raise all of them by a small amount and provide a better upgrade than if you only had three stats and could raise those by a small amount plus epsilon.

What other bonuses do you think Blizzard could provide that would be useful and would not be imbalanced PvE- versus PvP-wise? (PvP bonuses or PvE bonuses, either one.) The "ignore armor" bonus has been cited as an elegant way of providing PvE utility without unduly affecting PvP--are there any other ideas out there?

The offensive caster situation is really exemplified by the shadow priest situation. Spell power is the backbone of caster damage, yet only one stat increases it directly (baring talents and gear set bonuses) compared to other DPS classes getting AP increases from both the AP stat itself and Strength and Agility, depending on class. Mass amounts of spell crit, and spell hit, and spell penetration are nice, but when it really comes down to it we're dependent on spell power to provide substantive increases.

Blizzard did at passive spell haste bonuses to some of the Black Temple gear that I've seen, which will have some synergy with the otherwise excessive amounts of int and spirit on dps gear, but I'm really not sure how useful the stat will be overall; its dps increase is very much on par with spell crit and even stacked spell haste will only provide a 5-10% casting speed increase, which won't make much tactical difference.

The other side of this is Blizzard's reluctance to properly design gear for raiding; the crafted tailoring gear is so popular because its stat allocation is better than the sets and most raid dropped epics.

For starters they could make spell penetration useful.

I think they could add a "Critical Strike Damage Bonus rating", which assuming it scaled decently would be a pretty nice stat for high crit rate classes. It would also help be a gear counter to resilience, giving it some PvP practicality.

Past that, all I can come up with maybe gear bonuses that reduce mana/energy/rage costs, but I'm not too sure those are well suited to anything other than set bonuses. And mana cost reduction is really just mp5 in flashier clothes.

Actually, they don't. The formula looks roughly like:

cost = ( stat1^1.5 + stat2^1.5 + stat3^1.5 + ... )^(2/3)

So if you multiply each stat by a constant, then the cost is multiplied by the same constant. The nonlinear scaling only comes into play when you're shifting the point allocation between stats on the item.

Hmmm. Let's say we have two stats and we start out with both equal to 10, so cost = 15.87. Then raising stat1 to 15 costs 4.17 points. Raising stat1 again from 15 to 20 costs 4.43 points. Sure looks like adding five points of stat1 is getting more expensive. Where is my math wrong?

Because you're changing the relationship between the two stats.

You get the most benefit when all stats are realitively equal points wise:

IE:

+10 str
+10 agi
+10 int

The futher they deviate form eachother is when it gets expensive.

Take another example where the points scale the same way.

10 str, 10 agi = 14.14 (Not sure where 15.87 came from, sqrt(200) is ~14.14)
Make it 15 str 15 agi = 21.21 which is 7.07 points higher
Make it 20 str 20 agi = 28.28 which is 7.07 points higher

As long as the ratio of the stats remain constant, they scale linearly.

I thought that was the point, raising just one stat in relation to the others, example being how spell damage and only spell damage scales well for Shadow Priests.

One interesting thing I could see them doing on a trinket is in some way making the spell damage you do have count more. For instance have a trinket that on use makes the spell damage coefficient equal the (castingtime+1)/3.5. The wording I have used is very awkward but the general idea is that an instant or lower would get the spell damage as if it was a 2.5 second cast instead of 1.5. You could simply also make a trinket that says your spell damage is increased by 2% and make a rejuvenating gem type effect that scales until eternity and is OP when we are all level 80.

As long as they implemented this as a rating, that might be pretty cool... Would you gain more from 44 spell damage, or an extra 3% of your spell damage added to your casts, etc etc. Really depends on what spells you cast and what coefficients they use, and such. It would make for some complicated gear decisions as well.

This kind of stat is available in the game Titan Quest (and probably many other games I've never played): both flat increases to damage as well as percentage increases. It works for that game because your character grows in power by orders of magnitude, and it's balanced for single player. But it will quickly spin out of control in WoW. Bob Raider's fireball already hits 35% harder than Joe Casual's, but with another tier's worth of damage multipliers, Bob could more than double Joe's damage. We started to see that near the end of WoW 1.0, and it wasn't good for the game. Plus, the developers have a history of losing control of gear scaling even without percentage multipliers, and the corrections are rarely pleasant.

In EQ terms it was gear stats on new items needing to be improved over old items and as a result having rediculous stats. The issue is mainly, because people will not be happy if the new raid zones have the exact same gear with lets say +2 to every stat. People want to see noticable gain, and this leads to over growth of the stats/power of gear.


When I first saw Naxx loot me and another guy who had played EQ talked about how WoW was shooting itself in the foot. We had a friend who had just played WoW and did not understand what we were talking about. The biggest issue is people in WoW now have this expectation for large gains, its a hard problem to curb.

It's a problem of relative power gains.

Say you start out with an item with +10sta +10str +10agi. If you go up 5 ilvls (hypothetically) you get a new item with +15sta +15 str +15agi. You've increased in power by 50%. Go up another 5 ilvls and you get +20sta +20str +20agi. You've increased in power 100% from the first item, but people aren't looking at that first item, they're looking at that last item, from which it's only a 25% upgrade.

Extrapolate this out, and once you get to the point where you have +50 or +100 of a stat to start with, you have to increase it by more than 5 ilvls (or 10 or 20) for it to have a meaningful effect. This is then compounded the next time you increase stats, over and over until any upgrade at all is virtually meaningless.

It's kind of a catch 22. If you have a linear scale, it gets to a point where upgrades are meaningless, since you reach a point of such small increases relative to existing stats, that it's unnoticeable as an upgrade. If you have a % increasing scale, it eventually grows so large that the numbers you are using are meaningless.

Personally, I'd rather have a carefully planned out % increase type of progression path, combatted in part by introducing new and varied stats in addition to existing stats. They've done this to some extant, but they could go much farther as far as meaningful new stats:

-Spell penetration could be made useful by adding resists to pve mobs. Spell penetration would be needed to do max dmg.
-A stat could be introduced to combat the frequency and severity of glancing blows. They just need to figure out a way to seperate it from the weapon skill stat, since that is tied to leveling up, which they don't want anyone to have an unfair advantage in.
-They could add a pve function for dodging/missing/avoiding physical ranged attacks, so hunters have to collect something to make them be able to counteract that effect.
-Besides more armor, they could have mobs have a greater than normal amount of avoidance, so tanks/melee have to collect a stat that reduces dodge/parry. Again, divorce this from weapon skill, so you do not unbalance things when it's time to level up again.
-Add new talents that reward collecting a certain type of a new stat. Similar to how mages have a talent that gives them more benefit to the +dmg they have on certain spells, or several classes (hunters, warriors) have talents to increase the benefit of stamina.
-Add mobs that can reflect spells, and then give casters a stat to counteract this effect.

These are just off the top of my head, i'm sure others can come up with more imaginative ideas .

There's many directions they can go with stats, the important thing is to give people a reason to want those stats, and to make them broadly available and applicable to the chosen focus of the player, be it pve or pvp.

Well, the easy ones for offensive casters can be stolen from past games. Percentage reduction in mana cost is a simple example for situational use and could be tied in with spell haste to some degree to keep mpt at a constant burn rate. The obvious thing though is spell hit and/or giving value to spell penetration. The only reason I hesitate on spell pen is that unless they ever give back vulnerabilities (and one could split that for PvE and PvP to avoid issues) then it is only a nerf essentially unless you tweak all the other mechanics. I definitely advocate bringing back PvE vulnerabilities in some form but I do understand the issues.

I guess in the end I'd just rather see a separate PvE and PvP ruleset but there is definitely a developer faction at Blizzard that prefers to avoid doing that. While I sympathize from an elegance standpoint, I think it's time to move on.

I'd have to agree here. Seperate rulesets are the way to go. In a sense they already do this with DRs, Curse of Doom, etc.

Casters do not need another stat added that is inherently required for PvE DPS. As a mage right now, I'm already balancing spell damage, spell hit, spell crit and still having to round out a good set of base stats to boot. It's difficult enough right now to find the perfect mix of damage/crit/hit, adding spell penetration as a required stat would really create serious issues as far as gear choices are concerned.

Part of this problem stems from the fact that mages a need multitude of stats to be effective at PvE DPS, whereas classes like aff locks/shadow priests can basically ignore everything else in favor of pure damage, but that's derail material and I'll leave it at that.

I never quite understood why Blizzard decided to go for the "everyone uses the same base stats" route anyway. You can tweak the formulae such that different classes get different benefits, but all it does is create a permanent issue concerning cross-class itemization; unless they decided to make nearly everything say "Class: X" on it (which in the end would be exactly the same as starting with different stats for different classes). Right now hunters are running into issues with non-class specific gear being itemized with Enhancement Shaman (and even warriors and paladins in some cases) in mind. So hunters can't have items with the stats they want/need because it would make them "too powerful" or "too weak" for Enhancement Shaman (and vice versa). This is unecessarily complicated. It also works in reverse - some hunters are finding it more worthwhile to simply use leather gear because it has more of the stats they find directly useful to their DPS. But this creates problems with rogue/feral druid itemization because any class "above" them in equipment options must be taken into consideration. A given leather item might be perfect for a rogue, but because warriors can use it Blizzard has to be careful not to make it too strong for warriors, so they may have to tweak the item to be less useful for rogues instead.

These are basic design decisions that should've been understood and done away with a long, long time ago. The only reasons I can think of that Blizzard might have wanted to keep such "optionality" at a significant burden to their own workload is for purposes of aesthetics and overall gameplay experience. People enjoy having extra choices, even if they never exercise them or use them poorly (see: Hunters using Thunderfury). In the end, however, I think Blizzard really shot itself in the foot with this one. They easily could've compensated for this "illusion of freedom" environment by simply adding more gear that was spec-specific. If there were basic dungeon sets, each one with slight (5-10% difference, along with additional spec-specific set bonuses) modifications, people would still feel like they had options within their own class-specific stat environments. They could even keep rings/amulets/trinkets/weapons as entirely cross-class environments at a much less drastic cost, because the vast majority of your itemization would be in a much more confined space.

This is a common misconception that certainly emphasizes the feeling of "no real upgrade". If you for example double your life and double your armor, how much longer can you survive? Double? No, it takes four times as long as before to kill you.

The individual increases of stats have very strong synergy effects. If you have ten stats like this and each doubles up you will be 1024 times more powerful and can singlehandedly wipe an entire raid of opponents with ease (in reality not all stats have multiplicative synergy effects, but you get the picture). Healers heal for more hp per heal, they have more mana to start with and they regenerate it faster. Melee gets attack power, crit rating, haste rating and so on. The introduction of armor penetration has further accelerated this effect.

If you look at the stats of the new T6 and say ("Oh that's a minor upgrade") count the number of different stats and think again.

This brings to mind Everquest's BOE item system with the recommended levels. If you were under the recommended level, the stats were nerfed accordingly. The same thing could be done with "higher" armor class wearers stepping down a notch or two. A warrior can choose to use mail or leather (or cloth? lol), but that item takes a ~20% stat nerf across the board. 20% is arbitrarily chosen of course, and could be tuned, but it seems like a pretty easy fix to the issues you posed. Excepting the hunter/shaman problem, which I agree is bullcrap atm. Generally speaking, physical dps mail gear sucks ass right now unless its tagged with "hunter" or "shaman".

I was trying to illustrate the concept of mudflation in very simplistic terms, not trying to show how things actually are in game, which is why I said hypothetically.

I think the main reason they didn't implement a greater range of gear options is that they want to limit progression time. The only way to add more items with slightly different stat allocations to the raid game is to add more trash drops, more bosses, make bosses drop more loot, or add in more crafting recipes that in turn require raid drops. Any of these solutions increases the rate at which players gear up for the next level of encounters. Blizzard wants to control this rate as much as possible.

I agree that it would be better to have more gear options for everyone somehow though. Having a very limited set of options makes everyone look the same, everyone gear out basically the same, and limits players' ability to discover what combinations of gear and stats work best for their class and playstyle.

One of the problem with just adding 'more gear' is the depth of boss loot tables. I'm sure people remember onyxia and ragnaros, where the loot table was so deep some items could go weeks or months without dropping and not get to far off statistically average.

Putting in more gear and thus more gear specialization would require expanding the token system, putting more bosses in instances but only allowing them to drop 1 or 2 pieces out of a 4-5 deep table, more trash epics, or some other shift.

Seeing a boss with 12+ items on the table is not something I want to see again.

Really they have to make ultra rare items =)))
with chanses of 0.1% or even less/
They would be wery valuable and people will go kill those bosses for years))))