A purely ingame calendar seems of very limited value for raid organization. Both for players and organizers web site access is needed during hours when ingame access isn't available, whether one is nominally at school/working/whatever. Any ingame calendar needs to be equally accessible from out of game as well.

Isambard, that's not a bad idea at all. Maybe it could be editable through the armory login or something. Although, while a purely ingame calendar might be "of very limited value" for your guild, it wouldn't for us. People are different, and guild structures/processes are as well.

Thanks for the info Jerry. I can't wait to play with it for real.

There is already the ability to view your guild bank and logs through the Armory. I don't think it would be a stretch at all to view, and perhaps edit, your guilds calender via the armory.

And, on the converse, I would like not to have to alt-tab or exit the game in order to look up my raid schedule as well. It would be nice and useful to have the functionality in both areas.

Two screens will make your life soooooooo much better.

I think it certainly has potential in game, but if I can't get to it from work, then it'll be worthless to me personally. Linked functionality between the Internetz and in-game would vastly increase the value of the calendar tool.

Given that crit/haste ratings are being merged, and *assuming* no major stat mechanic changes, this would mean that int becomes a non-useless stat for melee dps (similarly agi and casters).

Now I am not suggesting that people are going to be seeking out those stats on the gear, but I find it wierdly amusing that rogues may well be demanding Arcane Intellect before a fight.

Not to mention the Intellect -> Critical Strike conversion is absurdly high. Isn't it something close to 225 INT per percentage of crit at L80?

So the unified crit rating only applies to items that have `x crit rating` in their budget and characters will continue to derive separate melee/spell crit ratings from their total stats?

Otherwise, I was considering the case where hybrid classes would get to `double dip` with two stats providing a bonus to both spell and melee crit as a combined rating. As the above poster stated, the crit/int ratio is poor, but when min-maxing every factor must be considered.

The combined crit rating also raises the possibility of odd ultra-niche items. Consider a dagger or 1-hand sword with stamina and boatloads of (unified) crit rating/haste. Potentially, this could be attractive to melee dps (depending also on speed and dps) and casters. In the past, I cannot think of an item where this would be the case.

Correct, the change was mostly done to reduce the heavy amount of stats being introduced and helping classes with secondary rating requirements (Enh Shamans, Rogues & Paladins etc) which was pretty much impossible or futile to acquire.

This is unlikely to occur since part of the item budget that is allocated to dps is removed in the case of caster weapons to allow for stats that actually boost caster performance.

But if you make it a ring or trinket (or even enchant or gem) instead of a weapon, I'd say it's actually almost certain to occur.

To be honest I don't see a healer equiping an item with no spellpower(and arguably anyone else, or melees using a no AP item). Possible, but unlikely. Just adding spellpower would make it viable for healers and casters alike though. But I don't really believe in universal items, unless you're way undergeared and use any upgrade(aka running around in quest greens and you're taken into tier8 since you're a reroll new main, and you get melee based stuff on your caster cause it's better than your stuff).

Haste, Hit, Crit and Stamina could all be applied universally - throw a socket or two on the item and it would be very customizable to most classes.

I'm rather hoping Blizzard try to adopt a policy where sockets will be used to tailor items to your class/spec rather than just enhance the pre-existing power stat like we have done in TBC - lumping hit mostly into sockets and off main items allows a much better sharing of items between all casters as all the other stats are mostly useful to all.

I wasn't suggesting we'll see a bunch of raid tier gear itemized like that and just with that spread, but it's strong and easly to make levelling gear and means that quest itemization is pretty simple; I'd expect to see some blues itemized like that on reputation vendors and mid-range crafting recipies. Also, I'm expecting to see some epics itemized like that with 2-3 slots which would let them be very generically useful; make that a tailoring epic cloak, for example, and you'd have a good candidate for a constant, solid seller for new raiders, depending on the availability of Epic Gems to some degree (2 slots are worth 46SP/80AP with epic gems, which from our current perspective looks pretty solid for a Cloak).

This is *huge* for guilds just getting into raiding. One of the biggest problems for these guilds is simply getting people to go to the website for sign-ups or whatever. On the guild relations forums, a very common question is "How do I get people to use the website?" An in-game tool is awesome for these guilds.

The value to an existing raiding guild is lower, because that guild already has the necessary structure for raiding in place. This tool will be invaluable to guilds which don't have that structure yet.

So long as the update time from in-game to armory for a calendar system is less than a couple hours, it would be great. I believe the current update time on armory GMOTD is around 12-24 hours? Which would make it sort of useless for the task of checking what raid is on tonight while at work, and deciding if you should leave early/late or not.

If they improve the update time, that will be an amazing tool for both the new guilds you mentioned and the hardcore alike. I would love to just grab an XML of my guilds calendar from armory and throw it into a custom website/RSS.

Some of the haste-healer rings are already considered very good for casters
Rings - Items - World of Warcraft

Also back in WoW Vanilla when ZG first came out, and before a lot of rogue attacks were normalized, this slow spell damage weapon was eagerly desired by rogues and casters alike. [Fang of Venoxis]

These things happen, and I personally like finding all the corner cases in itemization.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it wasn't that weapon, but the one off of Azuregos, [Fang of the Mystics]. Initially, spell damage weapons did not have reduced physical DPS traded for more stats, and this dagger also had a slower speed. I remember some stupid loot drama over this.

It's both. [Fang of Venoxis] had a 2.0 attack speed and pre-normalization it made it very, very good. The [Honed Fang of the Mystics] had a really high weapon dps, but the speed was roughly the same. Just made it a really good offhand.

Wow. So if that gets perfected, there could be a mod (plus a third party program) that can export your in-game calendar to a Google Calendar every x-minutes whenever anyone is logged on with the mod? That would render any presumably slow armory calendar integration useless. That would be great considering there is almost always a non-working bum that logs on during the day well before raid time, whom just by logging on and having the program in the background can be updating the calendar with any short notice raid changes.

Probably wouldn't be quite that smooth - the only way addons have to communicate with the outside world is via savedvariables, which are only written to when relogging or /reloadui-ing

In theory, yes, in practice, the addon could just present an export button that when clicked would open up a scrollable text frame with the data necessary to use on an external calendar application which would allow the user to copy-paste it.

That would reduce some of the inconvenience of going through saved variables.