More or less I'd say given the track record I can understand why they're fearful to do it, but I'm not arguing the mechanics of them putting it in and fucking everything up, I'm just arguing that if it's done right, I think it's a good system, that leads to a lot of fun. Yes Green Whelp Armor was overpowered, but it was hilarious and a lot of fun when your shaman got lucky and ran across the entire field cause he RNG'd their entire team. If it was balanced with something like boots that gave a chance to go immune to CC and gain 50% speed for 10 seconds when you got cc'd, then you'd have the equal opportunity chance that he's RNG the team with green whelp armor, then all of a sudden he'd have an AP POM mage running along faster than him just decimating him. If balanced properly it could give a lot of depth and enjoyment to the game (IMO)

Of course they're being conservative, but how long can they push the "balance over fun" before the game gets boring and people quit and start looking for another game. It's a thin line for them to walk, and it can honestly be put together with so many other discussions on this board. Take this thread, with the thread about pvp items being so amazing for raiding, alter it so pve gear scales well with solid upgrades that make you feel good about your progress, and put the good pvp bonuses on pvp gear so that no one in their right mind would use raid gear over pvp gear and you hit a happy medium. Sure my 2 hander from raids has an extra 20 dps over the pvp one, but the pvp one increases MS effectiveness and has a dispel proc. Sure you could use the raid one and do okay, but if it's balanced right the pvp one would be garbage for raiding by comparison, but be better for pvp so you can have good upgrades in raiding and pvp isn't dominated by raiding.

Gear Matching System? Lol, where? In organized BGs? Hell no. I did my share of BGs in part greens, part 70 blues and ran into premade epic teams where every warrior had a Gorehowl or S1 weapon. In Arena? Gear is huge. There is no gear matching system there, since gear and skill both factor in. Sorry but your argument is based on the idea that Blizzard has a properly implemented gear matching and pug/organized team matching system. They don't.

Even among my own side gear matching was a joke. Funny thing to zone into AB and start inspecting. One warrior has full Arena gear, next warrior wielding a Crystal Forged Axe and some great adamantite pieces plus greens.

I'm confused as to what MSD stands for, mind clarifying the acronym? I'm sad that arcane mages are going to be nerfed; they make pug heroics laughably quick due to their awesome damage, and it was nice to see something different from your typical firemage or low dps frostmage (+slow is awesome).

The issue isn't that it wouldn't be nice. I agree that it would be nice. I think that if they could pull it off, it would be a lot of fun. However, that's a really, really big "if". And given their track record, it's completely warranted that they don't do this stuff, because they know, you know, and I know that they are more than likely going to screw it up right out of the gate.

It would be great if that weren't the case. But that's an ideal situation, not a realistic one. The situation I describe would be a much more realistic one.

If they tried to do this, it would end up with the nerf pendulum swinging back and forth again, as described previously. Doomsaying isn't necessarily substantiated at the moment. I don't doubt that *you'd* probably cancel if you got bored. But you have to prove that it would be significantly more people than the normal amount of 'burnout' or churn rate that's standard for a MMO of this size.

Disquette brings up an interesting issue when he refers to "totem twisting" being removed. One of the thing I remember fondly about EQ was how malleable it was. Quad-kiting, feign-death pulling, complete heal chains, bard twisting - these tactics and others shaped the way the game was played, and yet none of them were (to my recall) actually intended by the developers. They were, in the purest sense, player-created content. They were also wildly overpowered in certain contexts, which was the entire point of some creative person figuring out the tactic in the first place.

As Lodekim implies, WoW seem to have adopted the mantra of "balance above all". Balance CC classes by letting them CC *one* target. Balance group roles by allowing multiple tanks, or healers. Balance raid and pvp gear by artificially inflating the one to keep pace with the other. Balance raid and non-raid progressions by flattening the improvement curve, and so on. WoW isn't balanced in one or two dimensions, it's simultaneously balanced in five or six (that I can distinguish).

Of course, this great interlocking web of balance is going to enforce a certain level of homogeneity. Few things can ever be really *different*, because being different means they are notably better or worse than similar things...and therefore unbalanced. Paladins and Shamans swapping factions is (yet another) example.

The problem I think Blizzard faces, is that the playerbase are the ones who ultimately demand this aggressively balanced environment. If a Druid can beat a Hunter 65% of the time - we demand a fix. If PvP gear is better than raid gear, fix it. If the reverse is true, fix that. If Paladins are tanking better than Warriors, or healing better than Priests, we produce very good logical reasons whay that should be changed. Of course Paladins hve eloquent representatives also, and a case will be made that sub-par tanking and healing needs attention.

WoW is a second-gen MMO, and one of the things that distinguishes it from it's predecessors is that it is more sophisticated and resilient as far as game mechanics. Nowhere in WoW will you see a Bard soloing thirty mobs at once, or watch a single high-raid player ninja a spawn that an *entire* lower tier guild was after. You'll never get your kill stolen, or have an uberguild take your Illidan while you're buffing. You also won't see a top guild snag an amazing one-per-server Artifact weapon, because as cool as that would be...well, the issues are pretty obvious.

Taken as an whole, I suspect WoW does an amazing job mirroring the aggregate desires of it's players. Unfortunately, with so many demographics that involves a lot of compromise. "Compromise", being a synonym for "no one getting what they want". My hope is that THIRD-gen MMOs target their demographic more tightly, and/or allow a bit more chaos into their gamesystems. Unfortunately, it's questionable as to whether WoW's market-shattering success can be approached by any game with more "chutzpah", and potential success is what gets you published.

I couldn't disagree more. Blizzard had months to test this (very specific) change while 2.2 was up on the PTR. They could hardly have been unaware of how the MSD would synergise with AM, given that the change was so very specific. It's incredibly obvious that any item with a (useful) low chance proc and no hidden cooldown becomes immediately many times more valuable. I also find it hard to believe that the devs totally missed out on the discussion here, especially given the tinkering that occured seemingly in response to some of Manly's tests (specifically, the change that caused channeled spells to consume the focus buff after it was increased to 10s duration).

Also I would assume that the reason they reworked AM (and not other channels) to enable this is because AM is otherwise singularly uninspiring: it has a high mana cost, does mediocre base damage, and has a low crit multiplier. Being uninterruptible does not a good base nuke make. Other channels (mind flay, life/mana drain, rain of fire/blizzard) are invariably either cheap and efficient, have special secondary effects, or are AoE spells.

More generally, regardless of the wisdom of making a spec so dependent on specific items and gems, it was an example of a new and different way to gear and play your toon, which is one reason why so many mages switched to Arcane as soon as the patch went live. Equally, it is at least part of the reason why so many mages are QQing about respeccing back to fire - after this breath of fresh air, going back to a "stale" spec, even one newly buffed with the damage tax removal, is a very disappointing prospect indeed.

Agree with the thrust of your point, Wings, but must just say.

*cough* C'Thun, *cough* Nefarian *cough*

You may say that, but there's another phrase for that, which is "itemisation hole". And there's a long, tedious multi-page thread elsewhere on these forums lamenting the various itemisation holes - the fact that there's no upgrade for rogue boots between Moroes and BT, or for Latro's between BM and BT. What I'm seeing is a lot of complaining, and no thought being given to the fact that people simply want incompatible things.

People want cool high-powered items that they won't replace for months - but they don't want itemisation holes that mean they wait months for upgrades

People want to be on a server with lots of high-end guilds raiding the content - but they don't want to be among lots of people all wearing the same gear

People want PvP to be skill-dependent rather than gear-dependent - but they don't want everyone to wear the same gear

People don't want to burn through all the content and have to wait months for more - but they don't want to be forced to run content they've already beaten just for attunement, or because the Next Big Thing isn't out yet


Now of course, it's not always the same people complaining about the first half of each pair as about the second half of each pair. But quite often it is, and there's a lot of absolute wilful blindness to the fact that some of all our "wants" are completely, inescapably incompatible with each other.

This is a very good point, but I think we can qualify the itemisation issue at least. People want cool non-essential items that survive a few tiers of upgrades. [The Lightning Capacitor] is a great example of this, to my mind. It is competitive for a specific function (AoE) all the way through BT but not having one won't cripple your single target dps, which is 90% of what you will be doing. There are also a multitude of viable alternative trinkets available, so you are (hopefully) never in the situation where you are forced to use an i115 blue trinket you picked up six months ago in Black Morass.

Something rather more essential like Latro's blue offhand sword, however - that is just silly. It can't even boast an interesting mechanic like TLC, it's just a standard blue-quality item with no upgrades for an absurdly long time.

I disagree, the problem was never that it could proc on each missile hit, but that it could proc without any cooldown, which is in fact what they have fixed. And they have pretty much fixed this across the board, with items such as MSD, DST and Warglaives. Which missile the proc actually comes from is hardly any big consequence, seeing how badly AM spam performs with the new MSD.

I think just as many are disappointed that a spec that finally made us into something a bit closer to what we should be (not an abysmal DPS'er compared to a rogue) is taken away, without there being a lot other than theoretical evidence that fire without the damage tax will put us back up there again. Many mages, specially min/max'ers, are more concerned about damage output than about freshness, and have spent a fair deal of time in any spec anyway.

Well I can't speak for everyone else, but _I_ at least found it fresh and interesting. My normal rotation is AB/AM as I don't have the regen or s.priest availability to support pure AM spam, and changing my cast on the fly depending on whether focus and/or CC procced (or triggering AP if you got both) was different and fun, certainly a change from 1x scorch 7x fireball ad infinitum. Can you honestly say you didn't find it the least bit fun when you got back to back focus procs and had a huge burst of numbers appear on your screen (especially if you got a couple of TLC bolts in the mix)?

Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to speak for mages other than myself and assume they found the spec (and also, the process of tweaking your gear for the spec) new/interesting; but if so, it is equally presumptuous of you to assume that all other mages are so jaded as to be entirely uninterested by the change. Improving one's dps is of course a non-trivial incentive to change specs, but it is by no means necessarily the only one.

World of Warcraft simply doesn't have much deapth. There aren't many choices you can make and in the end it really is just a quest to improve the item level of the items you wear; sure there are some flavour perhaps but really not much.

In the end its not really fun to upgrade from Tier 4 to Tier 5. The items are just the same with an extra few stat points here and there.

In the end at least for me personally I think the start of booring itemization is items with its item level split over 4 or 5 different bonuses.

It doesn't matter if your sword has defence, stamina, block rating, and dodge; or armor, hit, block value, and parry. All those stats are good for a tank, and any single item wont provide enough to make a substantial difference anyway. As long as one of the items has more stats (i.e higher level) its going to be better in the end.

Though any single item might add different stats there isn't much choice in what end result to aim for.

Kind of wish Blizzard would have stuck with having perhaps two stats at most on items. And even restricted alot what item types could add different types of stats; so there was always a choice in what to go for.

For instance by saying:

+dodge only goes on boots
+hit only goes on boots, gloves, and weapon.
+armor only on rings, chest, helmet.
+intellect only on rings, neck, helmet.
+strength only goes on gloves, rings, and bracers.


Well and for rest of the stats. So the items are there for adding extra of a particular stat. Not for adding a little of everything at once.

Though for that to work out I guess the base character stats/talents would have to account for much more of the characters power than it does now. If items are supposed to make the character unique and different from other characters playing then items simply can't also be used for adding the nessecary base stats needed for doing the content.

Though it would be better if a warrior have 150 stamina as base value. If you want more for a particular fight you'd switch one or two items for another 20-40 stamina. Rather than swap all your items for another 600.

Would be a different game system though so WoW can't change. But as long as items are what makes up for a majority of a characters stats; then progression will be about replacing current items with more powerful ones. Assuming Blizzard don't have the energy to add 100's of items for each class on each tier of progression there wont be much room for flavour and differences.

Could they stop making items more powerful between tiers and just add more flavour items and different looks? Sure. Would likely be a better idea. Though wouldn't account for character progression.

Items have the advantage that they can be reset simply. But there are other options that can also be reset. For instance bosses could start dropping books that gives additonal training as a way to increase stats. Such books could then be quest rewards, or be added to trainers in the next expansion and still make it resettable (unlike other AA systems maybe). But a new Tier wouldn't automatically make you replace old items you like the looks off and have used forever to give your character a distinct look.

Think it could be a more fun way to add stat progression. Really it is the character that should progress and not mostly the items that the character has. Though there is a need to keep it easy to reset the progression in an expansion of course.



EDIT: Though for a simple system. Suppose Blizzard were to make a trainable talent called 'The Path of the warrior' that increased your stats every few levels. At level 70 Blizzard could then take Tier 4 and Tier 5 and look at the end stats of those armors. Then remove the stat advantage Tier 5 has over Tier 4 and make the bosses drop manuals that teach the next rank of your 'Path of the Warrior' talent. So at the end of SSC you would have a Tier 5 set consisting of 5 items with more of the same item level that your Tier 4 had; but with a slight differece in what stats it focus on maybe. The increase in stats entirely made up for by having learned 5 ranks of the mentioned talent.

Would leave stat progress the same. Would have to farm the same bosses; but in the end you could use either of tier 4 or tier 5 depending on personal preference. More or less fun?

Could keep items beeing useful for many many more levels. If taken to the extreme with no progress at all with higher level items you could use Scarlet monestary armor still at 70 with no real loss of efficiency but thats perhaps taking it too far.

...at the end of the day expansion hits and everyone gets to train addiional ranks for 5 gold in Stormwind barracks and all characters starts fresh; but items phased out more slowly and naturally maybe.

You can do it again:
WoW-Europe.com Forums -> [H] Showdown selling SSC/TK Loot Don't know about Illidian, but I guess they'd do it for a high enough price.

High-end raiding is non-purchasable only at the bleeding edge when you really need ALL raid members to be top shape and gear.

I guess I'm the one at fault for bringing this to such a public eye. My little parody of another thread (I'm sure most of you seen it "http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2366687290&sid=1&pageNo=1") led to something quite big as a lot of players had input on the subject. Basically my point was about whether or not we should challenge Blizzard's style of buffing loot and nerfing raiding to the point where casuals are less than a full teir behind those in the most advanced instances. I got a lot of mixed responses, and by playing the role of the "no-life" raider, I was able to invoke quite a bit of emotional response from the casual side. After my experience in that thread, I have come up with a list of issues and some solutions I have come up with:



1.) Arena PvP - Let's face it, Arena PvP is one of those places where the good players can be good, and they can flaunt it. They may not have exclusive gear, but due to parity that is understandable. However, they have a number rating, rank, and all this is a click away on the forums that CLEARLY spells out their skill level to everyone. There are ranks and rewards (titles and drakes) that are distinctive and rather unique. Arena PvP is probably in the best state of any of the aspects of the game, but even it has it's flaws. First off, there is very little cut-throat competition at the higher levels. Everyone kinda settles into their niche early and just farms/sells the points leisurely. Once they have their points, they have no incentive to keep the rating up. I hear it's different on BG9, but on every other battlegroup I've seen the same thing. This, combined with the clear schism between "good" players and "average and bad" players leaves the current setup unfufilling. Nobody gets to see each other play, so nothing other than your little 200 point range of teams matters to you.

Solution: First, to establish the competitive level, they should add WEEKLY BATTLEGROUP TOURNAMENTS to each bracket, rotating the days to make it available to all (so that the 5v5 is not ALWAYS on the same day). Make it an event where an arena team can sign up, and there is a bracket formed. You play a best of 5 against a team, winner moves on. This ensures that the top teams in the battlegroup, if they wish to be known as such, will have to defend it against the best teams around on a regular basis. A simple reward like a rotating weekly title and a token amount of arena points should be enough to encourage people to play (even award like 10 arena points to the teams who finish last). This would attract people, people WILL be interested in this if done correctly, and it will make the Arena a staple attraction of Warcraft that people will enjoy.

However, that isn't enough. They need to create the connection between the elite players and your average players. The average player needs to be able to SEE the skill these players possess, the teamwork they show to truly understand why these players are better and why they deserve the gear. ARENA VIEWING needs to be brought into the realm of options for people to see. Maybe even recordings of matches would be fine. Say, keep a record of a match for 2 hours, and catalog it so people can look up matches to watch by ratings or by team names. Real time would be even better, but that would most likely tend to crowd the server too much while the players are playing, and would ultimately be detrimental in my opinion. This would let your average player watch the best players play weekly. You'd see more fan base, and the possibility that this game can go mainstream with competitive gaming as we saw a glimpse of with the WSVG. I know both of these would be huge projects, but in my opinion it's in Warcrafts best interest in the long run to have these implemented soon, as it's content that will never expire.



Casual Progression - This is has always been a concern with casuals since the later parts of Vanilla WoW, and it's obviously been a concern with blizzard with the addition of much casual content in BC. It's quickly becoming an issue with raiders (by this I mean people who raid 4-5 nights a week or have at least killed Vashj/Kael). We as raiders are quickly seeing our unique looks as part of our 'aura of eliteness' being eroded as Blizzard is attempt to close the gap more and more. Purple is average, Everything looks the same, and Gear differences are almost meaningless. Not to mention the progression. As an Illidan slayer, I'm having to go to Slave Pens to put the final touches on my character. Is that right? I don't think it is. In my opinoin, Blizzard has started to cross that unmentioned line of what raiders will tolerate in order to keep our game going.

Solution - Stop with the farming of crap. Badges, Scraps, Turn-ins. It's old and overused. Rather, develop a semi-unique system of well... a checklist. For example:
If you want to see a more casual alternate advancement that won't irritate hardcore players, some sort of "achievement" list would be better, maybe each time you reach a certain milestone of completed objectives (say 40/80/100/120/135) you open up some more gear. So finish 40 of these and get kara level items, finish 80 and you get something a little better. Hell, add a faction to it, like goblins outfitters, who seek to sell gear to "worthy" adventurers. You'd only be able to do so many "easy" ones before you need to move on to more difficult tasks. By the time you get to the highest end gear, you've A) earned it, B) Shown you have some skill or lots of dedication, C) Done a variety of different types of gameplay, and D) Had an entertaining Challenge.

IE:
[] Kill a City Commander (PvP)
[] Kill Nightbane
[] Complete Slave Pens (Normal)
[] Complete Arcatraz (Heroic)
[] Complete CoT: Mount Hyjal in under 3 hours.
[] Earn 100 Heroic Badges.
[] Earn 300 Heroic Badges.
[] Achieve 375 Fishing.
[] 5 Cap in Arathi Basin.
[] Defeat Gruul.
[] Defeat Illidan Stormrage.
[] Achieve a 1700 Arena Rating.
[] Achieve a 1900 Arena Rating.

You could make hundreds of these of varying difficulties, types of gameplay, and variety. Like, not everyone can get a 1900 rating, but maybe they could kill Illidan. It lets the player have a little say in their form of advancement. It doesn't need to be balanced really in any way, as long as people are getting gear around the correct level of advancement. In my opinion I see this as a much better way of easing casual players into increasingly difficult content and awarding them appropriately. It gives them goals and rewards for completing those goals. Obviously these would weigh heavily on the casual side, unlike most of my examples, but I think you get the idea. I like it much better than badges. You can add more with each patch, and tons of them with each Plus if you could put these on the inspect tab, it can give a player a sense of pride.


World PvP - This needs to be addressed. Their "World PvP" doesn't work. Nobody wants to take some stupid towers in the Plaguelands or a graveyard in Zangarmarsh. Sure, it was cool to see it once, but after that it's pointless. About the only one people even pay attention to anymore is the towers in Terrokar. And even then it's not something you usually go out of your way to do. Some form of assassination is needed. Quests for attempting to slay named NPC's. Maybe even some PvP BG type variation where actual PLAYERS are targets (ie, something along the lines of a Halo3, VIP game, but out in open World). Would give us more of a sense of open war with factions banding together to seek out targets.

Solution? I don't know exactly, but I think some ideas listed above would help spice things up a bit. Anyone got thoughts?


Raiding - Uh, oh. I'm about to step on a lot of people's love right here. Screw linear attunements. It's an artificial way to keep people out of instances. If you want linear progression, stagger the release of high end raid instances. I know we give Blizzard shit for it, but I'd rather have them intentionally stagger instance releases with the top 5-10% of the population completing the previous one. It also would help remove the taboo of bringing alts along to raid instances, increasing longevity. Linear Attunements leads to too many problems with recruiting and casuals wanting to "see" instances. Who cares if they can zone in and wipe to Naj'entus 100 times? I don't. However, with this Blizzard needs to be less lazy with the difficulties of early bosses in instances. A boss like Kael's difficulty should be the FIRST boss in an instance like BT, not a line of Naj'entus, Supremus, Akama, Teron. Keep people out by gear and skill, not some artificial security card. Some short story related ttunement is ok, like BWL or Molten Core or Naxxramas. We can all live with that. In fact, I think it's preferred by a large majority.

Secondly, UNIQUE ITEM SKINS. I've killed Illidan, I don't want to look like Joe Smith over there. I want someone to see me and say, "Oh, that guy has killed (or is around) Illidan".

Third, bring back the gear gap. With the introduction of Resilience gear, WE DON'T NEED A SMALL GEAR GAP. This will help keep undergeared raiders out of higher end content, which is something you need when giving easy attunements. I know we raped people in PvP because of this in 1.x, but it's not a huge issue anymore with the stacking of stam and PvP'ers wearing 500 resilience.

Finally, stop making our best PvE weapons come from PvP. It's ok to put good weapons there, but the best PvE stats available? C'mon... I'll have mine the first week of the new season, but even I think it's stupid.

I know this is a rehash of what has already been said, but I gueninely believe that people calling for MSD nerf are missing the whole picture.

If MSD was not nerfed in 2.3, AM spam will still do less damage than fire or frost spec. The only buff arcane is getting in 2.3 is more mana regen, which still cannot make up for the fact that arcane missiles has a totally atrocious DPM.

I understand that a metagem isn't intended to boost arcane missiles DPS by 12-15%. But I think something needs to be said when you consider that despise the extra 12-15% DPS increase, arcane missiles is worse DPS and DPM than frostbolt and fireball.

The only net effect of this change is killing an entire playstyle that does less dps than the competing specs.

If Arcane has issues, then the fix to those issues shouldn't come in the form of a metagem.

This is really just common sense here.

It is indeed common sense but a 'fix' isn't going to happen anytime soon. Blizzard has been tweaking arcane as a whole for a long damn time now and both AM and AB are still essentially reliant on specific items. In the case of AM it was actually the synergy between multiple items and that's been removed with obvious intent.

So be it.

Divide this into 10 randomly given quests, with 10 randomly assigned follow-ups. And I know you said no Tokens, but you can't clutter up everyone's quest log, so 3 new tokens just for this progression chain, and probably a couple Rare ones for good measure. Sounds new and exciting no? Maybe it needs a reputation requirement as well? Just to make sure people sink a proper amount of time? So they feel gratified wearing their [Rockfury Bracers]?

How can you seriously suggest the Tokens/badges are overused and then put them in your checklist? And there's nothing they love better than using these as sinks for random crap. There's no way you won't be farming sporebat poop.

Why is that? Why can we not have a certain spec be mediocre without a specific set of items but pretty good with it, so long as it's not horribly overpowered then? Why not have certain combinations of items+specs be significant power increases instead of mediocre upgrades?

This is precisely why this game has gotten so stale for me - all the upgrades I can look forward to are relatively minor boosts in power, non of which significantly impact how I spec or play my character. It's not like, now that I got this level of gear I can respec into this other spec which used to be crap but now it's good and change how I play.

And I know, that even on the off-chance that something like that happens, it will be "fixed" soon after.

This is what overbalancing does, and it's making the game boring. So long as there are many "unbalanced" things, and you can look forward to making your own character strong, what's so bad about having people have strong characters? There is a limit to it of course and I'm not advocating entirely crazy specs/items, but there needs to be *something* to look forward to. And really I can't see that there is.

The problem is the response to what was a case of player creativity and some good theorycraft, and the underlying trend more than the specific example.

The AM build is entirely built around procs and spell haste to create a positive feedback loop, combining things like the BT Exalted trinket, Capacitor, spell haste gear, proc items like the Hyjal Exalted ring (or even the pre-TBC Silithus +dam proc ring), and so forth. MSD is key, but it's not just the MSD. And it yielded a very strong result -- you can see up to 1800ish DPS sustained on static fights with CoS, a shadow priest, bloodlust, and pretty much the best possible gear in the game (4pc t6, Leggings of Channeled Elements, Illidan staff or Archi sword, etc.). Rogues still can do 2000 without any such gimmicks (and without Warglaives).

The problem is that the response serves to discourage such innovation, or to encourage players to keep their little tricks and discoveries secret. If we didn't have the "Arcane damage" thread on our forums, I have to wonder whether MSD would've changed. If Manly and a few other mages, instead of coming to the forums and saying "Hey guys, check this out, this build and gear setup I have is pulling 1600 DPS unbuffed on the PTR," with pages of supporting math, keep quiet and only tell mages in their guild, I guess that's better?

It gets back to my concerns about the lack of individuality. If you know that if you do come up with a creative way to distinguish yourself from every other cookie-cutter DPS spec out there, it's probably going to be nerfed, why bother?

Sticking with the Healing Mace example. My problem is with how small the upgrades are compared to how difficult they are to obtain. My guild has 8 Lady Vashj Kills and 0 Healing maces. I don't have the statistics to back this up, but what do you think the ratio of [Lightfathom Scepter] to [Merciless Gladiator's Salvation] is on servers? For even a pretty well PVE progressed server like Blackrock its probably something like 1:20.

I'm not asking that [Lightfathom Scepter] be 2000% as powerful as [Merciless Gladiator's Salvation] or look 2000% as cooler... but how about 30%? or 20%?

This is bordering on another discussion all together. But my point is if character progression is almost soley based on gear... and I obtain an item like [Lightfathom Scepter] then it should mean something. People should look at it and say "WOW That mace is awesome! I Want one!!!". But the reality is people look at someone with [Lightfathom Scepter] and say "Your guild spent 3 months in SSC, raiding 20-25 hours a week, and thats all you got? LOL I bought arena points for my ALT and got him an [Merciless Gladiator's Salvation] more then a month ago."

Maybe I'm just too old school where item progress went something like this:

[Aurastone Hammer] => [Jin'do's Hexxer] => [The Widow's Embrace]