Is Blade Flurry still breaking CCs or is it subject to the new cleave rules?

@handratty on page 159

This can be found on page 1 in this thread at the end of the first post.

Not only has itemization become boring, but due to the streamlining of "optimal" stats on gear, Blizzard is backing themselves into a corner. Most stats have an effective "cap", and gear in TBC has allowed people to either acheive or get close to their caps already. Now the dilemma is how do you effectively make any improvements when your stat options are so minimal. You could raise the conversion rate of the stat, but players aren't going to be overjoyed at having their effective Hit or Crit rating go DOWN with an expansion. The expecation is that characters improve with each patch and therein lies the rub. Hit/Crit/Haste/etc... are already being pushed in excess with current gear. So what "new" stat will have to be introduced?? Time will tell... if they do nothing, you are exactly right in that we will be exchanging our +141 with +149!! How rewarding!!

More chance on cast/hit/resist items I suspect. The SSO Exalted Neck being a neat toy until we can see some hard #'s on it. Then they could "nerf" the stats on items and give them a chance on cast, and also have an item of "near optimal" stats. Then you would have "choices". They tried this with haste rating, and failed miserably for alot of classes.

I take it you didn't play before TBC? That's exactly what happened from 60->70, everyone's crit and hit and other rating-based stats dropped whilst you leveled, and then you had to work them back up again at 70 once you started collecting better gear. Expect the same thing to happen in WotLK (along with other new stats/design ideas, of course).

Exactly. In fact these values used to be expressed in percentages (+1% crit, +1% hit, etc). They specifically changed them to "rating" values so that they could devalue their conversion as they raise the level cap.

I am guessing it will scale to about 2.5x this time, so like.. 55crit rating = 1% type deal.. maybe lower.. depends how much of a gear reset they want.

The formula is already in-game, you could caculate your values for your character at level 80 right now, if you felt inclined to do so.

While true, it's not safe to assume that'll work. There were formulas in the game pre-expansion that didn't hold post-expansion. And there are formulas that have inflection point where all the curves change, too (like the armor ilvl formulas do around 40th level), and there might be another one post-70.

The strategy might work, but it's not safe to be certain it will.

I don't think they'll change the ratings formula, more likely they'll change the item level point system. I can't remember if that changed between Vanilla and TBC. I'm guessing some highly stacked item would get many times more expensive with just adding +30 healing, +50 AP or similar because of the way the cost of the stat points scale. I think that's what they'll change going forward into wotlk.

It did, in two ways that I can recall.

1) The cost of Stamina,

2) The typical ilevel of an item that a given "level foo required" item actually had.

I think we can be sure #2 is going to happen again. Remember how much more powerful a "level 57 required" green that drops in Outland is when compared to a "level 57 required" green that drops in the old world? We should expect the same of "level 67 required" greens in Northrend.

No idea if something like #1 is going to happen again.

Edit: there's a sort-of #3 that I forgot: the introduction of completely new named suffixes on random item lists, like "of the Elder". I could see them coming up with new random suffixes that have combinations of stats that are rare or nonexistent today. But that's not really the same thing.

What about armor? It is my understanding that bears are at the cap these days. So how can they continue to scale armor up for bears and warriors without either changing the cap or not increasing armor?

If I remember correctly from Vanillia to TBC the armor cap changed as well, with more armor being required for the 75% reduction.

Armor cap is level-based already. Armor that puts you at the cap today won't put you at the cap at 80, even if no formulas change.

The value of a certain amount of armor is dependent upon the level of the target hitting you. The current formula is:

Armor / (Armor + 400 + 85 * (5.5*Level -265.5))

For a level 70 mob this reduces to:

Armor/ (Armor + 10557.5)

The cap is defined in terms of how much damage reduction can be achieved. This value is currently set at 75%.

This results in max usable armor being 31,672.5.

If the mob were level 80, max usable armor would be 45,697.5, assuming the formula doesn't get tweaked again.

So armor already scales, though I am not sure that the ramping is sufficiently steep to provide for interesting progression for bear tanks.

I'm fairly certain that this is done intentionally, because of the way Druid mitigation compares to Paladin/Warrior mitigation - their lack of an innate %-based damage reduction (defensive stance, imp righteous fury) and inability to block is made up for by the fact that they can cap easily, get uncrittable with resilience, and then stack agility and stamina.

More interesting itemization would just involve adding secondary bonuses to the other stats, in all likelihood.

A green level 57 leather hat of the monkey yields 17-18 sta/agi in vanilla and 24 agi and 37 sta in TBC. The vanilla helmet is ilvl 62 and the TBC helmet is 81. The TBC helmet is evenly spread like the vanilla helmet in terms of item points, 24 agi ~ 37 sta.

Without changing the formula though, this 33% buff in both ilvl and stat points should not be possible. 33% higher ilvl with the same stat distribution should not give 33% higher stats. So I think the formula was changed slightly to make stats cheaper as well, maybe rebalanced to a new norm? It'll be interesting to see how much they need to up item levels to make the same item progression in the next expansion. Going from vanilla level 57 required items to TBC level 68 required items you go from ilvl 62 to 114. Quite an increase for just 11 levels.

PS: And as someone mentioned, armor values were also changed.
PPS: Resilience will most likely not appear on green items as it's a PvP stat? You only use green gear for levelling up really and discard it fairly quickly, I fail to see how anyone would find any use for green resilience items.

Sounds about right.

Without haste and armor pen on gear, our crit levels would already be higher than they are at the moment, assuming an even spread of stats on items.

I imagine a few more of these stats will appear. Some random things that these new stats/ratings could do, off the top of my head:

• Spell Cost Reduction by % (mana, maybe energy/rage?)
• +Weapon Damage (not new, but rare atm. would need to be normalised so it isnt terrible for slow weapons and too good for fast weapons/dual wielders)
• Threat reduction and threat increase by %

and.. um. It's actually harder than I thought to think up of other stats, without resorting to unrealistic things like Range Increase, Movement Speed, etc.

Basically what they need is another couple of stats that increase the damage you do/take/heal that scale with the rest of your gear, but are on a seperate type of stat table... if that makes sense.

For example, in early WoW you had Attack power and Crit chance. Attack power would increase your damage by a set amount, and crit would increase that damage by a certain %. Hit and Weapon Skill then did the same thing, yet it was on a different scale to crit, meaning they could balance all these stats to increase dps, without making crit rates stupidly high. Then came along Expertise, Haste and Armor Pen. Again, these stats increase dps by a % of what you already do, and but they dont mess with the scale of all the other stats. More armor pen means your AP, crit, hit, haste, expertise, procs, etc all do more than they did before you had that armor pen.

But.. what is another % based stat that could be introduced, aside simply:
"Stat-4: increases dmg done by 1% per 20 rating".
"Stat-5: increases dmg done by 1% per 20 rating".
And then gear has "increases your Stat-5 rating by 48".

Give stat-4 and stat-5 a name and a rationale, and you're done.

What would this serve other than make the "ultimate" stat combination trickier to determine? Armor penetration did just that, just another stat to juggle and compare to your other stats and then figure out how much you wanted to max your gear layout the best.

It wouldnt serve anything but to reduce the stacking of current stats as gear level increases. This means you can get higher gear upgrades without reaching caps, or absurdly high levels of crit/haste/whatever.

Although I'd much rather things like procs and special effects unique to each item. However this would make gear selection a lot harder than simply adding a couple more standard stats.

You can add all the new stats and unique bonuses you want, but in the end the min/maxers will find the best possible DPS/healing/mitigation and ignore pretty much everything else, barring some sort of gimick fight.

Probably not all of it. Enchanters need "worthless" greens (Plate with spirit, lol) to disenchant and get the WotLK equivalent of Greater Planar Essences and Arcane Dust.

Probably not so much #1. It was my impression that the stamina buff was a one-off thing to keep PvP less crit-dependent. That goal has already been reached with the current ivalue of Stamina and the introduction of resilience.

Would #3 really happen? Even if there were new suffixes, would the new items be really that much different in ivalue from items of equal level but which had different suffixes?