jerry247

What about using sockets in more instance gear. Say a cloak with three red sockets; thats healing, agility, strength, spell damage, attack power, parry or dodge. That's only red, orange and purple give even more options and it's unlimited if you dont care about the socket bonus.

Cloak is obviously the easy one, so one boss could drop leather/cloth/mail/plate wrists and we still have the RNG factor, but more often than not (except for tanks) someone can use the drop, even if its not thier 'choice' armor.

 

triman

And do what exactly to make feral dps keep up? Ferals have enough problems as it is. Honestly, I'd rather not share more items with more classes. What'll end up happening is they'll use the item budget to create items ideal for rogues and figure that "druids make good use of them as well" and ignore the fact that they aren't budgeted nearly as well. Ferals already being told to pick up rogue leather for dps in 2.4...sounds great until you realize they've hit the hit-cap with 4 pieces of gear and picking up any more would be detrimental. Meanwhile, rogues can just keep picking up +hit to great effect. Itemization for ferals is just crap and making them use rogue scraps is a (very) bad idea.

 

Malan

Even if Str was changed to give 2 AP to rogues and hunters, they're not going to rush out and take all your feral gear. Too much of a feral items budget is spent on +Armor to be of interest to anyone other than a druid.

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• Playered

Not to mention if Str gave 2AP for those classes then it changes nothing (except keeping the stat from becoming redundant) because currently they get 2AP regardless (so a 60AP item would become 30 Str).

 

Malan

Strength on a shaman item is "good" only because of Kings. If we disregard kings, having pure AP is just as good. So that's not a huge deal breaker, I can handle having shared leather/mail items that do not have strength.

The problem though is that Blizzard designs the items with rogues and hunters in mind, who get both crit and AP from Agility. So we get an item that is "ok" for an enhance shaman with Agility and AP on it, but a rogue/hunter is getting a lot more use out of it than we are.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Machinator

No one has seemed to have much reaction to the different class/spec use the same gear. Talking about it with people I think they are approaching the problem in the wrong way, and that it would have been solved by a token style system anyway.
I'll use ret paladins and dps warriors for the example. Ret had itemization issues, the stats the ret gear had wasnt giving them the same bonus as other classes got from theirs. However instead of letting ret benefit from those stats more, they gave them the same gear as the other classes. This waters down the difference between the classes. But while they are similar, the plate dps classes still scale differently with certain stats and so there will always be items that are seen as being made for X class. Looking at the new plate in 2.4, its clear they changed the direction but both warriors and paladins seem to think that they lose out on stats by making item acceptable to someone else. Why not just make spell damage more useful for paladins, rather than replace the stat?
And the ‘another item that's not for me?' argument applies to everything, not just between classes/specs. Get a token, turn it in and take your pick of either paladin or warrior gear.
On a related note, this also amplifies the issue of leather gear being better for warriors/shaman than the plate/mail.

"Information is ammunition."

 

Malan

I don't have a reaction to it because that system is already largely in place for Enhancement shaman. Other than our tiered sets there are no raid drops that we were the intended recipient of.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

PSGarak

I don't think that your stat and gear preferences are particularly class-defining, especially if you prefer the same stat for different reasons. I don't think that ret paladins and warriors are basically the same class because they both prefer STR and crit, I think they're very different classes because their resource and ability systems don't resemble each other in the least.

The "another item etc" arguement isn't just about psychology, it's about having to design comparatively massive loot tables to handle everyone's non-tier gear. Tier gear can be hyper-optimized for your class, and I like that it is, but unless they really change their itemization paradigm there have to be non-tier alternatives for every gear slot, and several slots that are not part of your class set in the first place. It doesn't solve it completely, as you mention, because casters don't like tank rings, but it could cut it in half. Overall I think the problems that it solves are significant, and the problems that it introduces are minimal.
It doesn't amplify the leather issue. If done right it solves it. "right" in this case meaning balancing shamans to get more DPS out of hunter stats than rogue stats. Warriors in general already prefer plate, ever since blizzard figured out that crit is better than agi for warrior dps.

Getting back to respecs: People respec so much because respec costs are cheap enough for it to be viable. In pre-TBC, when they were more expensive in real terms, it was much more common for people to have hybrid specs that could straddle two playstyles, rather than specing back and forth between two specs hyper-optimzed for different playstyles. Like the good old days of 31/5/15 MS warriors MTing every cutting-edge piece of raid content. Personally I prefer it that way, because it encourages more diversity in specs, but the serviceability of hybrid specs has also dropped in TBC, mostly because talent trees are now 41-deep but you still only have 20 points to throw in your offtree.

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Machinator

But the question is, did blizzard intend those items for shaman and the shaman looked at them and said "No, thats not for us"?


"Warriors in general already prefer plate, ever since blizzard figured out that crit is better than agi for warrior dps."
Except that best in slot both pre and post 2.4 is leather in several slots. Kinda a pet peeve I guess. The warrior gear isnt really hyper-itemized for warriors imo, but I think this part should go to another thread.

"Information is ammunition."

 

Nezralix

I'm pretty concerned about this suggestion that they're just going to try to normalize class itemization. It only works for some subset of classes. What works as feral DPS leather certainly won't work as tanking leather; will resto druids just be wearing cloth? Will Prot paladins just have no spell damage or INT?

If this is the entirety of their solution to gear availability for hybrid classes, then it's going to fail as half the hybrid roles are still left out in the cold. They need to work towards solutions that give every spec an equal availability of gear, not that slightly reduce this problem for a couple of hybrid specs.

 

mek

Nope. 31/5/15 existed because deep protection was mostly bad, so it wasnt worth trading the ability to dps for. 31 talents points is also less specialized than 41, so it's a natural progression that "hybrid specs" became less powerful in 2.0. But I can't really name any real examples of a hybrid spec that I saw often. Not to mention that "serious pvp" didn't really exist, and raiders could show up to BGs with a 0/0/0 spec and still annihilate everyone thanks to epics.

 

Darjin

This combining of stats useful for multiple classes seems to be behind the life tap change as well. It looks like they are trying to change warlocks to desire int more, so possibly they share more itemization with other casters (arcane mage, shadow priest perhaps?).

 

• Suggestive

People need to stop beating this very dead horse. All DPS casters already share drops, its obviously not optimal for a shadow priest/affliction lock for the most part, but that's not the reason for the lifetap change.

 

• Sirloin

One thing that could make gear more flexible would be adding more sockets, except make them *require* a certain color gem, to preclude people from the "all reds please" that we currently have. These "fixed sockets" would not replace currently sockets, but would just be an extra itemization options. So, a blue fixed socket would accept blues, purples, and greens only.

A side effect of this would just make gear with tons of sockets very expensive to gem up, but a solution would be to make special gems for fixed sockets that were much cheaper than existing gems, and only fit in fixed sockets.

Here's a more complete example:
Say we have a cloak drop that has low base stats, 2 traditional sockets, maybe red/yellow, and then 3 fixed sockets that were red, blue, and yellow. The traditional sockets would be filled with existing, expensive gems. The fixed sockets would be filled with new gems that had the same power as traditional gems (10 stats per epic gem), but could be obtained cheaply through badges (3-5 badges per gem), or daily quests, and could only fit in fixed sockets. These fixed gems could still exist as raw gems that required a JC to cut. So do some dailies to get a couple "fixed spinels" cheaply then a JC cuts them into "fixed teardrop spinels" that only socket into your fixed red slots. This allows people to customize their stats, without resorting to "all reds" when they see sockets, and without incurring a huge gem cost for items with 5+ sockets.

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• Shabadu

[Girdle of the Tidal Call] is the only clearly enhancement piece of mail loot. More items need to be modeled after the T6 sunwell pieces. They're close to ideal.

 

wormie

Or why not just replace full stat values on items with a new type of a gem socket that activates stat values based on the type of gem you put in. Lets take Ranger-Generals chest piece for example. Lets say we substitute the +36 agility on it with a "Special" socket. Socket this "special" socket with a "special gem of strength" and it actives a +36 strength bonus on the item. Socket this same item with a "special gem of agility" and it actives +36 agility. Make these gems fairly easy to access and everyone's happy.

 

Ghost

It would be cool if the cost of respecing better matched how much gold the character could expect to farm.
At level 60 a character can farm about 50g per hour, lets say (not sure if this is really true). So respecs cost 50g just like they have been.
A level 70 character can farm a good 150g an hour, though, so shouldn't respecing for them cost 150g?

 

Dalthium

I don't think respecs costing more is a good plan. Respeccing 4+ times a week due to raiding and arena is already expensive enough

 

Douglas

Or, unique-equip spec-specific gems that only fit in certain new custom sockets, and that participate in set bonuses, maybe? (Can you say "Rune/Runeword"?)

Imagine if a boss dropped an epic gem that you took to an NPC gemcutter, and they gave you a choice of cuts for a variety of roles. One has an absurd (for a gem) amount of int, spi, and +heal on it. Socket this into a cloth piece for a priest or a leather piece for a druid.

 

Katria

And this will drop further in WotLK, as people spec for 51 point talents and still have only 20 points to spend in other trees. I wonder if blizzard will increase the number of talent points per level from 71 to 80. If we got 2 points per level, the would give us 30 points to spread around after investing 51 points in a main tree. This allows for a few more options, and hopefully a bit more variety in talent specs.

Of course, maybe this is all by intent. Since they have said they don't plan on increasing respec costs, it's essentially going to be free in WotLK. We can farm 150-200g per hour now, and probably more like 500+ gold/hour in WotLK; 50g is going to be nothing. Daily quests will probably give you 30g each. So maybe blizzard intends for us to only really use one tree at a time, but respeccing will be so cheap (relatively speaking) in WotLK even casuals will do it often.

I wonder if with gold inflation they'll add a new currency, 100g for 1 platinum (arcanite?).

 

Douglas

I honestly wouldn't mind seeing the top talent level only go up by 5 when expansions increase the character level by 10 in the future. Make the top tier 46-point instead of 51-point, and give folks 25 points to play around with elsewhere instead of 20. In every future expansion, bump both numbers by five. (I like talent diversity, and I like hybrid specs.)

Go ahead and make each talent tree more broad, for people who want to specialize, so there's room to spend all or almost all of their points in one tree. Best of both worlds, IMO.

 

Dalthium

Maybe they will make it so the new 51 point talents are necessary to be effective. Stuff like slow, endless rage or druid trees.

 

Bunni

I would really like to see them at least even out the spirit benefits for healers. As it stands mp5 is a viable choice for any healer while spirit is rounding up to be very powerful (a little too powerful maybe on the PTR, hard to say) for two classes and a complete waste of points for the other two. I got an innervate last night (5 man so it wasn't like there was a Priest or Druid around) from the tank and I couldn't really tell even though I saw it show up and actually watched my mana bar.

 

Mideci

See, I'd like it to be free without any penalization. But that's clearly not going to happen. And here's how I 'know' this.

I suggested to many people in game that you get "Freespec" with multiple talent trees for nothing because well, it's a game and it should be fun. And they all came back to me and said, "But you can't have this." And I was like, "What?"

Blizzard has brainwashed the masses to some extent into expecting a certain pain threshold and in fairness it's often pretty low. I mean the taxi fees on griffins are next to nothing, reagents are cheap, etc. etc. Respecing costs were capped at 60 and yet gold is vastly easier to acquire at 70.

I don't really get why we can't maintain 2 specs for free and switch them via the trainer and pay the existing nominal fee structure to alter those -- perhaps with an even lower cap. But apparently, that's too much to ask for. So I'm suggesting we ask for less.

Gold will likely be devalued again at 80. I suspected the effective value of a gold piece will be halved or worse. If the 50g cap stays in place for a "side" of your table stable and you have to pay once to create your talent stable, we have a compromise I think most of the hardcore respec-ers could live with. If they'd like to make the stable free, sure, please go ahead. But understand this, I and many others are willing to pay something to get the ability to do this as often as needed. We've actually built our guild around being able to play with fewer people who can repsec more often. If it were free with a 6 hour cooldown, it'd screw our guild badly. If the stable had a onetime cost of 500g, we'd pay that for the 3-5 people who routinely respec to avoid any cooldown effect.

There is still going to be the penalty of the trainer, admittedly minimized by the summoning inside of non-ZA instances come 2.4. But really, this is a serious issue in my mind. It's increasingly absurd to battleground in some raid specs and almost entirely absurd to arena in many of them. And it's not "just 100g a week". I like to serendipitously PVP, which is awfully hard to do when I might still be raid speced. I suspect I'm not the only one.

 

PSGarak

It's not an issue of brainwashing, it's that blizzard wants (wanted?) specs to be a relatively permanent part of your character. Respecing on a whim is exactly what they wanted to avoid, which is why respec costs are still high. Part of balance is cost, and the general idea is that the cost of specializing your character into a certain area is that it's not as good in other areas. I, personally, don't think that the game or the gameplay experience is enhanced by talents at all if they can be redistributed every half-hour.

The basic problem is, that mindset about talents isn't very amenable to the current implimentation of talents, because the difference in performance gained by specialization is basically insurmountable. I would rather that talent choices become relatively permanent like they used to, but I only want that to happen along with the co-requisite evening out of the power distribution of the shallow and deep talents so that hybridity and cross-specialization become viable again. Such a change won't be happening before WLK, and probably not until an expansion later if/when they finally decide to deepen the talent trees by ten but raise the level cap by 20.

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