One thing I'd mention on the item budget thing.

If you take 100 and turn it into 50/50, yes technically you are underbudget for a 5-stat item. However, you still have the same points that were originally on the item.

Basically, you still have the budget of a 4-stat item, as they intended. While one can argue you don't get the "bonus" of splitting down to 5 stats, even though you have 5 stats on your gear, I would guess Blizzard is perfectly fine with that.

It sounds as if the amount of mod points granted from a 4-stat distribution is what they are going to be aiming for in terms of the average value at a given ilevel. It doesn't make sense for them to allow you to boost the actual points on an item, even if it would have had increased points if it was originally designed with a 5-stat distribution.

I think it's a bit of an abstract argument to say "if this was designed how I split the stats, it would be underbudget" to mean it's actually underbudget. If it was originally in the budget with X mod points, then regardless how you split it, it is still budgeted at the intended number of points for that item and ilevel. They never intended for it to have more stats on it, so the "loss" is not real.

I don't recall where I read this, but in one of the Q&A panels I recall GC or someone mentioning that overflow item points could flow into Stamina. This would help to alleviate the HP gap as well as retaining the ilevel of each reforged item.

^

They're adding plate quantity stamina to all armour classes.

There are examples, but they don't particularly help your cause. Resto Shamans love crit, Resto Druids don't really care. However, Disc Priests love crit so there is likely to be cloth your Shaman can use, and Paladins could easily make use of Resto Druid leather.

I am confused as to why this is such a critical issue to you, enough that you describe yourself as "desperate" to find some means to enforce distinction. If you don't want to wear cloth and leather, there shouldn't be anyone forcing you to do so, and even if someone will be there are a large number of situations in both raids and instances you can cite where your armor is very helpful. So long as you have a healing Priest or Druid around, it's a mistake to have you take any cloth/leather drops over them anyway.

This is more going back to the AGI mail/leather issue Jayde was bringing than the healing mail/leather/cloth issue I'm quoting, but since you ask, I'm averse to the removal of armour preferrences because I've been there already, and it wasn't really pleasant. For the majority of TBC, hunters (and I suspect enhancement shamans) preferred leather to mail at every tier - questing leather was usually better than questing mail, kara leather was better than kara mail, etc. In T5/T6/SWP we only wore enough mail to hit set bonuses and generally took leather in every other slot (some KJ/Muru mail drops were the only notable exceptions. This was all because the only difference between mail and leather was that mail completely wasted budget on INT which we didn't need.

This was nice enough from my point of view in terms of "will this boss drop an item I can use", but bad for all the leather classes because it doubled the competition they had for each piece they could use. It was also terrible even from my point of view whenever we ran into a leather piece amazingly itemized for me with no mail equivalent, since I then had to basically steal it from people who could only wear leather (or be in a loot system that arbitrarily stopped me from getting it before leather wearers).

Neither of those problems goes away with the proposed changes to DPS mail - WotlK actually did an excellent job making hunters want to wear Mail instead of leather because our 100% INT->AP talents mean a 6 stat mail item with INT+AP+AGI gives us better value per iLvL than a 5 stat leather item with no INT. But with the announced changes, unless they add in some motivation to wear mail again, both leather and mail are going to be as inefficiently itemized as 4-stat plate is right now, and I'm just going to try for whichever ones happen to have the stats I want - at the expense of rogues and druids (or possibly to my great frustration when told I can't win bids on those items until leather wearers no longer need them).

Was there any word on the Expansion model changing to a simpler model? At the 1st expansion it didn't occur to me, on the 2nd, it looked OK, but on the 3rd it is very clear that it starts looking complex to the new gamer. You can't expect to have new players not being taken aback on the thought that in the near future there will be a demand to buy 3 more sub-games to continue playing the same game on a monthly subscription; on top of that, patches take more than 2 hours even if you download an 'automatic' installer.

I was more thinking of a complete overhaul of the game on the Expansion model on its core; to put it simply: having 1 distinct game installation after a 'reset' of the expansion cycle; for the benefit of the new gamer predominately (and ideally, no 4-hour waiting after using an 'automatic' web installer).

They did that with WotLK, you could install just the WotLK disk and you'd get TBC also plus it was patched up to the latest version at the time. I'm sure they will do the same and you'll just install the Cataclysm disk then maybe 1 patch.

In regards to the itemization changes that are coming, it greatly reminds me of how Vanilla items used to be, especially the blue items from dungeons. The items were full of raw stats but short on modifiers (spell power, crit, etc) of course, back then it was a flat 1% for crit and haste did not exist. In my mind, it appears that Blizzard is trying to "reset" the gear for everyone, taking spell power and AP off of items and going back to having raw stats in abundance. I can even see them bringing back spell power and other modifiers after this "reset" in cataclysm.

This leads me to believe that Blizzard might go back to the early raid style of gear, where each class has tier sets and that is what they wear. Certain slots of course have no tier item (neck, fingers, trinkets) but every other slot has a tier item for each class/spec. Blizzard has been building on the token system and even on the emblem+token system with TOC in 3.2 and I'd imagine they are feeling out the waters for having all future drops modeled this way. I imagine that there might be certain non-set pieces for armor slots, but each spec will still have an 8 piece set with 3-4 set bonuses that are incentives to wear a majority of the set.

What? Don't we wear tier sets now?

And Blizzard has stated they dislike that model. They disliked people not giving up 8 piece Netherwind or 3 piece Transcendence or whatever, even though we were in Naxxramas or Karazahn.

Besides, technically Tier 6 had all 8 pieces as well (and Tier 3 had 9 pieces).

Did anyone who had access to all 8 pieces of Tier 6 really wear more than four in practice? It seemed much more like it was a mini-game of getting the 3 pieces from Sunwell, then figuring out which of the previous five pieces of the set was the least amount of sacrifice for the set bonus.

I don't know about your priest sets, but for my shaman, sets tend not to be optimally itemized, whereas certain offset pieces are. The questions at every tier for me are: (1) Is the set bonus good enough that it's worth sacrificing stats that I want for less favorable stats on set pieces (for example, at T7, the answer was very strongly 'no'), and (2) which of the five set pieces has the best non-set alternative. In this expansion, just looking at resto, there were zero pieces of T7 with optimal itemization, 2 pieces of T8, and 1 piece of T9. So, no, in an ideal world, I wouldn't wear tier sets if there were truly better alternatives! On the other hand, if Blizzard stuck optimum stats on tier gear, there would be no reason for them to drop off-set pieces for head/chest/legs/gloves/shoulders, which they won't do as long as they want to make people think carefully in choosing how they gear.

So if I'm understanding the itemization philosophy laid out at Blizzcon correctly, it goes something like:
Cloth without spirit - all DPS casters (7 specs, 3 classes)
Cloth with spirit - healers (2 specs, 1 class)
Agi leather - rogues, ferals (4 specs, 2 classes)
Caster leather w/o spirit - boomkins (1 spec)
Caster leather w/ spirit - resto (1 spec)
Agi mail - enhancement, hunters (4 specs, 2 classes)
Caster mail w/o spirit - elemental (1 spec)
Caster mail w/ spirit - resto (1 spec)
DPS plate - DKs, ret, fury, arms (6 specs, 3 classes)
Tanking plate - tanks, obviously (~5 specs, 3 classes, counting the DK trees again)
Healing plate - holy (1 spec)

For set pieces using tokens, this is obviously fine. For non-set dropped pieces, it doesn't look so hot. It seems like they've basically taken the annoying situation with healing plate, where the item is good for exactly one spec, and created the same situation for four other specs. I guess you could argue that they're counting on people trading down armor types and that resto mail, for example, is really for two specs (resto and holy pallies). Up until this point though, they've taken steps to try and make people want gear of their own armor type through talents like Mental Dexterity and Armored to the Teeth. So I'm left scratching my head as to how this itemization change is anything except two steps backwards. Did any of the Blizzcon panels delve into this announcement and explain the designers' reasoning?

They likely expect heavy use of reforging which will work magnificently while leveling and gearing up. But for optimization and BiS? It could lead to a lot of frustrations of both having "useless" drops for raids without 1 particular spec of a class and not having new gear in new tiers for some slots for the '1 spec gear' specs because adding gear for all their slots would clog the tables.

In the end we'll have to see but in many cases there is going to be little reason for all healers to trade down often, and for mail physical dps to grab leather.

Minor note, but feral dps and tanks really should be counted as separate specs.

With regards to itemization ferals they did away with tank leather drops. Ferals steal from the pool of tank jewelry/cloaks and just enchant gear differently for tanking vs dps. They might need about twice the amount of leather drops if that was what you meant, but the armor will be from the same "pool". The only items would be the idols, but I think Blizzard is happy about having relics on vendors for the most part.

I may me completly wrong but the idea of reforging is there to make this :

Cloth without spirit - all DPS casters (7 specs, 3 classes)
Cloth with spirit - healers (2 specs, 1 class)
Agi leather - rogues, ferals (4 specs, 2 classes)
Caster leather w/o spirit - boomkins (1 spec)
Caster leather w/ spirit - resto (1 spec)
Agi mail - enhancement, hunters (4 specs, 2 classes)
Caster mail w/o spirit - elemental (1 spec)
Caster mail w/ spirit - resto (1 spec)
DPS plate - DKs, ret, fury, arms (6 specs, 3 classes)
Tanking plate - tanks, obviously (~5 specs, 3 classes, counting the DK trees again)
Healing plate - holy (1 spec)

not such a hassle anymore ? Isn't it easy to just reforge a Leather with spirit to a leather without spirit and hit.

I think they've run into an issue with stat itemization. If 5 Stats has a bigger budget than 4 stats, then all classes will want items with 5 stats. But not all classes have the same # of usable stats, (healers less, dps more), and this makes 4 stat items much less desirable than 5 stat items.

If they change to 4 stats being the norm on gear in raids, but then have reforging available, you have given players access to greater flexibility with 5-6 stat items, but simultaneously removing the budget bonus that created the incentive for players to go for 5-6 stat items over anything else.

The complexity introduced by reforging may have led them to the idea of minimizing the number of stats offered to the players to begin with.


PS. I wonder if it occurred to them to create a simple "Forging Points" system: "This belt has 20 forging points; find a Forger to add 20 points only to stats currently on it". Or similarly, only allow taking from 1 to give to those on it. It sounds its only - but dominant - problem would be the creation of 'over-capped' characters, such as tanks with an immense figure of stamina or DPSes that benefit from crits reaching insane crit chances, though at 1st glance it sounds more manageable.

What does this do that gem slots don't, other than fail to add free socket bonuses? Under such a system, adding "Forging Points" to an item would necessarily reduce other stats on the item such that value of current stats + value of the forging points = item level. What you describe is exactly what people already do with gem slots - tanks stack stamina, DPS stack whatever the theory says their most valuable stat is, healers stack whatever they need to be more effective, be it haste or spell power or whatever. The only difference is that this is actually more restrictive, because gem slots can be used to add, say, hit to an item that doesn't have any.

I see your point; and BTW, it's also what enchants do partly. Alternatively, it could be limited to putting the points taken out only to other existing stats. In fact the complexity introduced makes it sound they may resort to that or they may resort to very limited sets of forges or reduce the types of stats offered in the game in the first place. Hence I suspect the reduction of stats types may have come to accommodate reforging; or begun with it.

As long as re-forging can never produce an item that's better than a "correctly itemized" one for your class/spec*, and as long as it's not a means of adding more useful stats to items that are already correctly itemized**, then re-forging could very well have a limited scope and not come into play for BiS lists and other min-maxing discussions the way enchanting and gemming does.

Or at least, that's the impression I got from how they want re-forging to turn out: Something extra you can do to your items, but not something extra you always have to do, else it would just add another layer of prep-time.

* For example, a healer belt with SPI ending up better for DPS than a true-DPS belt with hit, once you've re-forged the SPI to something else.

** For example, a DPS belt with INT, STA, crit, and haste, then being re-forged with hit.

I think that you will need to reforge every single piece of gear that isnt perfectly itemized. For example as a rogue i would use agi, hit, crit, haste, expertise(if it's still in?), and mastery. Any item that does not have the 5 of the highest EPs would need to be reforged for min/maxing and I highly doubt they will start right off giving us full sets of perfectly itemized pieces if ever during the expansion cycle.

Also, if things stay the same, 5 stat items have a better budget than 4 stat items so it might even come down to the point that everything without 5 stats will be required to be reforged as well causing another headache. On the other hand of the spectrum, this will be pretty amazing for pvp gear as many of the stats you want/need are not put on the gear until the last cycle or two of the expansion such as hit. It will also be interesting to see how sacrificing resillience for other stats can turn out.

Does anyone else feel like this is starting to get a little overboard? To use an item next expansion we will have to gem, enchant, and reforge it; i dont even want to think about the following expansion with the next set of modifications. It's starting to seem like taking sidegrades and offspec loot will become a giant pain having to modify a piece of gear so much to use.

Ghostcrawler's quote (via blue.mmo-champion.com)

seemed to me to strongly indicate that multiple-reforging was unlikely and that they don't expect people to have to reforge an item unless it's not really meant for their spec.


Unrelated: I'm vaguely suprised that there was no mention of a "re-write" for WoW's code. I work in software myself, and I cannot imagine how painful it must be for them to continually add features to WoW that never existed before: the code base is very old and there are a lot of examples of spell/ability interactions that do not get resolved 'correctly'. For example, multiple spells getting Spell Reflected at the same time, the interaction between getting snared and jumping (you don't slow until you land), the way Hunter Traps and other ground AoE mechanisms interact with jumping (traps will trigger if you jump away from them because your position doesn't update until you land--never jump to get away from a trapt).

WotLK had a lot of code re-written for it, I know, but the core combat mechanics were largely unchanged. The graphics were largely unchanged as well, save for the addition of shadows (which most people seem to turn off anyway). I assume that they would have advertised it if Cataclysm was getting a major code re-write for Graphics, but the aforementioned combat interactions could be changed with a bit more subtlety.