Will there be a spell damage rating as well? If not, casters would not be affected as much as other classes.

No spell damage, but there will be a Spell Hit Rating and Spell Crit Rating.

It is somewhat different for casters. We gain by far most of our damage increase from spell damage. We gain very little from INT and have lower crit rates too.

That actually hurts us with the current itemization formula since having one mod stacked costs more than spreading out the effect over multiple mods. Hence the caster complaints about itemization. However, it will help us in the expasion. Frost mages can have 11% to hit and arcane 10% from talents alone (which dont scale down). So we will not miss much by having little to hit on gear. In PvP, to hit on gear is outright useless. By the same token, a frost mage is not very crit dependent. Very few if any frost mages stack crit on gear.

Thus, this change will have virtually no impact on frost mages. It will have more impact on fire, but still a lot less than on say rogues or warriors. I guess that is payback for having had crappy itemization (we didnt even have a to hit mod the first 9 months) for the longest time.

Do you kill equal lvl mobs equally easy on lvl 60 as on lvl 18? If you did you could use blackened defias leather for the entire levelling race ;)

Yes, but my point is that casters - frost mages specifically - will be much less affected by the accelerated gear deprication because they do not rely much on any of the mods that are now rated to begin with.

hmm... 7% loss per level?

I'm going to cry if it's really that bad.

I suspect crit rating is just a distilled version of crit similar to how you gain crit from agility and intellect. In that context:

At level 60, your converted crit rating will give you 10% crit against level 60 targets.
That same crit rating will give you 9.2% crit against level 61 targets (using the numbers from the example).

At level 61, your converted crit rating will give you 10% crit against level 60 targets.
That same crit rating will give you 9.2% crit against level 61 targets.

Your gear isn't getting nerfed, you're fighting more advanced enemies with the same old gear. It's been that way for melee classes forever actually, as you level, your crit rate progressively goes down, not because your damage potential is decreased, but because the tooltips are done relative to an equivalent level mob.

That's not unreasonable. So, if that's right, at that rate a Blackhand's Breadth would be 1% crit in the hands of a level 70, 1.5% for a level 65. It'll encourage a lot of gear churn, but that's fine. It gives Blizzard a chance to get some of their scaling mechanics right this time around. The alternative would be a game full of hit-capped people and uncrittable tanks at which point you might as well get rid of stats like +hit and +def entirely.

Yep it could be a very good change. Will be interisting whether pre expansion items start at 81% effectiveness from kaubels formula on +3 mobs (and therefore stay at 100% effectiveness when farming level 60's as a 65) or start at 100% effectiveness even if we want to try and grind +5 mobs then immediately get lowered to 92% once we are grinding the same mobs but they are now only +4.

If Blizzard is sensible it'll be your crit rating versus the mobs resilience, and the mobs resilience is a constant so your chance to crit on the tooltip might change, your chance to crit mobs of a certain level doesn't. The other way around would just be silly and take away some reward from levelling.

"Woot, ding! ... Hey, why am I suddenly weaker?"

I think you guys are looking at this the wrong way. When you were level 20, a rogue could find an item with 5 agility, and it would be great. At 40, 10 agility would be good, because it'd be more AP and just generally better for the rogue. Hed do more damage with it than before. However, with crit, there are caps. If you want to improve on blackhand's, you need to give three or four crit. If all items had to scale this way, you would have situations where crit was the norm, and hits were the exception. That's not really the best way to go about it. I would speculate that rating scales not with your level, but the targets level, allowing something similar to higher level mobs having more hp so you need more AP to kill them in a reasonable amount of time.