The fact that they need to fix stuff like weapon skill is an excellent reason for delaying the expansion.

I'll be happy if +skill no longer reduces the glancing blow penalty mainly just because I have no way of getting any of it.

I do think the +skill talents should be retuned if it stays this way however

T3 chest, legs, gloves, head, and shoulders are given +1 skill daggers/swords/maces/fists, or the equivalent amount of +skill rating, and lose an appropriate amount of strength. Since multiple +skill mods are effectively the same cost (since you can only use 2 weapon types at once, and the gain from multiple types of +skill is never more than the gain for 1 type and 1 weapontype), this'll be a minor change overall to AP values.

There. +skill is fixed for Naxx-geared rogues. There's no problem with the stat. The problem is *strictly* with the itemization.

There does seem to be compensation though. From the combat logs I have, +weapon skill is increasing +hit by more than it used to. It's very BAD compensation for taking away glancing damage reduction, but...

I'm not really arguing that this is a balanced change OVERALL. A CM recently stated that they're tweaking DPS level across the board for all classes, and to me, the most logical way to do that would be to separate different parts of combat and balance them individually. Level-based mitigation (things like glancing blows and partial resists), gear/mob-based mitigation (dodge, parry, armor, resist, etc), theoretical damage output, and buffs and their effects. In that respect, the change makes sense, because it equalizes level-based mitigation for everyone.

Obviously, that's a lot of assumptions on Blizzard's intent, but one can hope. :)

Did your testing see a bigger difference in crit rates with various levels of weapon skill?

Not compared to what's currently known about +weapon skill. Only notable difference was reduction in miss rate by 2.6% when it should've only reduced it by 0.4%. I'd like a larger number of samples to work with, but you get tired of staring at the same mob for thousands of hits. :P

You have don't understand ratings. How it works is at 70, it takes more rating to give the same benefit as you got had it at 60. So while around 10 hit rating gives 1 to hit at 60, the same 10 hit rating gives like .5 or .75 hit at 70 (the in-game UI tells you what is gives, so you don't need to know the formula).


Whatever blizzard does with +skill, I hope they tell the player base what they are doing and their thoughts behind it.

You are correct, +hit with spells reduces the level-based resistance rate

I'm fully aware of this but I repeat: what does it have to do with the argument I was presenting?

There is a cap beyond which point hit rating will be useless assuming effective mob levels never go past 73 (before next expansion). There are similar caps for weapon skill ratings, defence ratings and spell hit ratings. Rating system has nothing to do with this since rating merely depends on level. The fact that effective level specific cap exists is the issue, not ratings.

What Anaram is saying, I think, is that the level of raid bosses is likely to increase because otherwise an increase in %hit over current gear levels would be completely and totally wasted item points - and people are already complaining that gear has too much %hit on it.

I happen to agree with him. I think bosses like Vashj and Illidan will be level 74-75.

Your argument is pointless because you are making a very wrong assumption.

Fishing Poles! Now if they only made Fishing Poles with Feral Attack Power we would be so set.

I've seen plenty of items with less than level 70 required that have more than 1% hit or crit (in level 70 rating) on them. The ratings for hit and crit are basically a 50% increase from level 60 to 70 to get the same result. That means a Hunter, for example, will only need 129 hit at level 70 to be hit-capped (69 if they have Surefooted and the 1% hit boots enchant - note that 69 is very easily doable with level 60 gear) ASSUMING there are no enemies higher than level 73. It also means the character has not improved at all in that stat from level 60 to level 70.

No, read what I said. 1% hit, and 1% crit, and other stats at lvl 70. Lvl 70 versions of t3 essentially.

+Skill is a good mechanic, but one for which gear/human and orc racials need to be retroactively changed. If +Skill was applied to gear similarly to +hit/crit, and the racials reduced to maybe +2 skills (the value of 1 talent point), there would be no issue with it.

It's a very interesting stat which can play a large effect in your gear choices, and gives us all more lovely math to do. And lord knows we love The Math.

As it is, having a mid-40's epic with +7 weapon skill on, and +5 racials is broken. But that's the fault of the itemisation implementation, back in the days before blizz or any of the players had a clue how the stat worked. Not the fault of a flaw in the design of the stat itself. If your argument mentions ACLG/Muggers/Edgemasters then you are arguing against something that NO-ONE is trying to defend.

That's been fixed from what I understand :P

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the original intent was to have resists be the caster equivalent of armor, level-based partial resists be the equivalent of glancing blows and level-based misses being the equivalent to dodges. This is just from my recollection of an old blue post where it was stated that caster dps was based around an average resistance of 0 and melee damage was balanced around the assumption that there would be some level of mitigation to damage from armor. Then, this changed because:

a) level-based spell misses were too drastic for casters, especially without any kind of spell hit gear until BWL happened
b) the appearance of full FR suits in PvP was really strangling mages, not to mention 200 SR suits vs. Shadow priests and
c) negative resists were imbalanced in the opposite way.

I guess they're still working on balancing out the whole caster vs. melee damage model whenit comes to the ways in which damage mitigation can be nullified.

Yeah, having had some time to think about it my knee jerked a little hard. It's a scary prospect, but hopefully the melee mechanics will end up a little more balanced, and now that we have SWStats working in beta we can start getting some real numbers.

This is not to say I'm thrilled about an 8% decrease in damage, but hopefully they're just balancing in segments.

Ok, I'm really confused. Maybe this was mentioned somewhere, but the Human racial remains at +5 swords, same for orcs. Anyways. What actually happens in the skill tab when you equip ACLGs? They no longer say +5 daggers, instead +12 dagger skill. Does the tab actually show up as having +312 skill at level 60? If +skill and skill rating are now two seperate stats (one affecting crit/hit/dodge/parry, the other glancing blows), we're all knee-jerking a little hard.

Skill rating is exactly like every other rating. It's a means to give less than +1 skill, and to scale +skill based on your level.

At level 60, +3 skill rating = +1 skill. At level 70, that should be about 4.5:1.

This is actually a very good suggestion.

40% glancing with a 24% dmg reduction does not reduce white damage by (just) 9.6% in all scenarios.

Glancing blows CANT crit. This can be significant. So significant, that for a fury warrior it's sometimes pointless to apply crit stones as they will be already (realistically) critcapped.

eg Thaddius who you will face from the front half the time (assuming +15 hit gear):
5.6% dodge + 5.6% parry + 5.6% block + 9.6% miss + 40% glance = 66.4% meaning you are crit capped at 33.6 %.


Assuming a 35% crit and +15% hit and attacking from the front, you would do
(nonglancing DmgCoefficient) 0.35*2+0.386*1=1.086
(glancing DmgCoefficient) 0.336*2+0.4*.76=0.976

i.e. 10.1% reduction in white damage.

But the higher your crit rate, the greater the loss. As an extreme example consider Loatheb (+50% crit buff) and attacking from the back.
(nonglancing DmgCoefficient) 0,848*2=1.696
(glancing DmgCoefficient) 0.448*2+0.4*0.76=1.2

resulting in a whopping 29.2% dmg loss in white damage just from the glancing mechanic.

(neglecting the very minor loss of less flurries in all cases)

regards