Very little. The most significant impact of Ratings was to nerf level 60 crit/hit/defense/etc. gear for the long-term. Something that needed doing, do be sure, but when I first heard about Ratings, I thought they would be a lot more than that.

As we saw in WoW 1.0, Blizzard did an outstanding job of tuning the scaling from 1 to 59. Things like level-based Rage generation, level-based Agi/Crit ratios, and the increasing skill vs. defense counterpoint allowed for smooth balance all the way up to 60. At 60, however, the sudden disappearance of the level curve as a balancing guideline caused a lot of the issues we've discussed to much. For example, all three of the balances mentioned above broke down.

The same thing seems to be happening again in 2.0. Carefully crafted systems govern the progression from 60 to 70. But then what? Crit chances will start increasing without bound again. Ratings will stop scaling downwards. Tanks will be uncrittable after N tiers of progression, and thereafter.


Complaint #1: Ratings will make the nature of progression at 70 precisely identical to what it was at 60, but with bigger numbers involved.


Complaint #2: Even the 60-70 scheme is kind of weird. All other things being equal (including the target), why does my crit chance go down as my level goes up? This makes no sense.

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I won't develop this fully, but here's example of something that could have been better.

--Level never plays directly into any combat computation.
--Everyone (players and mobs) has a crit rating and an anti-crit rating. The crit chance of a given attack is based directly on ratings of the attacker and defender, and on nothing else.

When I get a new piece of gear, my crit chance against all targets increases. When I progress to a new raid zone, my crit chance against those mobs is lower than it is against the mobs in the previous zone. When we progress to a new zone, tanks start getting critted more often.

They're so close. Crit Rating and Resilience Rating exist. But they're wasted, because they just normalized based on level (a constant) into exactly what we have now. Heck, even the weapon/defense skill system was almost good enough, except that they decided they had to be tied to 5*level.


Basically, they didn't realize that the fundamental problem the first time around was that the system was so dependent on level, which makes the leveling curve easy to design, but is just not conducive to good level-cap behavior. Separate the notion of level away and make everything based on some set of stats (which can be obtained by levels or by gear), and good balance can persist through an arbitrary amount of progression.

Ratings allow them to fix scaling from 60 to 70 on gear (hello Blackhand's Breath) while also giving the ability to diversify itemization by allowing modifiers such as "+1/2 crit" and "+1/3 hit" on new items. Taking both factors into account it's a good change. Without the former I'd see no reason to ever replace my Mish'undare or Neltharion's Tear, which hurts itemization as people already have powerful items in those slots that are hard to replace without mudflation.

In the respect of scaling efficiency, that aspect of scaling just feels like a bandaid to make 70 gear appealing. It isn't something I'd concern myself with at 70, even if it does make some of my prior gear less effective. I'm more concerned with how much resilience is given to mobs personally, aside from that it feels like things should balance out at 70 and be back to the old progression. I don't deem that sort of progression a bad thing.

Those are both good changes. I just don't think Ratings meet their potential to make the game's combat design better.

Admittedly, I entirely missed the resilience concerns somehow. Edit inc.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. From 1-59, progression is driven mostly by levels. At 60, it's driven completely by items. Ratings mean TBC will have the same, 60-69 will progess by levels, and 70 by gear. The end game remains the same, the middle game remains the same, and meanwhile we won't have 90% chance to crit on Backstabs at level 70.


This is my one complaint, and I've been saying it since way back when I played D2 and my block rating when down when I leveled up. There's a very, very easy solution, though. Level still is directly in the computation, but use target level. This already happens in many cases with miss/dodge/hit, etc, but does not for Ratings or Base Stats.

I think the intent is that if Blizzard holds to the one-xpac-per-year-from-now-on plan, there won't be enough time at level 70 for this to become a huge issue. The problems you cite have a lot to do with the fact that the raid game has been stuck at 60 for almost two years now.

Yeah, it really should be based on the level of the target, either directly or indirectly (as in the system you suggest.)

Judging by the added level caps on a bunch of abilities they are offsetting the uncritable/crushable tank by increasing mob levels as we move through tiers.

Expect Illidan to be 80 or higher.

Weapon skill will be affected similarly.

To a small extent it is based on the level of your target, but that is only based on weapon skill and the exact way that works isn't clear yet.

Flat +.1% per skill or +.1% of your total crit rating. Or something completely different, since apparently they are trying to make weapon skill a premier dps statistic (and what I mentioned will clearly not do that).

It is now and has always been there to push you into new gear as you level, as well as check mudflation.

Okay. How will this affect resist rates (both spellmiss and level-based partials)? Glances? Tank mitigation? You can't just jack a guy's level up because you want to mess around with crit rate.

This is a terrible misconception. Your crit chance does not go down as your level goes up.

Lets say you have 20% crit on your tooltip @ level 62. When you level up, it now says 19.5% crit (estimating numbers... I know it's not exactly right).

If you were to go fight a string of level 62s as your new level of 63 with no gear upgrades and ran a combat log parse, you would find that in fact your crit has gone up ever so slightly. Why? Stats increase by a few pts every level, naturally. So now you have something like 20.1% chance to crit a level 62.

Why does your tooltip say your crit has gone down? Well.. it doesn't actually say that. It is now comparing your crit rating to mobs of your new level, 63. If you were to fight level 63s as a level 62, you'd see something like 19.4% chance to crit. Now that you've leveled, your chance to crit a level 63 is 19.5%.

The tool tip changes what it measures as you level. Your crit does not go down.

Are you basing this from the tooltip? Because that only ever compares your chance to X against a mob of the same level as your character. So of course going from level Y to Y+1 with no gear changes will see a reduction in things like chance to crit.

It does in fact go down Cel. The changes you notice are mostly a result of weapon skill differences. If your scenario were the case a lvl 60 would have near 100% crit rate against lvl 1 mobs, which isn't the case.

The amount of raw agility/int/rating per absolute point of crit increases as you level.

Honestly Ara I have no idea. I would assume gimmicks for the dps classes.

Maybe they added restrictions like http://www.thottbot.com/beta?sp=25596 for shits and giggles but somehow I doubt it.

To above two posters:

I understand that, currently, the apparent 0.2% drop in crit rate when you level is because the tooltip is recalculated against a mob with 5 more skill.

However, there is a very real (though small) loss in crit chance as well, due to the increase in the Agi/crit ratio when you gain a level.

Ratings simply amplify this affect, as now, when you gain a level, you lose gear-based crit as well as Agi-based crit.

That's not entirely true.

It's only true in terms of weapon skill vs. defense crit%. The game, however, does not recalculate your crit% vs. lower level mobs by adjusting your crit% based on your target's level's coefficient.

Easy way to test this: in raiding gear, your crit%, calculated using level 1 crit/agi terms, will be much higher than what you would observe if you actually went and attacked level 1 mobs.


EDIT: lol @ 3 posters posting the exact thing within 1 minute.

Perhaps I misunderstand, but you've just proven your crit relative to your level does in fact go down. So at 70 his crit on an equal level mob will have gone down a fair amount from his crit at 60 on a lvl 60 mob. I believe that is the common complaint.

Cel was assuming the crit rate against a 62 has not changed (would still be 20.1), only against a 63 has it dropped (to 19.5%).

Unfortunately this is not the case. Your crit rate against a 62 will be 19.5% + (0.04% * weapons skill difference)

In this example 19.7%