The other day Ghostcrawler made a post about upcoming Stat changes in Mists of Pandaria. I actually meant to talk about this in the Vengeance article, but it turns out I had a lot to say about that pesky tank passive than I thought.
While we aren't going to see such big changes as the removal of Armor Penetration and Attack Power on gear, there is a bit of a revamp slated for Mists.
First of all, Spell Resistance is going the way of the dodo. Now in all honesty, this was a long time coming. Wrath had basically two fights where it would help you to put together a resist set (Sapphiron and Sindragosa, the latter fight clearly inspired by the former,) and even then, you didn't really have to get those sets to beat those bosses. Cataclysm didn't even have any resist gear, so frankly, I think this is just making official something that's been true basically since the end of Burning Crusade.
For us Block tanks, there's a big nerf coming to the block mechanic. Basically, total CTC (combat table coverage) or "block-capping" will be next to impossible (and probably truly impossible, given gear limits.) This is achieved by separating the block roll from the dodge/parry/miss roll. Essentially, let's say you have 20% dodge and 20% parry and a 50% block chance. Today, you'd find yourself only taking a direct hit 10% of the time (actually less, thanks to bosses' chance to miss you.) Well-geared tanks, or those who sacrifice everything to grab as much mastery as possible, can turn that into a total 0% chance.
In Mists however, let's look at the same tank with the same dodge/parry/block chance. First, they have a 60% chance for the attack to land somewhere on the tank's body. Then, within that 60% chance, there's a 50% chance the attack's going to land on the shield, and thus do less damage. So while it looks like there's a 50% chance to block, it's really more accurately a 30% chance, meaning that our tank with a 10% chance to get hit directly will now be hit 30% of the time. Essentially, as your dodge and parry goes up, your block chance goes down. Dodge and Parry will de-value Mastery. So I suspect that someone at Elitist Jerks will figure out some value where Mastery becomes less valuable than Dodge and Parry. Expect it to start out powerful at the beginning of the expansion, but toward the end it will be worse. This makes me a little sad, if for no other reason than that I like having a bunch of Mastery on my gear (it's a cool stat,) and that it was nice for block to be actually worth something for a change (unlike Wrath, where all avoidance, and especially block, was always secondary to straight stamina and armor.)
Now, I'll grant that due to the math of it, this could arguably mean that the same amount of block is now the same value regardless of avoidance (the less often you're hit, the more valuable it is to block all of those hits) but either way this is a nerf.
Most relevant to dps (and thus most players) is the change to Hit and Expertise. First of all, hit for spells and hit for melee is going to be calculated the same, which I actually think is long overdue, and ridding us of a relic from the pre-Wrath days of separating hit, haste, and crit between spells and melee. Also, Expertise will no longer give you an arbitrary number (woot! 26!) and instead be percentage-based. Additionally, Expertise and Hit will be equal in value per rating point, so until you get hit or expertise capped, you're getting the same benefit for your chance to hit something regardless of which one you favor (except tanks, I assume, who have to attack bosses from the front, and thus will probably prefer expertise.)
Everyone will need the same sum of hit and expertise. Casters will still just want hit, but they'll need a greater amount of hit equal to the amount of expertise they'd need if they were melee. Also, ranged attacks can now be dodged, so Hunters will need to load up on expertise (and Enhancement Shamans will be overjoyed to finally find expertise on their armor.) Still not sure what this means for "white" damage for dual-wielders.
Along those same lines unifying stats for casters and melee, crits will all now hit for 200% damage, which is good news for Enhancement and Assassination (and rogue poisons will use the melee hit chance - no word on Enhancement spells.)
Finally, Resilience is becoming something a bit more complicated. There will now be "PvP Defense" and "PvP Power" (tentative titles.) Everyone gets a baseline 30% PvP defense, to hopefully ease people into PvP when they don't have a lot of PvP gear. Power will increase damage done to other players (kind of the expertise to PvP defense's dodge.) I have no idea whether this will make things easier for people to enter PvP (it seems that by requiring a bunch of Defense and Power, you're actually making it harder to break in) but it's not all that relevant to me.
So there you have it, stat revamp. Not nearly as radical as the talent/ability revamp, but we should be seeing a somewhat different type of balance come Mists.
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