When Reforging was introduced in the pre-Cataclysm patch at the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the main purpose I saw in it was to get my hands on some of that sweet, sweet mastery. Because no gear before Cataclysm had Mastery on it, the only way for Paladins to increase their block chance, or for Enhancement Shamans to improve their Elemental damage, was to reforge some iLevel 200+ pieces.
The ways in which we alter our gear have expanded since WoW's inception. Back in Vanilla, you got an enchanter to work on your gear (there was no Vellum back then, so you really had to find an enchanter, and you could never use an alt to enchant your main's gear) and that was it. Some factions provided shoulder or head enchants, and it's possible that tailors and leatherworkers were already making leg armor and spellthreads, but the gear really pretty much stood on its own, apart from the enchantments.
Gem sockets were added in Burning Crusade, which provided a much more modular way to alter your gear. Now one guy could go for Spell Crit while another went for Attack Power.
Still, when you got down to it, the piece of gear itself was what mattered. If you had a whole mess of hit rating on all your gear, it would behoove you to trade some of those pieces out once you hit the cap.
Unlike Voidbinders, I'm a little more ambivalent about reforgers (before 4.3, when the Ethereals were brought in with Void Storage and Transmogrification, reforgers were called Thaumaturges, which was a way cooler name.)
So let's break it down:
PROS:
Reforging makes hitting hit and expertise caps way, way easier.
Back in the day, the amount of trading out gear pieces to maintain these "minimum caps" was a real pain (likewise for the now-defunct Defense rating for tanks.) As you got to higher item levels, you'd get bigger chunks of each stat, which meant it was harder to fit that one piece in. Reforging makes it a lot easier to get just slightly above the cap and then devote the rest of the stat's value to more useful stuff. Similarly, at low gear levels, reforging makes it a lot easier to hit the hit and expertise caps, and thus be able to contribute significantly to your group earlier.
It gives players a little more customization. You can make a piece of gear your own, and focus on a stat that you like, or even tweak off-spec pieces to be stepping-stone mainspec pieces.
CONS:
Long ago, when you got a new piece of gear, you could pretty much just put it on immediately and happily go to town on the next group of enemies. Now, however, getting a new piece of gear involves several steps: buying an enchant or other item-enhancement, buying gems (usually) and then going to the reforger. It's one more step we're forced to take to make our raw gear usable.
The pressure to min-max: A piece of gear could, potentially, have a profound impact. Trinkets, for example, usually have a huge chunk of a particular stat. If you have that one really crit-heavy trinket, you would really notice the difference. With reforging, all of that gets sanded down. Sure, you can't reforge procs, which are usually pretty powerful, but it does start to put you in a position where you're never really going to see your itemization shift all that much.
Likewise, it makes individual pieces of gear matter less. For example, I've been half-heartedly going for the sword off of Iron Qon on my tankadin for a while now because it has hit and expertise, instead of parry and dodge, like the sidegrade mace off of Primordius. Even though I'm hit and expertise capped, I'm not really trying to get those stats, but rather doing a weird thing where I'm shifting as much avoidance out of my gear as I can to reforge into stuff like mastery and haste. So the sword on its own is not that appealing - it's really just how it fits into the larger puzzle of my whole gear set. And that leads to the next point:
It makes lesser stats even less desirable. Getting a little dodge or parry on a piece of gear that otherwise has great stuff used to be pretty much just a bonus. But nowadays, because of the flexibility afforded to us by reforging, it seems to be an expectation that we check Ask Mr. Robot every time we get a new piece of gear and utterly purge any less-than-desirable stats from our gear.
TO CONCLUDE:
Reforging unquestionably allows players to become more powerful, but of course the thing about game design is that making players more powerful across the board really winds up being a wash (because enemies will just be balanced around that greater level of power.) Reforging gives us another dial to tweak, but I don't think we were ever really in danger of having not enough dials.
Philosophically, I think there's an argument to be made for making gear a little funkier and less convenient. Obviously in a game where the players are obsessed with balance, this could be untenable, but I wonder if the game would be more fun if we were a little scrappier, a little thrown-together. Blizzard's philosophy is to make players feel overpowered, but I don't know if turning us all into armor engineers is the right way to do that.
Unlike item upgrades, reforging has been around since the pre-Cataclysm patch. That doesn't mean it is a sacred cow, but it means it is a lot less likely to be removed. Additionally, in a game where player gold is undergoing insane inflation (there was a time when I wouldn't spend a hundred gold on something at the auction house,) having a regular gold-sink is probably needed for the economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment