Obviously one of the biggest developments in Warlords of Draenor will be the adjustment to gear that causes primary stats on armor to change depending on the player's spec. With these stats appearing only on armor (admittedly, also possibly weapons) and not on accessories, this will make nearly every piece of gear that is of the appropriate armor type now appropriate for your toon.
While anyone who has experienced that sad feeling of a piece of gear being equippable but not actually useful (so, anyone that's not a Shadow Priest,) it's a great solution to an old problem. Intellect Plate has been a problem for all of WoW's nine years, with only a single spec of a single class able to use it (and during Vanilla, if you were playing Horde, there was absolutely no one who could use it at all.)
But the question remains: Is this really an elegant solution?
Consider this: Strength, Agility, and Intellect will effectively be the same stat. Sure, Strength does not provide critical strike chance like the other two, but all three of these primary stats translate to raw throughput. While secondary stats can have funky interactions, like crit soft-caps and haste breakpoints, primary stats are the most basic kind of RPG stat - more is always better. It just translates to your numbers going up. That means more damage on your enemies and more healing to your buddies.
So why have different stats in the first place?
Well, let's take a walk down memory lane here.
Stats in World of Warcraft used to act very differently. There was a time, for instance, when, say, a Protection Paladin, would be happy to see all three primary stats on a piece of gear.
Strength:
Strength has always been a throughput stat. In fact, Strength has changed the least of all the primary stats since vanilla.
It has always granted two attack power for every one point of strength to plate classes. However, it also used to do so for Shamans. Back in Vanilla and Burning Crusade, Enhancement Shamans were expected to get fairly rare Strength Mail pieces (the old Scarlet Crusade set was a very nice mid-level set for Enhancement.) Likewise, Druids used to get two AP per Strength, though Cat Druids got to double-dip by also getting a single point of AP for each point of Agility they had.
Strength's other benefit was that it would increase block value. For those of you who came in during Cataclysm or later, the Shield mechanic used to work differently. Rather than reducing incoming damage by a percentage, blocking would subtract a fixed amount. Shields would have an innate Block value, and one could use Strength to boost that amount (though by a fairly small amount.) There were even two block-related secondary stats that would increase your chance to block and your block value. When Death Knights were introduced, they were granted additional parry chance based on their Strength in order to compensate for what would basically be a lack of scaling due to their missing shield. With the block changes of Cataclysm, they just made this the standard.
Agility:
Agility was a weird stat. Like today, leather and mail physical classes benefited from Agility (except Shamans and Bear Druids until Wrath,) but one would still only get a single point of attack power per point of agility. To complement the agility, almost all agility gear would also have raw attack power. Agility, as it does today, would increase one's chance to get critical strikes with physical attacks, which made it reasonably attractive even to plate classes in those early days when secondary stats were pretty rare.
Beyond that, though, Agility would also increase all classes' chance to dodge attacks (making it even more attractive to plate tanks) and would actually increase the character's armor as well (again, making it even more even more attractive to plate tanks.)
Intellect:
Of the three primary stats, Intellect has probably changed the most dramatically. Nowadays, Intellect really functions basically the same way that Agility does for non-plate physical classes. But Intellect actually only shares one attribute with its earlier self.
Today, mana pools are fixed - your level determines how much mana you have to work with. Intellect then alters the power of your spells and increases your spell critical strike chance. Back in the day, Intellect actually did nothing to effect the power of your spells. Instead, players would have to load up on spell power on gear (which, during vanilla, was actually quite rare.) Intellect would increase spell critical strike chance, but its more noticeable effect was that it would increase one's mana pool. In a way, Intellect was kind of akin to Stamina (and remember that in Vanilla, there were only two classes that didn't use mana.)
But it gets weirder. First off, just as Strength increased block value and agility increased dodge and armor, Intellect would increase your resistance to the five basic kinds of magic: Arcane, Frost, Fire, Nature, and Shadow (this actually gave a slight edge to Priests and Paladins, whose Holy spells could not be armored against.) Resistance was a really odd mechanic that frankly, I never fully understood, but Intellect was the easiest way to beef it up.
However, far weirder than that was that Intellect would affect the rate at which you learned your weapon skills. Before Cataclysm, you would have to practice with various weapons to gain skill with them, and you would also have to take physical attacks to increase your defense skill. Essentially, weapon skill was somewhat like Expertise, meaning if you had been a Gun-toting hunter for a long time and you got a really good Crossbow, you'd have to spend a little time being utterly terrible with your new weapon until you could actually hit your target for full damage. Likewise, casters were far more fragile, as they would be far more likely to receive critical strikes due to the fact that their defense skill was probably far below that of a melee class. Intellect, then, actually became an attractive stat to anyone who used a weapon, as it would shrink the time they took sucking. (Fun fact, Fist Weapons would use the "unarmed" skill, which you'd also level when an enemy disarmed you.)
"Power:"
Over time, these three stats have grown far more similar, so perhaps it's not that bad that we're going to see them become interchangeable. There was a time when there were a handful of classes who would actually want a piece of gear with a bit of each of them, but the gearing model has changed, and we're seeing Secondary Stats take on the role that a lot of these primary stats used to occupy.
The new system is a lot clearer, but it is a little sad to see these three stats become something almost vestigial. They used to be so delightfully bizarre.
No comments:
Post a Comment