Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Bringing Stats In Line

Warriors love crit. I mean that they LOVE it. Crit is so important to Warriors that an upgrade piece from a new raid may not, in fact, actually be better if it does not have this holiest of stats (well, not Holy, that's Paladins. Most Brutal?)

Warriors are designed around critical strikes. In addition to the obvious benefit of the crit - doubling the damage of any attack - Warriors are also fueled by crit through Enrage, a passive that causes their major abilities to increase their damage and grant them a bit of Rage every time they crit. Currently, tanks favor dodge and parry, but only because Riposte gives them crit from those stats on top of the benefit of avoidance.

The three Mage specs are each built to focus on a particular stat. Much like Warriors, Fire gets a lot of benefit from crit, as it fuels the Hot Streak proc that really forms the central mechanic of the spec. Arcane is built entirely around its Mastery, which makes the management of Mana not only about having enough to cast your next spell, but also just making sure that you're staying as topped up as you can. Frost, admittedly, has less of a special reason to favor Haste, but the point here is that Blizzard clearly designs these specs around favoring a different secondary stat - it's reflected even in the various Armor spells that they use. The Arcane-flavored Mage Armor increases Mastery, the Fire-flavored Molten Armor grants Crit, and Frost Armor grants Haste.

These days, through enchanting, gemming, and reforging, there's basically an expectation for us to try to squeeze absolutely as much out of that one secondary stat we want as we can.

But this can't really be sustained in the face of the changes coming to us in 6.0. Reforging is going away completely. Likewise, gem sockets will be rarer (though the gems that fill them will be more powerful, so it could balance out.)

Hit and Expertise are going away, but DPS will simply replace them with Readiness and Multistrike (barring further cuts.) Dodge and Parry are also going away, and tanks will start using the same stats as DPS.

Now granted, gear will be more commonly available to us. There will be more gear we can use than there used to be. Really, armor will only be divided between the four armor classes. Rogues will be able to use any kind of Leather. Warriors will be able to use any kind of Plate.

And given that wider availability (and the likelihood of expansion of the LFR-style of loot assignment making competition a non-issue, at least in any automatically-matchmade group,) we may simply have more gear to pick and choose from, and more easily be able to put together a set of gear that emphasizes our preferred secondary stats.

Yet I also feel like this is an opportunity to really look at the value of these stats to various specs and classes. Sure, crit is great for Warriors, but why not make the other stats interesting? For instance, Haste does relatively little for a DPS Warrior, and even less for a Tank - it increases the speed of their auto-attacks, which grants a little Rage (in Battle or Berserker stance,) and might make their Deep Wounds tick more frequently, but it's not nearly enough to compete.

Honestly, though, I'm not a theory crafter, and I realize that in many of these cases, Blizzard doesn't go out of their way to make a stat better or worse. Indeed, Frost Death Knights seem like they ought to like Crit the least, given how Killing Machine devalues it, yet the math (apparently) says that crit's the way to go - even gemming pure crit instead of emphasizing Strength (though one of my upcoming experiments is to switch around my DK's gems to go the strength route and see what effect that has on his DPS, if only because I just don't get how crit is supposed to be so good for them.)

Still, with somewhat less customization in our gear (which is fine, if you ask me,) it would, I think, behoove Blizzard to work on bringing things in line.

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