Ghostcrawler says....(re:Spellpower plate)

#0 - Nov. 25, 2008, 5:06 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Q u o t e:
As far as two classes legitimately needing the same item, we view that as a good thing. It's a better place to be than when items always drop that nobody can use.


Bolded for emphasis. A lot of effort has been made with this expansion to prevent there being any piece of gear that is only of use to 1 spec of 1 class. They are even changing the mechanics for feral weapons to prevent this from being the case. It certainly *seems* like a good idea. They seemed to have missed the boat though in a big big way.

Spellpower plate. There are 3 plate wearers out there with 3 specs each. Holy paladins are the sole spec that has any use for this stuff. Further, it takes up about 1/3 of all the plate drops (from looking at the various loot tables). Why should 1/3 of the drops go to 1/9 of the specs? (in my experience 1/9 is charitable...seeing a lot less holy paladins these days)

They had the perfect way to solve this...they should have made 2 of the death knight specs spellpower users (frost and unholy most likely). That would have been the best solution. They failed to do that though so now we have a huge number of drops going to waste.

Any chance of anything being done about this? It's clearly too late to change the death knights. I'm guessing that this is just going to be something that continues to be a problem thoughout WotLK.
#36 - Nov. 26, 2008, 12:42 a.m.
Blizzard Post
It would feel very elegant to get rid of healing plate. But it is a pretty major change and one you aren't likely to see anytime soon.

The logical choice is to make Holy (and all paladin healing really) scale off of AP somehow. But then you also need to solve the mana pool and regen problems because melee dps rings don't have int or mp5 on them.

It's not an impossible problem to solve, but it is a big one. Changing melee druids to share a lot of gear with rogues has been tricky and something we are still working on.