A few questions about this game's direction.

#0 - Feb. 4, 2009, 5:04 a.m.

With the release of Wrath of the Lich King, I was pretty excited with some of the changes, but on the other hand confused with others...

1.) Why homogenize gear so much? Although I could understand the hassle when something like plate aster gear drops and there's no pally, but when you standardize things like stamina and armor, classes that depend on them take a hit. For example, a warlock in PvP in TBC relied on the surplus of stamina and armor on PvP gear to do well because we had limited peeling abilities. Now that I have less armor at 80 than I did at 70, the same health as a mage, yet different scaling with other stats (crit, haste, etc.) it just doesn't "flow." Hell, a HOLY paladin in PvP gear has more health AND mana than me.

2.) What's with the need for "all specs being viable for everything"? I was perfectly fine with builds that were preferred for PvP and others for PvE, it was how a player was defined (like if they were a raider, or a PvPer). Not only that, now you have to balance every spec to each other (as if balancing wasn't hard enough).

3.) PvE gear vs. PvP gear. There's nothing that differentiates them besides 2 stats. Hit and resilience. When I switch over to my PvE gear, I lose a whopping 1k HP. 1k. That's barely anything. Why can't PvP gear and PvE gear be more specialized for those purposes so classes that aren't as reliant on resilience don't get a one-up on others like at the beginning of this season? Also, Naxx 25 raiding is so retard friendly that the best PvE 2 hander in the game is about as easy to get as one piece of savage while the Deadly weapons are almost unreachable.

Ghostcrawler

#7 - Feb. 5, 2009, 6 a.m.

Q u o t e:
1.) Why homogenize gear so much? Although I could understand the hassle when something like plate aster gear drops and there's no pally, but when you standardize things like stamina and armor, classes that depend on them take a hit.

You answered your own question here. Nobody was going to be happy when the Feral tanking armor or Frost DK plate started to drop except maybe 2 out of 30 specs.

Q u o t e:
2.) What's with the need for "all specs being viable for everything"? I was perfectly fine with builds that were preferred for PvP and others for PvE, it was how a player was defined (like if they were a raider, or a PvPer). Not only that, now you have to balance every spec to each other (as if balancing wasn't hard enough).

Among other things, we thought it was shallow that every raider of a class had the same spec and every Gladiator of a class had the same spec. For dps classes, that also tended to lead to the PvE spec, the PvP spec and the pointless spec. For classes with very different roles per tree (like shamans) it doesn't make sense at all to have a PvP spec. So Resto shamans are only for PvP?

Q u o t e:
3.) PvE gear vs. PvP gear. There's nothing that differentiates them besides 2 stats. Hit and resilience. When I switch over to my PvE gear, I lose a whopping 1k HP. 1k. That's barely anything. Why can't PvP gear and PvE gear be more specialized for those purposes so classes that aren't as reliant on resilience don't get a one-up on others like at the beginning of this season? Also, Naxx 25 raiding is so retard friendly that the best PvE 2 hander in the game is about as easy to get as one piece of savage while the Deadly weapons are almost unreachable.

If you compare a PvE and PvP piece of the same item level, the PvP piece has more resilience and pays for it by having its other stats lower. This wasn't necessarily the case in BC when resilience was more of a free bonus stat.

The PvE gear is currently pretty easy to get, but we think that is actually a fine place to be after BC where anyone could get Arena "welfare" epics and raiding scared off a lot of people. The PvP gear in LK isn't all that hard to get either when you consider that you can spend badges or get lucky on Archavon. If we could do it over again, though, we probably would have started the Arena season earlier (or at least let some of the Honor gear be attainable) so that there wasn't so much high level PvE gear relative to PvP gear floating around.

The Ulduar gear, especially the better weapons, will be harder to get, just like the new season of gladiator gear will be harder to get.

Ghostcrawler

#22 - Feb. 5, 2009, 6:47 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. You just don't get it.

Tragically, if I don't get it, it doesn't get changed, so your post didn't accomplish so much. :(

Q u o t e:
TBH I'm more upset with the gear homoginization then I would be if a feral piece drops and no druid takes it. It makes the choices fairly boring.

I understand and there are other players who feel that way. However we also know a lot of players were frustrated with seeing so much loot drop that their group had to shard. Making itemization both interesting and fair is a very difficult challenge, but it is something we want to improve as much as we can.