Is Blizzard happy with gear consolidation?

#0 - March 16, 2009, 10:54 p.m.

There was a major effort in 3.0 to consolidate gear between certain classes (hunter/shaman, pally/warrior/dk, etc). Is Blizzard happy with how this turned out 4 months later? If so, why don't you remove mp5 from the game, replace the mp5 stat with spirit, and then adjust each class appropriately? It seems like this would make it much easier to balance mana regen, the 5 second rule, and also improve cloth caster itemization (assuming mages finally get a use for spirit, etc).

There just seems like too much gear for cloth users that is a complete waste because it either has mp5, spirit, crit, or hit on it (I think haste is useful to all, maybe not). It not only depends on your class, but highly depends on your spec making it so only one or two specs out of 3 cloth users would ever want an item.

mp5 to me has always felt like a hack fix for classes who chain cast and don't have a spirit regen while in combat stat.

Ghostcrawler

#8 - March 16, 2009, 11:19 p.m.

We are pretty happy with it. There is plenty of room for improvement.

Even with gear consolidation, Ulduar probably has as many items as all of BCs raiding content put together. Even if you divide the number in half to account for 10 vs. 25 player content, Ulduar still has like twice as many items as Black Temple or Sunwell. Perhaps our design makes more sense in that context.