#0 - May 17, 2009, 5:05 p.m.
At first earlier on in BC when I started realizing that leather is actually better than plate for me I was really sketchy of wearing it and didn't understand why it would be designed that way. I always thought plate was worse than leather because it just had so much stamina on it, which I guess was ok, if you want survivability in raids then go plate, if you want maximum DPS go leather. Then it was brought to my attention in one of the numerous itemization threads that it's not because of the stamina but rather because of the way itemization works where the more different stats you have on a piece of gear, the more net stats you get. Which again got me thinking, why would Blizz ever do that to plate and only plate.
This led me to the conclusion at the end of BC, and I was quite certain of this, that Blizz purposely designed some leather items to be better and best in slot for all physical DPS (physical, I assume the same applies to some cloth), like Gloves of Immortal Dusk in Sunwell. Hunters, Warriors, Shamans, Rogues used it all over the world. I always just thought it was laziness, instead of design multiple best in slots items for multiple classes, just make select great leather items that way all your physical DPS'ers can use them if they chose to and if they want to wear their own armor class, it's up to them.
These were my beliefs through BC until the advent of the Class Role forums, which by the way are a great tool you guys came up with giving us lots of insight to the thought behind the game. It is sad that some people tend to abuse it but so is everything in life. Recently you released the developers thought behind warriors and other non-leather classes using leather and that that was not something you intended and that you intended to fix it. Now obviously this completely shattered my whole view on this issue and I was really confused as to what is going on with the armor design process.
So now it is clear that making a lot of the BiS gear leather is not for the purposes of making it a one size fits all type solution since you can't have so many belts, helms etc drop from the top bosses, so making it leather would have made sense. But this rules that out, so it must be something else, like Blizzard hates warriors and owes us a pony(no, I'm just kidding), so my question is why does/did Blizz chose to buff certain stats so that warriors are forced to chose plate, which is most of the time a sub par item, over leather? Why not just add 5 stats to plate just like leather instead of the 4 it usually has.
Now I am going to sum this up with linking two belts, one (Leather) off 10 man hard mode, and one plate off 25 man hard mode. And please just take a look at them, as a player for one second and tell me why would you attempt to corner warriors into wearing the plate version which is 13 item points higher ilevel yet clearly a worse belt. I mean the leather belt is just such a better belt for plate wearers even with the massive amounts of agi on it even thought it's a higher item level. Not only are the leather stats just better, but it has 2 red sockets as opposed to a blue/yellow. If it was a 10 hard mode belt vs. a 25 man normal mode I would understand but this is not the case.
Item level 226 10 man hard mode leather belt: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=46095
Item level 239 25 man hard mode plate belt: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45241
Please Blizz give us some insight to the design thoughts on this. And please community lets not turn this thread into a BLIZZ HATES WARRIORS or STOP NERFING US thread. Let's keep it civil with a true discussion and no pointless bumps. If you feel you have nothing to add don't just keep bumping it because other people might have something to add. I think the last thread Landsoul made was very informative and had the potential of getting the ArP response but didn't just because it turned bad real fast. Let's not do that here and have to wait for another response a week or more down the line when/if someone else makes another thread. Thanks.
TLDR: Why does plate have 4 stats and leather have 5?
