Reforging may be extremely confusing

#0 - Aug. 25, 2009, 1:02 a.m.
Blizzard Post
So from what I understand, they're removing stats and making it more simple to gear yourself to avoid confusion. Not everybody knows what is good compared to what, etc.

But then they're doing reforging, and from what I understand, this may become very confusing for players when they're trying to make a decision on whether or not to get a piece of gear.

Here are the problems I see:

1 - Not being able to directly see how much of what will convert into what. I can see them doing this and not updating tooltips to display reforging information. This would make players do one of the following: alt tab a lot when deciding on gear, require help for decisions from people who can reforge the item, or require them to reforge it and then often be disappointed.
2 - Not being able to decide whether or not to take an item versus another person taking it. Sure, if you can reforge that Spirit to Haste or something on that piece of Cloth gear it might make it more desirable as a DPS, but do you take that over somebody else who can use the Spirit?
3 - Even with the changes to Haste, it still won't scale well with a few specs and thus will be a stat that's very confusing to people. Same goes for Crit, assuming it will cost a gigantic amount of Crit Rating to get 1% versus other stats.
4 - Rogues rolling on Cloth gear. Since there's no spellpower, I can see a piece of caster gear having Stamina, Intellect, Crit, and Haste. A Rogue can take that Intellect and shift it to Agility and use it as a "well itemized" piece of gear. Now I'm all for people rolling on lower armor classes if they've got nothing better due to poor itemization (Gotta love Boomkins, Shamans, and Holy Paladins rolling on Cloth 'cause of it), but aren't they not changing spellpower plate because they WANT people to use their own armor class?
#5 - Aug. 25, 2009, 5:28 a.m.
Blizzard Post
Imagine reforging could work like enchanting, where there are specific recipes that everyone knows. Example: "Converts Spirit into 50% equivalent hit rating on gloves."

I'm not saying it would work like this, but something along those lines would be pretty comparable to existing features.