No hit juggling if no Defense Juggling

The reason we want to do away with defense isn't because it is a "cappable" stat. Hit is interesting in that you need a certain amount but no more and have to make gear choices accordingly rather than just gemming and enchanting your best stat everywhere and using the highest item level piece that drops without other considerations.

There are several reasons to get rid of defense:

1) It's a confusing stat with its "cap" that isn't really a cap.
2) It contributes to avoidance inflation.
3) It's not of the same value for all 4 tank classes.
4) If you have a bunch of dps that can't hit, you'll probably just progress more slowly. If you have a tank that can be crit there's a chance you can't progress at all.
5) It contributes to tank scarcity. Ideally an Arms warrior should be able to go Defensive Stance and grab a shield to tank a 5-player dungeon (though not a raid). When every dps warrior (though the same is true of all tank classes) needs a full set of tank gear to tank even easy heroic content, it's harder to fill your Dungeon Finder groups.

Q u o t e:
As a player, I find defense to be a much more interesting stat, because it doesn't have a hard cap. In fact I'd say that the fact that +hit *HAS* a hard cap is what makes it such a problematic stat. There's nothing interesting about having to wait until I have 4 compatible pieces that I can swap in all at once to get a DPS increase.

GC, you guys have done a very poor job of dealing with stats that cap as gear levels have gone up. Whether it's a hard capped stat like +hit or avoidance stats that don't have a cap from a player stand point, but which make encounter design problematic, you guys have just made each tier +X to all stats, including these capped stats.

I know you've read the numerous threads from players whose jaws dropped at the terrible frost emblem trinket with 150 hit on it. There's nothing interesting about an option to get half of our +hit from a single slot when we're already drowning in it.

I think you're approaching it as a player, in which your goal is to improve your character as much as you can as fast as you can. From that viewpoint, any piece of loot that isn't an unambiguous upgrade just gets in your way. But think for a moment about the over-arcing design of loot in the game and the role it fills. Deciding what is an upgrade is part of the challenge in the same way figuring out to beat the boss is part of the challenge. The hit stat represents a gearing challenge because you can't just assume any loot from Icecrown is an automatic upgrade. It may be a huge upgrade. It may be a sidegrade. It may be a slight upgrade, but only if you swap around a couple of other pieces, consider regemming, etc.

In short, you have to game it.

Put another way, even if there is a "best in slot" list for every spec, the order in which you get those pieces is significant, and makes you have to think and solve problems. That's why I call hit "interesting." Spellpower, while quite desirable, is not interesting in that more is always better to the extent that we can't even offer variation on it from one piece to the next any longer. The rating-based stats, especially those with caps as low as hit, cause you have to solve the puzzle in order to wear them. There aren't a lot of huge decisions you make in WoW, beyond perhaps your class and maybe your guild. But there are a lot of little decisions that when taken together make the game fairly compelling.

Too often players approach gear design as "I would never wear that piece, therefore it's a badly designed piece." But consider for a moment that badge vendor +hit trinket again. It might not be attractive to you personally assuming you're hit capped in your current gear. Your conclusion might be that the trinket was itemized wrong. But that might not be the conclusion of say a Resto druid who decides to try Balance and now has a huge hit deficit to overcome. Regemming or farming old content is one way to do it, but relatively slow and / or painful. Getting a shiny new trinket off a vendor (i.e. isn't even subject to the whims of boss loot RNG) with a whole bucket of +hit on it starts to look pretty attractive. Just because the piece isn't for you doesn't mean it isn't filling a gap in the fabric of the game.

Again, I think too many of you are approaching items as unambiguous rewards. If that was the design we were going for, there wouldn't be much reason to have different stats at all because item level and perhaps armor type would be the only meaningful attributes on that item. Equipping the right item is one way players can demonstrate mastery of the game. Knowing what is an upgrade and how it is an upgrade is one of those factors that allows skill to trump random dice rolls.

You can argue that "best in slot lists" are so readily available that the problem has been completely been solved but that is only true if you have complete access to all that gear and aren't willing to take any upgrade that isn't the best possible one in the game.

Think back to your leveling experience, more so with an alt or a new character than someone Sunwell geared. Not every quest reward was something you wanted. Some were such slight upgrades that they weren't worth the enchanting investment. Some required you to swap pieces around. Some you banked because with the right combination of other gear they might really shine. Some had great values for stat X but were saddled with poor values of stat Y.We're not really going for boss drops to feel any differently (just more epic).

I will agree that the complication from hit that comes from bosses being higher level than characters, along with the difference among melee and spell hit and dual wield hit make the system more confusing than it needs to be, and the various raid buffs (and particularly Heroic Presence) can put you in a mode of constantly swapping around rings and bracers or whatever. This is something we'd like to improve.

Q u o t e:
Except frost emblems will never be the trivial ones that you farm up by just spamming heroics for a couple days. Frost emblems are the end of WotLK progression. They will never be accessible in the way that triumphs are.

I am fairly confident we will all be drowning in Frost in several months wishing we had something else to spend it on. They feel precious now because the income is low because there are so few Icecrown bosses available (coupled with the fact that you aren't getting much non-badge loot because so few Icecrown bosses are available).

Q u o t e:
But that then begs the question 'why are the badge gears only aimed at gearing up people's offspecs when mainspec trinkets are already in a bad position?'

There are fantastic trinkets out there for just about every spec. But you have to raid to get them. By and large the emblem rewards are there to fill gaps, let someone gear quickly, or provide a safety net for someone with just really bad luck on drops. With a few exceptions they shouldn't be the most exciting part of the new tier of content.

Q u o t e:
Is it the developers intention that tanks carry around a depth of gear slots so that we can swap things in and out? I'm asking because we cannot predict what drops. That's part of the game. Consequently, if we're going to "tweak" our sets so that we can utilize a new upgrade, that would likely require that we horde gear in our inventory and bank.

To some degree, yes. Many good players carry around spare parts, even as a dps spec. Sometimes they want to swap some items for a certain fight, switch to their alternate spec or even re-glyph. It's a struggle to support that play style without making inventory management a trivial part of the game that you don't have to worry about. As with item stats, you're supposed to care about bag space. Doubtless many players would cheer if we said you can now carry infinite inventory, but as with itemization we think there is a point at which making things too simple can water down what is interesting about the game.

Q u o t e:
The current cap is 540 defense skill. That's it, not very confusing if you know how to read and know how to add. Most of those skills are developed in grades 1-4.

Go post on the tanking forum that defense has a cap of 540 and imply that beyond that additional defense is wasted. I'd grab on to some kind of immovable object first. :)

Q u o t e:
It is logically incongruent to want to remove spellpower, attack power, armor pen, defense, etc., because they are deemed confusing and detracts from the fun of the game .. and yet at the same time defend hit rating with the exact same arguments that could defend all the other stats I just mentioned. There is nothing you can say about hit that cannot be said about the others.

We're changing spellpower, attack power and armor pen for other reasons, not really because they're confusing. For example, armor pen is almost impossible to balance because of the way armor works. Spellpower we're actually pulling because it's too boring -- it can virtually be derived from item level and we figure if we have to put both it and Intellect in equal proportions on every piece then something's wrong. AP makes us split leather stats in weird ways that make it attractive to warriors and hunters. It's just a cleaner design where everyone has a primary stat: Str, Agi or Int. Those are simple explanations to the point of almost being inaccurate, but you get the idea.

Q u o t e:
GC, I guess your example of "Resto becoming Balance" wasnt good enough, and it was a really great food for many forum trolls. To expand the example, I can say your idea is more like "Healer playing as DPS", exempting Paladins up to some degree, but not completely. I also agree the idea is to give Healers that want to DPS a high-lvl entrance item. But i guess it should be done not so late in the xpac, you are eating item slots in the high-end raiding, which is something the design plan wants to avoid.

It was just one example. The risk of examples is that they get taken too literally instead of representative of the problem. Here's another very common scenario. "Hey guys, I finished college so I renewed my account and I'm ready to start raiding again. I only have Naxx gear. Can you use me in Icecrown?"

If we were in Burning Crusade, the answer to this would be "Sure. Let's just run you through Ulduar for a couple of weeks and then ToC for a couple of weeks and when you finally have a lot of 232 and 245 gear then you can come to Icecrown." These days the badge system coupled with heroic dungeons is a great way to quickly get back in the game. You're not going to have the best gear available, but you'll have enough to start raiding again.