Why Does the Hit Stat Exist?

#0 - June 14, 2010, 2:52 p.m.

Taken from an interview with GC (link is on mmo-champ):

Gameplanet: What precipitated the removal of spell power, defense and similar item statistics?

Ghostcrawler: ...A stat like defense: Instead of being something exciting that tanks could try to gear for it felt like a barrier to entry so that they couldn’t even do their job until they hit some magic number....

I would argue the hit stat is more or less exactly the same for dps or pvp. Can we get rid of hit yet? Or how about weapon skillups?

Ghostcrawler

#53 - June 14, 2010, 5:42 p.m.

As I've posted before, we like hit. It's the kind of thing that makes you pay attention to your gearing, because rather than just snatch up each item that's a higher ilevel than what you currently have, you have to actually look at the stats. You can't approach every decision with "I like hit, so if it has hit, I'll take it."

Defense was a different beast because it was serving as a barrier to entry. Mages and hunters can run a dungeon just fine without being hit-capped. Sure their damage will be lower, but not so low that they can't handle the content. Defense wasn't designed the same way -- a tank not at the defense cap risked dying on a boss fight and literally couldn't handle the content. If we had instead taken defense and stripped off the extra avoidance and changed it so that it decreased crit damage (so it made more of a smooth curve), then we probably could have kept it, even with an eventual cap.