#55 - Aug. 14, 2010, 9:17 p.m.
The "on paper" design of the Lich King relics sounds pretty cool: you have your choice of which of your spells or abilities you care about the most. Maybe a Resto druid takes the Rejuv idol over the Regrowth idol. In reality, what happens is that we make 3 druid idols per tier so the Resto druid is stuck with whatever idol we make. If we make the Rejuv idol, awesome. If we make the Lifebloom idol, probably less awesome (or at least much more situational). Of course we could just make the Rejuv idol every tier, but really that's not much different than the stats. The procs are designed to mostly be always up, so it's just clutter in the buff section of your UI.
With the new model, there is less risk of having the "bad luck" of having a bad relic for an entire tier for your spec. In fact, it should even offer a little more choice because you could choose the crit relic over the haste relic. Currently you don't get a choice because we have to offer such specialized relics. The gem socket is to make them at least feel slightly different from the ranged items that can shoot.
To be brutally honest, I wouldn't call our ranged weapon slot a success for any class. Warriors, rogues and all wand users don't care much about their ranged weapon slot except as a stat stick. Warriors and rogues use their ranged weapons once in awhile, but we really don't like the model where a caster wands everything while leveling instead of using their actual spells. The only class that really cares about the ranged slot is the hunter, and they in turn don't care much about their melee weapon. Furthermore, the hunter doesn't get the same kind of stat budget out of their primary weapon that the melee guys do. Believe me, we have had many meetings just to discuss the ranged slot. We don't have a solution yet that we think is better than the current Cataclysm implementation, but it's the kind of thing we're going to keep working on for a long time.
