by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Yesterday I began discussing the latest Dev Watercooler article here, specifically the changes to personal loot. Today I will cover the next two sections: secondary stats and the item level ramp.

The section about secondary stats is very cryptic. It talks about how in the past specific loot would be more exciting because it might have been best in slot for your class and spec, and now with how loot works you generally just use whatever you get. Their response to this is making stat weights a bit more important towards your attuned stat. They are also panning on toying around with how the budget of stats on gear works, so that there are better pieces for the spec you are playing.

First of all I think that improving attuned stats is a decent choice, but it leads to less diverse builds. For example I play Assassination and Combat rogue for raiding and their attuned stats are completely different, being mastery and haste respectively. What I did was gem and enchant for multistrike, which is close to second for Assassination and is the best stat for Combat AoE, which is the reason I switch to that spec. If attuned stats now become incredibly better I will have to keep more gear in my bags and would have to check spreadsheets more often to see how good a certain side grade is.

When we talking about stat budgets on gear is where this post gets a little confusing. It is not clear if the stats will be randomly distributed or if they will have fixed stats that will be greatly slanted. Hopefully they don’t add more random elements into gearing up, because so far having things like warforged and gems makes gearing up a pain. Until we have a clarification for this,there is not much else to say on the subject.

(Do we need more randomness?)

The last topic touched upon the article is how the item level of the gear drops will ramp up as you progress through Hellfire Citadel. This is where most of the controversy is taking place, because it does affect people with specific weapon needs. The distribution of gear in the different wings is not the best and it will affect the gear some classes are able to get.

A good example would be to look at the ranged weapons and the two hand sword dropped from the final boss. Strength users will have access to a better weapon than hunters inside the same difficultly of raiding. I don’t think this is good at all, as weapons are the most important part of gear we have most of the time, this will negatively impact some people enjoyment of the gearing up process. I think Blizzard here should look at the loot tables and let people have access to at least one piece for each slot at every item level with in a certain difficulty.

I personally can’t wait and see how these changes pan out once the patch goes live. There are some things that will greatly improve the raiding experience and others that need to be worked on. Overall I think that change here is good and hopefully things work out in the long run.

What is your opinion on the itemization changes for patch 6.2? Do you agree or disagree with my assessment? I would love to read your opinions in the comments bellow.