In Classic you have the following possible stats on gear:
Agility
Arcane resistance
Armor
Attack Power
Block
Bonus Armor
Critical strike
Defense
Dodge
Fire resistance
Frost resistance
Healing power
Hit
Intellect
MP5
Nature resistance
Parry
Ranged Attack Power
Shadow Resistance
Spell hit
Spell power
Spirit
Stamina
Strength
Weapon skill
And I haven’t even included the procs that some pieces of gear has. The combinations are almost endless, especially when you factor in stat budgets. The chances are that the best pair of bracers for me drop from a specific boss in a specific dungeon.
In BfA you have:
Armor
Crit
Haste
Main stat
Mastery
Stamina
Versatility
There are very few possible combinations. There’s a limit to how many haste/mastery bracers I can get excited about, if any at all. The best pair of bracers can drop from multiple bosses from multiple dungeons and because of titanforging you have no idea which one is actually the best pair.
You just have to wander aimlessly and hope for the best, eventually you’ll stumble upon a pair you didn’t even know existed that end up being the best.
After 15 years I would think that gear would’ve gotten more interesting, not less. It’s almost like the gear in Classic was hand crafted and the BfA gear was mass produced on an assembly line, one has soul and the other hasn’t.
Finding out which pieces of gear are the best or most interesting and going out to get them is at the core of any RPG, at least in my opinion. Having randomly generated stat sticks drop from wherever whenever feels like it’s from a completely different genre.
It honestly feels like that BfA armor isn’t looked at by stats, or even looks for that matter, but rather its ilvl that allows you to do harder raids and mythic+s. Also, I feel like mythic+ has sorta ruined the raid scene since you can get cap ilvl armor by just doing keys. You dont even have to step foot in Uldir or BfD to get ilvl 415 armor. Just to a mythic 10 key or something .
Who is World of Warcraft trying to get customers from?
Well for a while it was League of Legends. So they scaled down the abilities to try and keep that simple fast paced gameplay, which really didn’t belong in WoW. However the game was already aged compared to many of the games on the market. So they kept trying to move the game forward. Sometimes it went backwards and sometimes it went forward.
World of Warcraft now caters to much more casual playerbase. So yes their armor is way simpler.
You really can’t compare the two games at this point.
You could get leather pieces that had the Agility and Stam you were looking for and also had Strength. Itemization was batstick levels of crazy back then.
For me, it applied to whatever expansion i played also. The problem wasn’t lack of stats or optimized gear. It was transmog. The carrot on the stick will always be important, and I’m always going to look to which characters on the server had the best gear, what was the best gear, and who or was the top raiding guild.
Everyone was the same. And that was a huge turnoff.
Isn’t it ironic that making gear “simpler” makes it 1000x harder to figure out what’s actually good? Gone are the days of “Oh this has more spell damage? And I’m still hit capped right? UPGRAAADE!!”
And now it’s “okay first I need to import my character stats into an external website with the gear I have on now and run simulations. Now I need to go back to my game and equip the new piece and import my stats again. I should run these sims several times to make there there are no statistical anomalies too. Man, isn’t grtti g an upgrade fun?”
It exists in the game but hasn’t been on any new gear in a long time. I don’t even know if it has any effect on your character anymore, it might provide a minuscule power boost.
You need to know its name. Because Classic gear is not optimized, you can’t simply describe its effectiveness with an “ilevel” number. So you refer to it by its name.
You have to know where to find it. With extremely few exceptions, no Vanilla gear comes from vendors. As a result, to get it you know to what where it drops and how to get it.
They come with a story. Because drop rates are unreliable and there is no personal loot, dungeon and raid items come with a story involving how the group formed, how many times you had to kill something before it dropped, and beating someone else on the roll to get it because they also wanted it.
The item level system ruined everything, it no longer became about stacking a certain stat but always keeping your item level going to get into the next content, it made stats feel like they don’t matter anymore…
Nobody ever tries to go for that mythical 40% crit or 40% dodge anymore. I remember the 40% dodge Rogues from BC those where amazing!
How many pieces of your currently equipped gear can you name without looking at your armory? How many of them do you remember the details of how you acquired them?