This still doesn’t even sniff the possible affixes and abilities in classic. Spell reflectors, speed boosts, self removal of roots, invulnerability procs, shield procs, resist increases, mind control, fear reverse procs, and thats before we get into the crazy set bonuses that could provide benefits for raiding, or perhaps PvP, or for solo PvE.
Classic was an absolute madhouse for itemization. It was a true RPG in that sense.
Exactly this. When I look at most gear on live. Its like
Main stat
Stamina
Heavy crit
Little Versa
But theres another piece in the SAME SLOT thats:
Main stat
Stamina
Little Crit
Heavy Versa
or
Main Stat
Stamina
Heavy Haste
Little Crit
etc etc. Its all just a juggle of super streamlined factory designed items off of a conveyor belt, and you just grab the one that fits you and BAM.
I don’t know what to make of it, but I took the deal. There’s a gear-scaling hump that you need to graduate as soon as possible. I think it’s all a setup to take my money, but it literally beats grinding normals for blues and still getting scaled-shrunk out in the world when you cap.
I think it’s ridiculous but that’s the game now, they kind of force it unless you like long queue times of normals, I outfitted an entire shadow priest in normal blues and she still wasn’t worth a damn in the world. That situation burned me out so bad I quit for six months. Can’t wait until Classic when I have a viable alternative to retail. But I’ll keep plugging away in the meantime just because it’s the most efficient form of entertainment to me at the moment. Nothing about BfA interests me except maybe LFRs, assuming my computer can handle them. Of course I’m not looking for an even similar experience with Classic, before anyone jumps the gun.
Has almost nothing to do with the stats on the gear, and everything to do with the fact that gear in BfA (and Legion, probably as far back as Mists, really) is all super generic and RNG based.
By super generic I mean that gear is basically the same across all the dungeons, with most of the difference coming from ilevel. You can’t really decide, for example, that you want the Enchanted Gold Bloodrobes (I know they’re from a mid-level quest, but just the first thing to pop into my head), go get them, and then know that you have them - there won’t be a possible better version that you get because of RNGing into titanforge or whatever.
In other words, Vanilla gear is far more deterministic (you know what you’re getting with Barman’s Shanker and you know where it drops, so you go get it if you want it), whereas Current WoW’s loot system is basically all RNG all the time. It’s not even really worth targeting specific items.
Oh you mean random trash gear? Yeah that was more the completely random RNG gear and yes there was bad, good or amazing versions depending. That gear was never intended to be super exciting, just a side “oh neat!” or something you simply disenchanted (Professions were useful in Vanilla yay!)
As for other gear like blues or the actually exciting dungeon drops sure some would have resist gear, but you have to remember this was additive. There was no concept of ONLY stam/primary stat/ 2 random stats. You would have blues where they had 6-7 stats, even early on with some of the bizarre robes. Thats simply flavor, again, the RPG aspect you seem to not understand. A Blue Robe from the Frozen Underground may have a bit of frost resistance. Its called an RPG.
I can still get excited by Haste, BUT what I think was lost was the challenge of meeting caps. There was a push/pull of giving up one thing to gain another, such as a prot warrior deciding whether to boost defense or threat production. Resist gear is an interesting example because more kept a character alive better in a scenario with a lot of that damage but made them weaker at their role.
STR = Druids got 2 Atk Pwr, Rogues got 1 Atk Pwr. While there were some genuinely screwy pieces, leather with +AGI, +STA, +STR wasn’t bad (unless you were only doing raid healing on a druid =P).
Retail took away those little touches and decided to make Pick-A-Spec mandate the main stat, then made all gear switch to whichever main you were assigned.
As others have said: gear means nothing. Cool, unique lore names don’t exist. Even gear quality is irrelevant. Green, Blue, Purple…it’s all the same.
Long story short is that the game has been dumbed down to a level I would have thought impossible. Hell, I just did the Stormheim introduction quest where you go up on a ship, kill some forsaken, and are sent below deck. There are literally arrows pointing you where to go.
It’s only one step away from the Eastern MMOs that have auto-pathing. It caters to a certain playerbase, and that is fine. Everyone deserves to have a game to play, that suits them. That’s why I am happy to have Classic. Nothing since Vanilla WoW has been my game, and I have tried oh, so many.
I can rattle off dozens of item names from a 15 year old game, but I cannot name a single item or piece of gear that I used from Wrath onwards. Most of the memorable items are from Vanilla, still quite a few in TBC, but after that everything merges into a bland melange of stats and ilevel.
The game really did a good job of removing all the RPG elements. I can even remember 30 items from Diablo 2, and yet I can’t name an item from Cataclysm onwards.
I think Blizzard said they did away with alot of the stats that use to be gear in Vanilla, TBC and Wrath because it confused players. But I think Blizzard just found it hard to balance. I agree that gear is less interesting now, Blizzard seems to be working on fixing that. I hope Blizzard stops the crazy focus on ilvl that they have. I also hope we see more RPG stats come back to the game like defense, block rating and stuff.
Whoever came up with “pump base stats, no secondary stats, no tier sets, debateably crappy procs if your ap is high enough” needs to go back, back to wherever!
In the attempt to generalize everything, you make it so nothing’s special.
This means items no longer have special fun abilities, or if they do it’s very rare and very watered down.
On top of this, transmog completely kills the visual aspect, no one wears new stuff, no one even remembers tier whatever from legion or what not but everyone knows judgment, dragonstalker, bloodfang, etc, precisely because there’s no memory or personal value attached to new items, they’re just another normal purple to min max and transmog to another.
Weird enough, their generalization just ended up having even more problems where even the devs (confirmed by Travis Day, the man behind most loot systems in wow, as you can see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urijgWXLYck) end up not knowing what they’re doing and how to balance it.
It reaches a point where the numbers are so high and the only thing that matters is certain numbers that you just end up giving it to ask mr robot, the generalization and pruning to make things easier ends up taking away easily balancing elements and makes creating gear much, much more difficult.
I hear from a lot of people though that people go OOM really fast in raids, wouldn’t that be useful in those?
Edit. Or atleast run out of mana in general really fast.
It also works while casting. You have spirit that regenerate mana only when you’re not casting and then you have mp5.
In a game where mana is an important resource where you risk running out of it, stats that regenerate your mana can be very important. It was especially important for the healers for whom mana was a real concern.
It was also an extremely important stat for non pure dps specs like Shadow Priest for example. Without mp5 they where out of mana 30 seconds in to the fight and had to resort to wanding.
I assumed this meant it ticked for x amount of mana every 5 seconds, but it actually ticks every 2 seconds. So an item that grants 10 mp5 ticks for 4 mana.
Comparing these armor lists reminds me a lot of how your Class Toolkits and SpellBooks used to look like too…
So many fun spells/Abilities pruned and removed.