Itemization is boring and uninspired

Community General Discussion
1

This is not something that will ever get changed, at least not in the foreseeable future, but it has really hit me recently just how bad WoW’s itemization is.

To be clear, I am not referring to the acquisition of gear. As far as that’s concerned, I can’t think of a time where the game has been in a better place. Reward structures for the various content types make sense, the crest system is fantastic other than the existence of flightstones, doing more challenging content feels more rewarding. All of that, positive.

It is the items themselves that are horrible. We desperately need some new stats added to the game beyond the base 4 that we currently have, and more specifically, stat goals to work towards.

PoE

As an example, I will use PoE. When building a character in PoE, there are a few checkboxes that have to be ticked for your character to function properly in endgame, difficult content. For example, all characters want to cap their resistances. Many characters need to reach 100% spell suppression. Crit avoidance. Increasing max resistance. Satisfying attribute requirements. And so on…

Having these elements makes for compelling itemization, because your gear becomes a real puzzle that you are trying to solve. You have to find gear that checks these boxes, then you have to find gear that checks those boxes and also gives you other significant benefits, then you have to find truly insane gear that can check multiple boxes at once leaving more room on other items for other useful stats. This system is satisfying and rewarding, and is a major reason why PoE remains the best in its genre.

WoW

Now, I am not suggesting that WoW needs to or even can have itemization nearly as compelling as PoE or other more complex ARPGs. That is unnecessary, and a lot of the complexity is made up for in how much more complex the moment-to-moment gameplay is in WoW compared to those games.

However, WoW has gone too far the other direction, and there is nothing interesting about the itemization at all. There are no breakpoints, there are no minimum stat requirements, it is simply “My spec likes crit and haste. This item has vers and mastery on it. This item bad.”, or worse, “ilvl higher = equip”.

This has been the case in the past with things like hit/expertise caps, haste breakpoints, etc. I am not denying that these examples had their tedious or unfun moments. Having bad loot luck and not being able to make hit cap or being way over the hit cap suck. However, having those feel-bad moments makes those feel-good moments of perfectly hit-capping and being able to invest more heavily into other stats feel even better, and most importantly, was interesting.

Conclusion

There are two core pillars to the gameplay loop of RPG games. Building the character, and moment-to-moment gameplay. WoW’s moment-to-moment gameplay is great, and is the big reason why the game has managed to stay so successful. To this day, there has not been another MMO that feels better to play.

However, the game has gone heavily backwards in terms of building the character. Zero thought goes in to it. Sim the item > number go up > equip. The only “interesting” items we get, like the Diurna’s Chosen ring or the cantrip weapons or anything like that, are only interesting because they do literally anything other than just give x amount of 2 stats.

Please respect your playerbase to be smarter than toddlers, and give us interesting itemization with problems to solve.

6 Likes
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The “interesting” items you mentioned get simmed too tho.

3 Likes
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We had resistance, hit, block, expertise, defense before and it’s incredibly rigid for a system. It’s almost impossible to drop certain pieces of gear until deep raid. Forget what tier, but prot Pld or bear tanks heavily favored a blue trinket for most of the tier. I think it was an armor trinket in bc for bears and a def Jc trink for prot plds in LK.

1 Like
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Pass.

Gimme 1% crit 1% hit and flat stats please, ignore the dude that thinks sweaty paradise of PoE is anything remotely close to ok.

2 Likes
5

Current gear is super boring except for trinkets.

Nothing screams trinity based RPG like the same exact item being good for a tank, melee, caster, archer, and healer.

The “primary stat” + 2 of 4 secondary stat template is so bland.

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I do miss tank stats though, havent enjoyed tanking at all since they removed them in wod

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7

The return of Reforging is at hand.

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8

Doesnt matter how many new and exciting stats you add in. Theyre designed to be nearly maxed by the end of the season/expansion to the point you dont even think about them.

Its just another line of text at that point

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Does this mean I don’t need to sim my character anymore?

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They’re never maxed, and there’s heavy dr, so you can’t just stack one and ignore the others either

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I experienced something enjoyable in Grand Fantasia - past certain breakpoints on some classes you could imitate another.

I played a Paladin (essentially 2H Holy light warrior) and normally you stack strength. But with enough orbs and consumables you could forgo tanking with a shield and evasion tank with a 2 hander.

WoW doesn’t really have the scope for builds like that for reasons I believe are for balance.

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Blizzard admitted their gear was super boring during BFA. It is why corruptions was created.

The current boring gear system is by design. Blizz is basically designing the game for ppl to not get angry and yell at them. A boring dull deterministic gearing system is perfect for this. Sadly, it is super boring.

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Not in WoW, no. But in other games like PoE you can.

And even when we had hit and expertise stats, they didnt have to be 100% in order to achieve 100% effectiveness. Like tanks had to maintain 12.5% expertise i think to gain 100% effect

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Well, hit was always 100%

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And players lose their mind trying to grind out a specific trinket in M+ and then declare that they aren’t allowed to begin playing the game because that specific item still hasn’t dropped after 70 runs.

Multiply that by even one more slot, like Amirdrassil weapons, and they’ll be even more pissed that they can’t get the BiS items they are balanced against.

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I agree it’s a bit boring but we used to have crit immunity, resists, and more in the game that later got removed. These were nothing more than check boxes to make sure you had for the content you were doing.

PoE has a lot of random affixes but they add too much complexity and in turn that game becomes very niche. I like Last Epochs add an effect modifications though for sure.

That said these are arpg’s and WoW is an mmorpg.

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Check boxes like that though do lead to more intersting gearing choices, you have to decide if a new piece is worth losing a cap

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So how would adding minimum break points benefit WoW? Remember when the game had hit and expertise on gear and everyone used automated tools to reforge to get to the correct percentages?

If you weren’t around for that, let me tell you, it was not engaging. It was a tiny and annoying hurdle that did nothing to improve the game.

Could WoW have more interesting itemization choices? Sure, and they are definitely doing that with some weapon and trinket abilities. They are no longer just stat sticks like they used to be.

But no, I don’t think adding more pointless itemization hurdles will help, especially since those can get broken down into simming anyway.

19

We used to have more stats, but Blizzard removed them because people complained the game was too complicated.

To quote Ghostcrawler after he left Blizzard, “it’s really refreshing to work on a game where I don’t have to worry whether someone’s grandmother can pick it up or not.”

1 Like
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For classes like Pally, Monk, and Druid with multiple specs i can kinda see this.
My gear has both str and Int.
but IDK how that would be useful to a melee or ranged who use Agi