So, with The War Within, I think it’s time to address how mastery is displayed to players in the UI. We now have a raid buff that provides mastery points and a racial that did so in DF but will be spread out to more classes. We shouldn’t need Wowhead articles to explain how that stat buff works, it should be possible to understand just by looking at the buff tooltip and your character sheet.
Some background on what mastery points are and how the stat differs from other stats. Haste, crit and versatility are very straightforward. You get rating, and that rating converts into % at the same rate for every spec in the game. Mastery on the other hand is special.
Mastery has 3 parts:
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rating
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points
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percent
The conversion from rating to points is the same for every spec in the game, just like the rating to percent conversion for the other secondaries. Every spec has 8 mastery points baseline, and then gains mastery points at the same rate from rating. These mastery points then get converted at a spec-specific rate to percent.
The (retail) game however only displays rating and percent, skipping the points step entirely. This causes some problems and confusion. The big problem is that mastery buffs are either:
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Awful for specs that actually like mastery because they give rating which gets murdered by diminishing returns (think Algeth’ar Academy) as well as often being budgeted completely wrong (like the Kyrian Druid bond which gave about half the mastery rating that the other stats’ % would’ve cost)
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Confusing because they give mastery points, which aren’t communicated anywhere in the game (like the new shaman raid buff, Skyfury, which claims to give “2%” mastery when it just doesn’t)
Here’s a few examples of how mastery is displayed on the character sheet in both retail (the screenshots are from Dragonflight, but it works the same) and Cataclysm Classic.
Classic Elemental (mastery points at the top, divided into base and from-gear, mastery % in the body, explanation of the conversion from points to % in the body, mastery rating and mastery points from gear at the bottom. The points at the bottom are marked as % which is incorrect):
Classic Arcane (can clearly tell which numbers actually differ from spec to spec and which are the same if you account for the minor rating difference):
Retail Windwalker (mastery % at the top, mastery rating and %-from-gear at the bottom):
Retail Mistweaver (same rating, but the other 2 numbers are different, as expected):
The Classic tooltip is just straight up better. It’s more clear on how it all works, with the only cosmetic flaws being the lack of formatting (split it into 2 paragraphs) and the % after the mastery points from gear. At some point after Cata (the introduction of mastery), the tooltip got stripped of information that makes the stat easier to understand, and it just never made any sense. This isn’t some “give us advanced tooltips”, it’s returning old functionality that was just clearer in every way.
It’s great that mastery points are being used more to avoid situations like Algeth’ar Academy, but it needs to be made clearer to players what’s actually going on.