Or heck, call it “Mountain King’s Might” since Mountain Thane is based off of the Mountain King and he uses 1handers (a 1handed axe and a 1handed hammer)
The effect:
“Your weapons take on the appearance of 1handed weapons and can be transmogged into other 1handers while this glyph is active (spec-specific Legion weapons are still usable).”
Now there’s no balancing issues, the TGers keep their double 2handers, the SMFers get their cool mogs, we all keep our itemization and stats, nobody suffers.
The fix is simple: Stick it at the top of the tree as a mandatory node where you choose TG or SMF. The biggest flaw with it right now is how low in the tree it is, where it competes with other highly desirable choices.
That is definitely a flaw, but it’s not the biggest flaw. The weapon damage and loss of secondary stats is also a huge issue, and the dmg buff from the SMF talent of 5% is nowhere near enough to offset it.
They just need to make it a transmog option, period. It satisfies everyone and leaves less balancing problems
But again, you’re talking about balancing the issue. The main reason we wanted SMF back was for the Tmogs cause ultimately, outside of cantrip weapons like Jaithys/Gettiku/Gavel/Asscandy/Fyralath, there’s no other reason to prefer 1h over 2h other than the cosmetic aspect of it.
And 2-3% is more significant than it sounds. My last DungeonSlice sim was 273,314dps. 2% of that is a 5,466 dps. If it were ANY OTHER ITEM IN THE GAME I wouldn’t touch it with a 39 1/2 foot pole. Conversely, an item drop that increased my DPS by nearly 5.5k would be a party. My last patchwerk/ST sim was 196,938 dps, and 2% of that is 3,938dps. Which again, if I were checking my vault or a dungeon drop for what upgrades to target and one came out to a nearly 4k dps increase that’s not negligible.
Saying SMF is “oNlY” 2-3% behind TG, even without cantrip weapons, is a red herring cause when you look at the numbers that 2-3% is a lot bigger than it initially looks.
If they just make it a transmog option and put fury back to only using 2handers so we don’t have to sit in Arms spec, they fix literally everything and everyone gets what they want
I did. You suggested balancing solutions, keeping both in play. A suggestion that basically just creates more issues. There was a brief period where the Annihilator/Storm of Swords build was actually stronger than TG/RB builds for ST, while TG/RB builds excelled at AoE/M+. Which meant we could have had to have 4 weapons maintained at all times, and nobody was excited about that. Then they tried to balance it, and it was still loads behind TG because of sacrificing talent nodes. Even balancing it by making it baseline and increasing the secondary stats provided with 1handers via SMF is still a lot more to do than simply making it a transmog option.
Then we don’t have to worry about them balancing it now, in the future, against future weapons or talents, and can just enjoy the mogs.
To reiterate: if you have a nail in your head, remove it, don’t decorate it and pretend it doesn’t give you headaches.
Short term, probably, but they made it so Paladins can tmog a 1h and shield into a 2handed hammer so it’s not out of the question.
Long term, no. It eliminates future balancing issues that can and will come up, as they continue have ever since SMF was brought back in SL. It’s been a problem we’ve been asking them to just make a tmog option since before SL brought it back, and when it came back most people just asked for it to be a tmog option instead so that there wouldn’t be this balancing headache.
This is artifact weapons being able to use spec as a blanket transmog restriction.
That’s because they keep trying to balance it with do x% more damage, instead of just making it so a 1h has the same stats and weapon dps as a 2h, making them statistically equivalent.
Weapon damage is still a large part of our actual damage, the secondary stats are just 1 piece of that issue. And yes it’s an artifact weapon but it still shows that it’s not out of the question; same as when you are using SMF you can still transmog into the Fury 2handers from Legion, it’s clearly doable.
Like it or not, the transmog solution fixes it as both a present and future issue, it puts the TG fans at ease that they’ll never be forced to maintain 4 weapons at a time or swap to 1handers, it makes the SMFers happy cause we get our cool 1h mogs and don’t have to use ridiculously oversized anime-protagonist weapons, and Blizz doesn’t have to worry about trying to make them close enough and it also silences the problem of cantrip weapons rendering SMF useless.
You can disagree, but perpetuating the notion that they can or ever will truly balance the two is just copium. They even said “We want TG to be the competitive spec”, they blatantly admitted that they have no intention on making them truly equal or even close to equal, and as previously stated that 2-3% is a lot bigger than it initially looks. 2-3% looks small, but nobody is looking at an upgrade and saying “Eh, it’s only a 5k upgrade for that helmet/trinket/necklace/ring” so that’s just straight copium.
Weapon damage is literally just auto attacks, which is already normalized against a faster swinging weapon.
Again, this is artifact weapons working on a per spec basis. Prot cannot transmog a 1 hander into the fury artifact 2h, only fury can because its the fury artifact weapon.
So did what I suggested, outside of weapon specific cantrips, while also enhancing the warrior archetype as a master of weapons.
I brought up the fury and paladin artifact appearances as an example to show it’s possible to just make it a transmog option but keep huffing that copium.
I’ve watched Blizzard go through balancing for this game for 20 years. The better, long-term solution, is just to remove the nail.