My reasoning for this is because I find the stat very boring. There’s nothing really exciting, or visually appealing about versatility.
When you get more haste, you can feel it when you get enough of it. Your spec feels smooth and fun. When you get more crit, you visually can recognize you’re critting more often, and people like big numbers. And mastery varies from person to person, but it’s another thing you can feel in most cases that makes the spec more exciting. There are some which just increase shadow damage or something like that - and that’s boring. But that’s another topic all together.
Versatility is just boring all together, and the fact so many people are just outright stacking it now because of things like PvP, or in the case of monks, they just stack it because nothing else compares. I feel like that’s just not fun.
I’d much rather return to simpler balancing with haste, mastery and critical strike being the primary things we see as secondaries on gear, and make it so that stat priorities are redesigned for all specs and classes which had versatility as a main grab.
I dunno. I’m sure other people out there love versatility and what it does for them. But that’s why this is nothing more other than my opinion, and a little bit of feedback.
Top end mythic plus key pushers wear it too…damage scaling is out of control at the highest levels so Versatility becomes near-mandatory as a damage reduction stat (that still gives damage)
Readiness Rating was going to be a thing in WoD after the successful fun of the cooldown-reduction trinkets for melee in Siege of Orgrimmar, but they wisely realized they’d never be able to balance it.
Multistrike took its place, but they realized that they’d essentially created a second version of crit that had unexpected resource gain impacts depending on the spec you played.
They seem to be out of ideas on what to put in that slot, so that feels like why we’re stuck with it.
I wish they’d just … allow imbalanced and interesting stats to exist.
I know it messes with the meta and everything, but it’s just fun to have them in the game. I miss things like Armor Penetration, for example - it was interesting in how it interacted with the systems in the game!
Stuff like Hit can probably go pound sand, but even something as dumb as Hit Rating and Expertise made gearing at least a little interesting. As it is, all I really do is stack a couple of secondary stats to the exception of literally everything else.
If people want choices to be ‘more important’, having gear that’s specialized to specific scenarios could be just the way to do it.
As a class that likes vers on all 3 specs, I can completely understand removing versatility. Its a boring stat and has become the new PvP stat (pretty much). Although I’m not sure how well high lvl mythic+ would be without vers tbh.
However without vers I think WW would be pretty sad. Well worse than what it already is.
I’m not sure how I would feel about its removal knowing that as an Arms Warrior my life in PvP depends on whether I have enough versatility or not… It’s really the only thing keeping me from being popped like a balloon due to Blizzard’s horrid balance.
I dont care about versatility i just think is funny stacking a bunch on my holly pally to see ehat happens.
Also i like the streamlinsation that happened to the stats, and classes. I think that having a basic toolkit to any situation and then building from there the unicness of classes qould be better that lacking a freakin interrupt as demo warloc for example. Or the awful lack of self healing of warriors in classic
Versatility isn’t any more or less interesting than most specs’ Mastery, tbh. Mastery was intended as the “tuning knob” Blizzard could turn to balance a spec without messing with how it played, so most of them are just some kind of flat output bonus.
I think if that was universally true, it’d make a great case for just dropping Versatility, since it does much the same thing.
But there are SOME Masteries that require input and are actually semi-interesting. Holy Paladin Mastery directly encourages you to position close to your targets. The OLD Holy Paladin Mastery encouraged overhealing if you could spare the mana, as it provided an absorb. Blood DK Mastery encourages proper timing on your Death Strikes, I think. But then Elemental Shaman is essentially just a damage proc. Enhancement Shaman is a flat damage buff. Shadow Priest was (don’t know currently) a flat damage buff. MOST are flat damage/healing buffs in some way.
If all Masteries were redesigned to be more like Holy Paladin or Blood DK, I think that’d leave room for a “generic” stat like Versatility.
Here’s an off the wall idea though:
Bring back Reforging. Versatility still functions as it does now, BUT you can reforge it and only it to any other stat if you desire. 100% of it (on a piece by piece basis). No other stat can be reforged. Basically it turns versatility drops into customizable items.