Weapon VarietyFollow

What's the weapon variety like in WoW? I've seen a list of weapons on this site, but I'd like to hear from someone who's actually played with them.

In FFXI, given any particular job and weapon choice (swords, axes), you had perhaps 30-40 choices of weapons throught your career.

In Diablo, there were thousands of viable weapons as it used the nifty system of 'Prefix-Weapon-Suffix' with many choices for the 'fixes'. This was a fantastic system leading to gameplay just to try to get certain types of weapons or sets.

In Warcraft III, the heroes didn't really have much to choose from, but it was a wholly different type of game altogether.

So how does WoW stack up with this? Say you're a Warrior class, how much variety of weaponry can you excpect to see in your career?

For melee-based classes, there are plenty of weapons. For more hybrid and casting-type classes, there is a very paltry amount imho. I play a priest, and they start with maces, unarmed, and wands. They can also learn staves and daggers.

Since they cannot use shields, there are VERY few off-hand non-shield items, and staves actually have stats, this pretty much means everyone who can't use a shield of some kind has a staff. I discovered this around level 18 or 19 when I got my first "real" staff as a quest reward. I was using it until somebody gave me a better one at around level 35, and I still have that one. (Staff of Westfall and Tanglewood Staff for those wondering.) There are maybe two better staves than the one I have, one clearly the best, but I haven't been able to get my hands on one.

In my ranged slot, I have a wand. I have yet to see a wand with stats, but that's fine since I use my wand for my damage source most of the time. However, I have seen to date a total of *one* droppable wand(s), and it is the lowest DPS wand in the game, Opaque Wand. I bought it when I could, and have since upgraded three times through quest rewards, but prior to getting the last one, I had been using the same wand for about 15 levels.

I might not be a "melee" class, so you might think I don't care about weapons, but a good staff may as well be treated as an armor slot, for the stats you can get from it, and I do more DPS from my wand than many classes can do just from hitting auto-attack.

So imho, weapon selection is actually pretty sorely lacking. In fact, item selection as a whole is. Maybe one in five items that I see go by is something that my class actually allows me to use. Maybe one in ten of those items is actually decent. And maybe half the time there's another caster that wants it too, if I'm in a group. It's not until you see the 30th dagger and the 25th pair of leather gloves go by that you really start to notice, but it is genuinely aggravating. There is one set of high-level cloth armor, and pretty well every caster has nothing to strive for except that set and the one uber staff.

That may be, Jaefo, but I feel that there are still genuinely few items. Check this site, or thottbot, for the number of cloth items there are with spirit on them in most slots, and you'll find a grand total of about 6 items. Consider that I've got one of the lesser of those and am looking for an upgrade -- now you're looking at 1 or 2 items. You'll notice a recurring trend when you do this though...hey, look. Regal XXX of Spirit.

It isn't a matter of me wanting a full set of regal spirit armor. If I did, I'd be doing SM runs with all the other farmers. But with nothing else to do besides bank quests, I'd like to see *some* upgrade. I'd be very happy seeing them in quest rewards, but all I ever get are mail armor and swords and axes.

Melee players jump weapons constantly. I don't know how much they upgrade their armor by contrast, but casting classes simply aren't afforded that option unless they have money and scan the auction channels constantly.

I have (roughly) 90 spirit. That gives me 30 mana every second and a half. By contrast, 90 intelligence would add 900 to my max mana pool. By the time 45 seconds go by, the spirit is worth more than the intelligence. I could be slightly off with the exact conversion, but it's something to that effect. Unless you're a mage with free drinks and the ability to sleep the mob to stop and drink them, spirit >> intelligence.

dacanuk, nobody complained about weapon selection with regard to weapon types. I complained that the selection within one type of weapon was lacking. For a warrior, who has a choice of 6 or 7 different melee weapons, this isn't a big deal. For a caster, the "weapon" part may not be as significant, but it's still an item and can still have stats...however in either regard, there aren't many choices. Further, the amount of actual cloth armor in the game seems to me to be less than there is of leather or especially mail.

Also, there always has to be a "best", by definition. It's whether or not the best is so clear-cut that nobody will accept anything else that matters. D2 had that problem. Other games do not always, especially with the limited availability of those items. If there were no hackers and no macro-bots, D2's situation would have been fine. As it was though, the market got flooded with duped "best" items. Not that I want the prefix/suffix system replicated because it leads to tons of junk nobody wants, but Diablo didn't have the absolute worst inventory system I've ever seen.