No more stats/level on gears?Follow

Yep, imagine no more stats/level on gears. You hit 85 with the standard stats for your class, only way to improved is by professions. So you hit 85 and all the regular, heroics, raids are open for you, only skills will stop you to see contents. You can wear whatever gears you like (pirate/Santa/ninja...). Drops would be mounts, cool looking gears/weapons, recipe, pets, gold, titles and tokens for novelties items. Extensive class quests for special rewards and unlock rare ability.

PVP for titles, tabards, pvp mounts, no more resilience and only skills. 1 vs 1 won’t be balance like it is now anyway.

RP will be possible again and face it; we need to bring sexy back

http://www.wowhead.com/item=16900/stormrage-cover

It's not a bad idea per se. But it's not a good idea either. Financially speaking, is the worst idea someone can have for WoW right now.
Maybe for a new game it might turnout ok. But for WoW? Mass quitting all around.

You know, there is a bit of a grind to start getting geared. But even now, it's normally skill*, rather than gear, that ultimately stops people from seeing content.

The average player can easily gear to a level beyond that of guilds who initially cleared Cata raids. Unfortunately, their skill deficit (or that of the people they play with) requires them to have more gear than the more skilled guilds who initially cleared the content with lesser gear (not saying I'm one of those raiders, but I know they're out there).

The skill differential between 'the best' would just emerge more clearly in a system like the one you're describing. And I do not believe that would be received well by a majority of WoW players.

*Sometimes it's just lack of a consistent schedule or lack of a good guild.

I agree that’s why I questioned the gear grind. Why can’t farmer John or fisherman Billybob can’t come to the dungeons, they got fork, hook and full of skills.

So in other words, Guild Wars. It was a terrible, terrible thing. I played for three years and the only difference between my character which I had worked on for three years and the guy who just hit 20 (the lvl cap in GW) was a fancy costume.

I hated the system. It sounds good on paper so there are no gear differences, but in actuality it doesn't keep people playing. There has to be a reward for playing long term beyond aesthetics. Subjecting yourself to hours and hours of grueling raids just to have a fancier color dress gets old after awhile. Especially, once you find a design you prefer. Then of course there will be no incentive to do anything.

This would make the lifespan of each expansion horribly short.

You can't simply buff the difficulty of an encounter so that it requires more skill to beat. Sure, you can buff the health and damage output of a boss to require better coordination, button mashing and optimized spell rotations, but eventually the DPS would hit maximum damage output, tanks would run out of health and healers would run out of mana.

What then?

You'd be left with an increasing amount of TARD and that's about it. Yay for an increased number of randomly placed lava pools.

Personally, and I know I might be in the minority here, I don't find additional TARD fun.

Edit: I also don't find the current heroics fun.

Edited, Jun 15th 2011 7:53pm by Mazra

Raw, what you are asking is pretty much to exclude from raid everyone that is bad at it. Right now, gear, somewhat, compensate the fact that the person is incapable of looking to some huge pool of **** beneath him. If gear dont scale, that person has no way to compensate his lack of skills.
As I said, I dont think it`s a bad idea per se, but it would pretty much kill WoW. You would keep your 5%* hardcore raiders, your 15%* good casual raiders and lose around all other raiders because they wouldnt be able to raid. If you take in consideration that there are more people that play this game because of raid rather than pvp, WoW would lose a lot of their player base.

Besides, what you are thinking has consequences you are not fully understanding. Every spell would have to be redone, every class would have to be rethinked. Every talent tree would have to be redone. Every mob would have to be rescripted. And, hell, why would someone need to level untill 85 if the difference in stats between level 80 and 85 is 5 stats points? I would just raid while I'm level 80.
I'm sure exceptional players would be able to compensate -5 intellect with being, well, exceptional players.



*ps. these percent came out of my ***.

That's not what happens now?

Nope. As long as you have gear that compensate minor errors, you can get till 9/12 normals.
I know that because it's exactly what happened in the old social/casual guild I was.
They had 3 10 men teams at 9/12. They have one at 10/12 now. And they are bad. Not horrible, but bad. Each team had around 4 competent people, the rest was just carried through. Some bosses were only doable after the raid had gear to overcompensate the lack of skills of most members. I remember being able to kill that Elemental Monstrosity boss only after most of the group had at least 3T11 and were almost all decked out on purples.
Good group of raiders killed that boss while wearing all heroic blues + some rep epics.

They even do, every weekend, an old raid run. Sometimes it's ICC, sometimes it's whatever they feel like. So, they ended up seeing content that they wouldnt be able to if it wasnt for the gear and ilevels to compensate their inability to raid.

Another example? If you have raid gear, you dont need to know hot to proper CC in any heroic. So, if your tank and healer are good and well geared, you can have 3 fail dps doing dipsh*t damage and still be able to clear even those troll heroics. That's exactly what happen with me and a tank friend. I heal, he tanks and we pug 3 sh*t dpsers to fail and be carried so we can get some off-spec gear. All we need to say is that we have a tank and healer on trade chat and that it will be a master loot run where we get the first pick on gear.


Besides, every ****-*** player can do 2 out of those bosses: Magmaw, Wind Council, Omnitron, Maloriak and easy dragon comp on Halfus (not the one that has the debuff that decreases healing amount, that's "too hard").

Edited, Jun 15th 2011 4:06pm by Brisin

The ONLY reason your gears presently have more stats is because the boss/adds have more HP and hit harder. The 4 competent players will still carry you. What you don't understand is RIGHT NOW in heroics or raids, Blizzard increased the level of skills, gears mean nothing. You can be decked out and fails at mechanics.

Solution is doing what they did with ICC, when new contents come up, buff the old one. But I will offer the choice when you LFG to do Reg, or Buff.

And buffing old contents is what Blizzard is doing now, nothing would change. The HP/damage increase is for gear grind. Increase personal stats by level + buff should be good enough for you to go back and do stuff.

Listen and think about it, these players with current raiding gears are carrying others because of skills, not stats. If you can't avoid/cc/rotation properly...you die. This is the current situation; nothing would change except I can wear my flip flop.