Last week's announcement about the upcoming changes to the character stat system was a welcome surprise, but it left many players with more questions than they originally had.
Last week Blizzard finally delivered a semi-detailed explanation of the upcoming character stat changes scheduled to be introduced shortly before Cataclysm's official release. At BlizzCon 2009, the World of Warcraft development team revealed the news that the existing character stat system would be completely redesigned in the next expansion. We only received a smattering of details back then, indicating that, among other changes, modifiers like Spell Power and Attack Power would be rolled into base stats.
The details were all but speculation until last week, when Blizzard poster Eyonix announced the preliminary information in the official forums. The result is an itemized list of all game stats and combat mechanics outlined in several categories, including "What You’ll See on Gear," "Being Removed from Items," "Going Away Completely" and more. The announcement was well-received but, as expected, the player community unleashed a barrage of questions and concerns. Instead of spending a few hours scouring multiple forum threads and searching for individual "blue" responses, we've done most of the legwork for you; after the jump, you'll find Blizzard's answers to last week’s most commonly-asked questions from players.
As expected, Blizzard's original announcement at last summer’s BlizzCon left many WoW fans scratching their heads, eager to learn more about the upcoming changes to the character stat system. This is, after all, a collection of stats and combat mechanics that we've spent five years trying to master; the art of theorycrafting is a complex and almost religiously-scrutinized practice, as evidenced not only throughout our own forums but also in dedicated communities like the number-crunching tacticians at ElitistJerks.com.
The average WoW player won't have a detailed understanding of these gameplay mechanics by the time his or her first character reaches level 80, let alone all the newcomers who are left mystified by the complexity of things like damage mitigation, damage per cast time and MP/5…and therein lies the problem.
During the late-Burning Crusade era, the developers at Blizzard started to recognize that the character stat system and its underlying mechanics were becoming increasingly complex, especially with the addition of new stats like Armor Piercing and the branching-off of stats like Spell Hit Rating and Spell Haste. Blizzard occasionally applied band-aid fixes like the integration/disintegration of certain stats, but the overall system had become dangerously convoluted for the majority of players who weren't interested in studying tomes of information in order to participate in raids with a modicum of efficiency.
Or, as Blizzard explained it in the recent announcement:
As the game has matured, we've run into increasingly complex issues with the current stat system. Many stats are inherently confusing, and the way they interrelate can feel convoluted. […] Our ultimate goal is make gear a more interesting (and less confusing) choice by making each stat valuable to more players.
If you haven't already read about the specific changes to the character stat system and gear itemization, check out the full announcement in the aforementioned link. In this feature, we're interested in the most commonly-raised issues and concerns from players that followed the announcement. Blizzard posters Eyonix, Ghostcrawler and Nethaera have done a decent job of making good on their promise to answer the community's questions, so far.
One of the biggest concerns raised by players is the increase of Stamina for classes, specifically for cloth-wearing characters. Blizzard announced that "non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before" so that "health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes." Casters and healers probably don't mind hearing this news, because it might mean they will gain a little survivability in situations like accidentally drawing aggro from a tank; perhaps they'll be able to take five or six hits before death, instead of one or two.
Some tanks didn't share the enthusiasm, though; many players interpreted this to mean that Blizzard was "homogenizing" classes to an extent that cloth- and leather-wearing characters might be potential off-tanks. In a few posts like this one, Ghostcrawler explained that tanking will still be a class-dependent role because of their superior damage mitigation and possession of stats like Parry and Block Rating. "We have a lot of room to bring them closer together while still leaving them very far apart," he said, in conclusion.
In a later post, Ghostcrawler explained that cloth-wearers in Cataclysm still won't have as much Armor as plate-wearing classes; instead of having one-fifth the armor value of plate-wearers, cloth-wearers might have around half the value of plate, he offered as an example. "Really, cloth isn't the issue, since cloth wearers have spells to buff their mitigation," he said. "Leather wearers are the ones who end up the most fragile. Mail would be bad too except that shaman[s] can use shields when needed and hunters typically don't get hit by melee much. We just want to bring things a little closer to each other. It's easier to establish a baseline for how hard a particular attack should hit for when one dps spec isn't literally four times as survivable as another."
In a post regarding the upcoming change to Block (blocked attacks will simply hit for 30 percent less damage), Eyonix addressed the fact that low-level mobs will soon be able to damage players no matter what their Block Rating is. "We don’t like that block allows certain tanks to trivialize older content," he said. "Older content is always going to be easy, but it was a little strange that warriors and paladins could literally take no damage with enough block while DKs still took some damage. Stats need to scale and this one wasn’t."
