A discussion about stats

Community General Discussion
1

This is something that i discussed a few times, but i think it’s quite important to make stats feel more relevant.

So what is the problem with it?

Some stats are boring by default, because all they do is increase your damage like versa or primary stats, nothing can be done about those to make them more interesting, and that is fine, we need some form of damage modifier.

But the problem is that other stats that should be way better aren’t, there really only is one stat that makes the spec feel better regardless because of how it’s designed, and that is haste. Haste makes your rotation, or your resource generation faster, leading to a more tight, rotation with less downtime.

Crit only makes the spec better if it has an interaction with the spec, the best example i can bring of this, is legion demon hunter, i was very pissed at what they did to chaos strike at the beginning of bfa.

Mastery is hit or miss because the effect varies based on the spec, for example, for enhancement it’s great, because what it does is aside from increasing your elemental damage, it also procs stormstrike, which is your primary spell, leading to less downtime, and less frustration with procs. But mastery is also many times, just as boring as versatility.

And versa is just as boring as primary stats, almost.

I think blizzard would do well to give specs some better interaction with stats, to make them feel a bit better, and in turn make the spec you are playing better from a gameplay prospective, just an example, crit could have a slightly higher change to proc abilities like hot hand, or stormstrike compared to a normal hit, nothing like 100 % higher change, because that would probably be too much, but maybe something like 30% or 40%.

And also, i think multistrike was quite cool, especially if it synergizes with abilities that reduce cds for example. Let’s say that you have icecap for frost dk, and you hit oblitarate, then the obliterate procs multistrike and also crits, then the icecap talent would also reduce the pillar of frost cd by more than if you just critted with 1 ability. This is why i like multistrike personally. They said that it was too similar to crit but personally i do not agree.

Discuss, but personally, i think they really should do better with stats, it doesn’t have to be original, just cool to use.

Ps: why do we unlock mastery at lvl 78? that never really made a lot of sense to me, it’s just a stat.

3 Likes
2

With you on this one. Today, each stat has pretty much the same weight for most specs, making gearing just a matter of equipping whatever piece of gear has the highest ilvl. I miss caps. I miss hit cap. I miss soft and hard haste caps. I miss trying my hardest to get as much crit on my fire-mage as possible because of how the spec worked. I miss getting one-shot by the boss as a tank because I thought equipping the new piece of gear I’d just dropped was totally worth being 0.02% under my deff cap. I miss getting salty whispers from people I’ve defeated in an arena because I would stack as much mana regen as I could while manaburning the enemy healer dry (sorry, not sorry).

I don’t actually at all mind a primary stat as it offers some kind of a steady rise of the numbers as long as you’re upgrading your gear. But they definitely should return their benefits (armor/dodge/crit from agility, mana from intellect, double the amount of AP from str compared to agi,…).

And I actually like versatility. Granted, it’s a boring stat, but it allows PvP players and tanks to stack a damage-mitigating stat if they want to, without making people in PvP gear impossible to kill by anyone in PvE gear like it used to be.

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Thank you for replying, i thought this thread would die since it’s a bit long and people don’t usually like reading a lot, but i think it’s important.

Although my point was not that to be honest, i just want stats to have more interactions, haste is pretty easy to do, because that how the stat works, but they need to do some work on crit and mastery, and also i would like multistrike again.

I think stats should have about similar sims to other, but it’s clear that some specs are just designed around some stats, and that is fine, but the gap should not be too far, in my opinion.

I don’t like it a lot when the best stat is like at 2.5, and the worst aside primary is at 1.5, but that’s pretty extreme. For enhancement all stats for me at the moment have about the same value, which is good.

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Yet there are specs that doent hard stack haste, and there is quite a lot of them.

And that is good, haste and versa has same effect on all of your specs basicly, reduce cast / increase dmg… Doesnt that look boring? But mastery is unique on each spec, and thanks to it se have somehow diversity in stats prio.

Imagine if we had same mastery, or no mastery at all… All clasees and specs will play with same stats, thats what i call boring.

Afaik they removed MS because it was hard to balance, stats and specs wise…

First thing they need to do, is boost dmg we get from main stat (i know boring) but if main stat gave 100% more dmg than it does now, we will have ilvl meaning back. Secondaries are so strong compared to main stat that a lot of specs are better runing 10-20 lower ilvl with good stats, and thats lame design.
Coruption is same but its geting removed soon so doesnt realy matter for future.

2 Likes
6

Are you playing WoW or some other game? I’m sick of getting items that are ilvl upgrades and then sim way lower because it has bad stats…

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Primary stats - yes, incredibly boring, they don’t have to be flashy, but previous version wasn’t gamebreaking and it was cool

Crit - for me it’s OK, especially that it procs some passives/talents and it’s nice to see visual effect in MSBT :smiley:

Haste - faster = better

Mastery - depends, it should be strongest stat for all healers in terms of pure healing, but since it’s often on the same level as the rest or even lower then it’s not worth to sacrifice potential damage boost (mastery doesn’t increase damage done in any way); on dps it’s all about numbers, but shadow priest has so lame it could be treated as “increases your damage done”. Mastery often can be translated to that, which is lame. Who cares if it increases shadow or nature damage, after all it’s not really noticable.

versa - ok, I admit I was hater of this stat, but this has a nice purpose - increasing EHP. At high keys or during progress you want to increase your survivability, but not at cost of your efficiency so versa is your friend

multistrike - it was cool idea, but poor implementation, it should be stat which deals less damage, but increase chance of procing specific passives/talents/trinkets. It ended as weaker crit.

Personally, I’d divide stats into 3 groups:

  • primary - str, agi, int (previous versions)
  • efficiency - crit, haste, versa, cdr*
  • utility - avoidance, speed, leech, mastery**

EACH item should have mix of all of these 3 groups. Utility stats shouldn’t be rng.

* - cdr, cooldown reduction, some specs depend strongly on their cooldowns, if you don’t want to remove cooldown dependency then make it possible to increase frequency

** - mastery should be changed to increase effects of unique utility spells that class have, like “You move {mastery}% faster in Ghost Wolf” or “Reduces cooldown on your Hand of Sacrifice by {mastery}” or “Increases duration of Commanding Shout by {mastery}”

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I think the reason why stats seem boring is because of overanalyzation. Every stat Blizz introduces be it primary, secondary stat, azerite traits or corruption is calculated down to a simple priority list. Nothing will feel exciting if you see it this way.
I’d say azerite traits and corruption were good attempts at making gear more interesting. The issue with this system is that it’s very difficult to understand whether the new item you just got is an upgrade or not which is an inevitable problem imo.
One way to make secondaries more impactful could be to make them ability specific so they could be higher without being op + mix in general azerite traits. So let’s say an epic rogue item could look like:

This would make items very impactful and interesting but not having stats you want or need would be extremely frustrating just as it has been throughout the whole BfA.
One way out of this is to just grind until you get the item you want which breeds even more frustration.
The other way out of this is to allow partial or full refogring. If they allow this, people will simply get an addon that will reforge all of their items according to a spreadsheet someone else has made.

If you make items people don’t have to care about, people call them boring.
If you force people to care about items, they do everything in their power not to care. So what’s the point in making interesting items?
I really don’t envy Blizz’s position in trying to design good gear.

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i dont really see how stats can be more interesting, usually in games this just defines the limits of what you can do but with gear this kinda expands anyway, passives adds a layer of complexity for your character, not sure how complex things you seek to be but as is right now some system are really hard to eye ball it which to me is bad. when the game keeps increasing its complexity that you need specific stuff to have any clue of whats going on.

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I mean if we look at it objectively, haste actually does something for each and every spec in terms of gameplay, it increases your resource generation or makes your rotation faster, or both. While mastery can be either good, or just as boring as versa, sure it might be different, but so what? It’s like saying, this turd is different from this other turd, well, it’s still a turd though.

What matters is how it impacts the spec rather than how original it is for each spec. Mastery is the one stat that can be different for each and every spec, but in reality it boils down to “increase x damage by %” Which is boring af.

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The problem with stats heavily interacting with specs is that at the start of each expansion all specs would be pretty much garbage.

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Well they already are. So the argument is kinda pointless. I take better and more interactive stats over the at the start of the expansions specs will feel bad, because they already do.

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Not realy true, look at crit for example, while it does same for everyone, it doesnt. For me, it also increase dodge which is meh gameplay wise, but if u look at mage, his whole rotation is about crit basicly, without crit this class wont even work, which u cant say about other classes, so its realy not same. Another good example is holy paladin, where, yea it will work pretty much same without crit, but his crit has build in mechanics which means its a lot more interesting stat.

Also

While this is true it again boils down.

For me haste is good dmg wise, its also nice to have lower CDs but its not as with DK or retri where with low haste u have like 3-5sec downtime ( hello begining of expansion), i have something to press all the time, so again, its nice, but not same for all.

Well there are interesting masteries in game, and if u look at it that way everything is same… Haste=more spells =more dmg so its “increase haste to do more dmg”…

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But i already made the points you made here in my original post, are you disagreeing just to disagree?

What i am saying is that they can make stats more interesting for each spec for giving them more interactions, while some specs are clearly designed around certain stats it certainly would be good if they also added some other interactions for other stats.

For example, enhancement shaman crits could increase your maelstrom generation, or the chance to proc stormstrike by like 40 % more than a normal hit, so let’s say that you have 10 % chance to reset, a crit would give you 14%.

This would give some more interactions with stats for each spec.

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Isn’t this already the case, except it depends on mastery?

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Yea this is not realy ideal tbf. Imagine if all classes had this style of interaction they will all feel weird at begining, go olay holy paladin with 15% crit and then play one with 40%, its different class…

This would give your spec only more need to focus on specific stat, which eith rng aint that much fun.
And this brings us back to

If i get ilvl upgrade i want to use my upgrade, not put it in bank because it has not desired stat, which with your idea will impact me even more.

Do you see the problem with “strong interesting secondaries” now?

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Mastery increases your chance to proc stormstrike, but what i meant was just an example, crit could increase your proc chance in general things like hot hand, or stormstrike, so it’s not just a you do double damage thing anymore.

And also @lommatik, frankly i do not care about secondary stats being stronger, the fact is that primary stats scale always the same basically, but secondary stats are % based, so when you have a lot of base damage, they will scale much higher than primary, and frankly, that’s not a problem to me, because secondary stats are better from a gameplay point of view, both potentially and in actuality.

My priorities are these, first you make things cool, and then you worry about balancing, balancing in this case is just number crunching, you don’t really have different utility, to account for, so to balance haste with crit or mastery etc, you just have to increase or decrease the % change of each stat so at the end of the day the dps increase equals about the same. And they already do that, 1 point of haste is not equal to 1 point of crit.

Also, it’s kinda irrelevant to talk about the spec feeling weird at the beginning because lack of stats when the problem is already there.

Your second point also is similar, why are you talking about things that are already happening as if this is gonna make it worse? If anything it could do both, it could either close the gap or make it larger. You just see the make the gap larger because you don’t like the idea.

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Say what now?

We two live in very different worlds of warcraft, I assume.

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Regarding haste, it’s not true that it “makes the spec feel better regardless of how it’s designed”. Take feral druids for example. Haste does very little to improve the “feel better” aspect of the spec. It’s crit that does this job.

That being said… you have to be careful, because if you give too much of an effect to some secondary stats, then specs can feel very boring/clunky at the beginning of an extension, because you typically lack stats at the beginning.

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Again, why do so many people make this point? It is already the case, specs already feel garbo without stats., you are not losing anything by adding some more interactions. They already feel garbage at the beginning, so just forget it.

Also, “Haste does very little to improve the “feel better” aspect of the spec. It’s crit that does this job.” doesn’t matter, some specs are designed around crit, some around haste etc, that’s fine, but what i said, is that they should make all stats have some kind of interaction, and i also gave an example on how they could do it, the point about haste was that because of how it works, it does something for the rotation of each spec regardless. Other stats usually do not do that unless the spec is built around it, and i do not think that’s a good thing.

Crit is just double damage if your spec doesn’t have any kind of interaction with it, master is usually just as boring as versa. And i do not think that’s a good thing, at all.

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the only one I really hate is Haste.
It should not behave the way it behaves currently. GCD should not be tied to it. It should be 1s baseline for every spec in the game, 0,75s during Heroism.

Going from one exapsnion to the next is really rough experience because of Haste. Or lack there of, because you go from 40% unbuffed to 5% unbuffed, which is making your GCDs slooooooow asf. The specs just cease to be fun to play once a new expac rolls out.

I remember Hunter having 1s GCD baseline, untied to Haste for a very long time. Played in Cata, played in MOP, played in WOD. It felt fun to play even at low, entry-level gear levels. Now these early patches are hideous.