Bear with me on this one, this is a long story. Over the years we have had a multitude of stats
Hit rating, Expertise, Dodge, Parry, Block, Crit, multi-strike as well as resistances and the occasional proc on a weapon or set bonuses. We had have meta gems, spell penetration, magic damage and well you get the point.
Now i have always been a super casual player but back in BC I played a prot Paladin. My guild at the time asked me to gear up my tank and help them raid.
I was freshly a dinged Draenei at 70 and I fondly remember beginning the gearing up process.
Your first targets you went for was to be uncrushable in raids and make sure you hit your hit cap, block and expertise cap. Thankfully, i was a Draenei and the racial at the time was the 1 percent hit rating aura which made the race interesting and gave you a nice advantage.
What did you do to achieve this? You looked to normal dungeons and farmed them until you were geared enough to start farming heroics.
You would look at the loot table for each dungeon and farmed it until you were lucky enough to get the loot/stats you wanted. If you were lucky you would pull together a dungeon set to gain and advantageous bonus and maybe a weapon stat stick or a weapon with a nice proc with maybe a multi strike or magical damage ability.
Then you could look to professions. I levelled up engineering for the goggles. It was the only way to get an epic helm outside of raids that you could put a meta gem in. It took some work but i crafted it and it felt amazing and lasted.
Putting that meta gem in and gaining that unique bonus made you feel like a god and desperate to get back into dungeons.
In the process of grinding normalâs you were also unlocking the attunements to gain access to certain HCâs so you couldnt just skip them.
Once in HCâs the real work started. You could only gain epics form the final boss and they were hard to begin with until you were geared. Each pull had to be measured and CC and threat were a thing so DPS could just go all out or they would die.
You also had to be fully gemmed and enchanted to gain as much as an advantage as possible and I remember not getting into groups without being ready.
You grind out you HCâs and you get the epics you need or the recipes to craft them. You get uncrushable and you can start doing raids.
Again, you jump in raids you target the gear you need or recipes to craft them and you start to juggle you stats about because you dont need as much hit etc and thats when you start to feel like youâre progressing and you have a sense of achievement and progress.
Then the next tier would come out and the only catch up mechanic was a badge vendor with epics and some recipes on them but you had to farm HCâs to get the badges and it took time and felt great once you started filling in your blues. Once fully epic, less CC was required HCâs became fun because you could pull larger packs.
There was no instant catch up that made progression irreverent and if you were freshly dinged you had to put the same work in to catch up. If guildies were way more geared they had to step up and help you.
Compare this to wow today. Your main stat doesnât matter as its dictated by the highest Ilvl that drops. You have 4 secondaries that are so uninteresting, crit, haste, vers and mastery.
They removed sets, most enchants, gem slots on items (getting that one super rare weapon in HCs with 3 gems slots felt amazing). They also made professions irrelevant.
You have gear chucked at you left right and centre that it doesnt matter and targeting interesting stats and pieces are gone.
Theres so many levels of difficulty that it becomes tedious and more like a chore because in essence all your are gaining is and ilvl increase you dont actually care about the stats.
There is no character building, there is no interesting sets with cool interactions with talents. Just one talent build and youre done. There is no sense of achievement. The game just becomes a chore just to do you daily grind with no real reason to do dungeons. I think my only interest in raiding or dungeons is for transmog only.
I recently logged back into my Paladin and checked Icy Veins for the what stats i should target. Guess what, it doesnt matter they are all weighted the same and thats so boring. Why would i even bother doing mutliple tiers of mythic plus just for an increase ilvl? I have the transmog, achievements are nice but kinda boring as well.
Anyway, Ret needs haste so you stack haste, you stack a little crit and then its between mastery and vers. Mastery increases holy damage and vers increases all damage, increases healing and reduces damage so why would you take mastery at all if the stat weights are identical?
In my opinion vers is a horrible stat. They should just make that a pvp stat or something or rather than mastery be a damage increase it should have an interesting effect so that you have a reason to juggle the four stats around to build your character.
TLDR- I miss progression and building my character with targeted gear and interesting stat juggling. Despite being casual i want to work for my gear and progression with less catch up and more character investment.
Thanks for reading let the flaming begin!
