Might just be me, but I miss when your physical abilities actually scaled off weapon damage instead of your total attack power. Nowadays, you barely notice a difference in how hard you abilities hit even after getting a significant weapon upgrade. Every upgrade feels so miniscule and not nearly as satisfying as it used to.
I still remember back in wrath when I got Bryntroll from ICC 25 on my warrior and my mortal strike started hitting like a truck. It was such a satisfying moment to get a good weapon and actually feel your character’s power increasing. In the recent expansions the weapon upgrades feel so empty, as your abilities no longer scale off it and your auto attacks are barely noticeable anymore.
This works the other way as well.
If you don’t manage to find weapon upgrades every few levels, you could be swapping your weapon for a stick for how little (figuratively of course) it will hit for.
And not only that counted back then, as you wanted to get about 1.4k ArP at 80 to fully negate armor, until then your dmg was decreased by armor, also by glancing blows if not expertise capped and behind target, you had to get hit-capped, grab crit and haste, no idea what else… trust me, while I liked it even with all the stats and stat sticks you had to grind, Retail’s iteration is better. You’re welcome to try it out in the old game and see for yourself.
Anyway, making a simple exponential in item level and polynomial in interaction scaling system that is as smooth and continuous a curve as any you have ever seen in math class makes things easy for the developers. Trifles such as whether the item feels cool to use is not of great concern any longer.
WoW gearing is designed as a spreadsheet and must therefore be solved like a spreadsheet.
This will not change. Not while this team is in charge, anyway. They’d rather have any cool effects be on an ever-expanding list of talents that eventually punches the air out of the game as it endlessly stacks to heights of absurdity and prevents character customisation and radiating your power through your appearance.
Quit complaining about it. It’s not going to change. Trust me.
I didnt complain about it tho, i seriously have no thoughts about if its good or bad that they made this change. Just pointed out that the point above was a bit faulty.
Didnt they just make it so that the change of a weapon is less drastic for melee, so its in the same feild as for a caster? They even tried this the other way around by buffing caster weapons to give much more int/spellpower then they previously did.
Just my thought to why they did this but tbh i dont know.
Also bit confused, when there are items that increases dmg by a huge margin ppl complain when they dont get it. A legendary, an item with a bonus effect, an OP trinket. Its bad design when a single item increases your dmg by a huge margin but also bad design when 1 slot doesnt?
Please, no. Weapons with higher ilvl already make a huge difference, so that would worsen the situation. It would even be more frustrating not to get a good weapon.
True, it’s almost like weapons are now just another Stat Stick.
I remember when weapon speed was a thing, some specs liked slow hard hitting weapons and some liked faster weaker weapons.
We should be able to have different builds for our classes that work differently with different types of weapons, stack Haste and use faster weapons or stack Crit and use slower weapons.
It is because in BFA when they changed to this they also at the same time made auto attacks matter more.
So much so that at times in BFA there was a whole 0.5% dps difference if you hit your buttons in the right order or not for some melee specs, according to simcraft people as long as you hit the buttons.
Ironically they managed to make the feeling of getting a weapon upgrade worse and at the same time make the attacks from auto attacks more important in the rotation not actually changing how important it is to get a weapon but at the same time making it worse feeling to get a good weapon.
Different strokes for different people. Some like the idea of overpowered items, and some don’t. That’s all there is to it.
Well, i suppose it could also be immersion to some extent. I recall weapon strikes having a different feel in Classic than they do on live. Both active abilities and auto attacks. I thought it might be sound design, but even without sound they had a different feel to them. Can’t really explain it any better than that.
Might be because they had fewer attacks? Classes like Paladins had none? If they are rare the feel far more impactfull when used. Hell you even see the AA attacks, a WF procc from a AA is impactfull. Does not mean its engaging.
