That ship has sailed long ago, magic school resistances & spell penetration are gone. TOO COMPLICATED, said the… beings… who brought us WF/TF and Corruptions.
From more practical viewpoint, 20% less damage taken from X would make at least 1 Paladin mandatory in any content with unavoidable heavy X damage. So if such ability was given to Paladins, something similar should be distributed among several other classes. In Wrath Shamans had Fire, Frost and Nature resist tools, Hunters - Nature, Priests - Shadow, Paladins Fire, Frost and Shadow. Druid’s buff granted 75 resistance to everything.
IIRC 130 resistance to X from Aura averaged to about 16% damage reduction from X if you had 0 resistance otherwise, there was some variance - you could get full damage anyway, partial resist (damage reduced by some %), or full resist.
Gamepedia says it was removed in 5.0.4-5.1.0, mostly converted to PvP Power, wasn’t around then - too full of anger and hatred for all things Cata. But looking as it does follow that trend of making the game simple and brain-dead enough for 5-year old children and monkeys, I’d say it was that. Or the time-honored drunk dart throwing at “What we’re removing from the game in this expansion” target board.
I’m basing this theory on other secondary stats: ARP was axed in Cata and they DID say somewhere it was done on purpose to simplify the stats, because casuals couldn’t wrap their little minds around the idea of a stat improving their physical damage vs something with decent armor value. Same as MP5/Spirit which ended up as Spirit, then was removed anyway because still too hard to think about… And Hit & Expertise would soon follow, removed in WoD.
And in the same MoP they put RNG ilvl upgrades so you had to use sims to determine if something was upgrade or not. Yo dawg, we heard u don’t like sims, so we put more math on your math so u can’t sim while u can’t sim.
Bit confused on how a topic about Ret aura became about stats we had back in the day. Either way ill give my take as to why most of those were removed.
Arp - Mobs have armor aswell but not the same as players so kinda hard to grasp what bennefit it actually gave in pve and for pvp it was kinda powerfull… falls kinda in the same place as Spell pen.
MP5/ Spirit - Kinda pointless with how mana works now right?
Hit/ Expertise - Same reason we can no longer change stats on gear that they gave atleast… “ppl get an item in raid and want to put it on right away but now you have to keep Hit/exp capp and also change to your bis stats then enchant and gem” or something in that line. From what i get there were ppl complaining about that back then.
Out of all the added stats over the years only Mastery and versa stuck.
Retri Aura > Resistance Auras > Resistances/Spell Penetration > why they aren’t here anymore.
For “physical” DPS ARP was usually better than Str/AP/Agi as they would get more gain from not doing 60% dmg (your average boss had about 40% armor iirc) than from getting another +20 str gem (of which you’d get like 12 real str gain cuz 40% armor…).
It’s still in game though. Colossus Smash says hi. Some bosses have debuffs that work like stacking ARP on tank.
You’d stack spell penetration to some cap if you wanted to play PvP and 1) not deal with constantly dealing like 30% less damage vs arcane mages and 2) not make a Pikachu face when your magical CC or that big nuke meant to KILL SOMEONE DEAD was fully resisted. Then you would forget about it, like Hit - no value over cap, so take something else that does something useful.
ARP on the other hand was the stat you wanted to hard cap if majority of your output was depending on it. Hard cap that is 100% total ARP. Some specs had little or not-so-little boosts but the general rule was “cap it and then you can think about str/ap/agi”. TL;DR: The god stat for a lot of specs in Wrath.
There’s “Mana Regen” in your character window. That’s MP5 xD They just removed it from items, gems, etc. Like ARP…
Long story short: Once upon a time healers used to go OOM from healing for too long. Caster DPS too in order to be balanced against melee specs in PvP. But casuals seemed to dislike it, so now melee have more gap closers than ranged guys have gap makers, and in return we don’t go OOM anymore. MOST OF US, that is. Arcane still goes OOM as it can juggle mana/DPS ratio as part of its gameplay. Heard Warlocks also were going OOM before prepatch if they stacked Expedient too much
Well this was only something of issue if you were lazy, dirty casual who somehow got invited to raid and YOU WERE NOT PREPARED!
No, seriously, having to optimize other important stats while keeping the caps was kinda “raid prep” thing that you’d do outside that “logging in for 4 hrs on 2 raid days/week”. Alas, the casual crowd never got to see this side of real top-end PvE. They only saw awesome Tier X (Heroic) gear, pumping big numbers, simming, and getting phat lewt. So they cried and cried until Blizzard granted what they wished, and only then they saw it was not what they wanted.
Sometimes I wish they didn’t. Versatility looks like designated PvP stat as it’s flat damage reduction/increase. Seen too many unkillable weak DPS in Wrath to think it’s good thing.
All of these were pointless back then and is so even now. A stat increase that makes another stat useless is bad design. Armor and Res hardly scales up much as the expansion goes while Arp and spell pen did.
Here have some armor… also have armor pen
Here have some Resistance and also some Spell pen
And worse "When someone dies, you do a bit more dmg for a couple of sec… if you activate it b4 he dies, instead of maybe throwing him a WoG, LoH, BoP etc
In the end Auras always were and still is a flavour for the class.
About MP5/ Spirit they went throu the same cycle every expansion. Casters were mana starved early on and then had an unending mana pool at the end… Remember Int gave only mana and spell power was seperate from that.
Have some ARP, so you can fight back instead of desperately trying to scratch the plate guy’s armor while he’s cutting you to pieces.
Spell penetration in PvP was mostly caster vs caster thing. Auras etc. were something to consider, that 15-20% chance to get resisted added another layer to preparation: Do you go full “performance” stat and risk being gimped vs something like Arcane, or do you get that spell penetration cap paying with some % of output? Short term it could be hit or miss. Long-term you would see stable tendency to take less damage or sometimes not being CCed. In extreme cases you’d see someone resisting like 50% of damage while dishing out full deal. Just something that was worth thinking about before you’d get to button mashing. Being Arcane I have to admit feeling undue amount of schadenfreude when having 270 or so resistances while those poor schmucks had at most 130-135 penetration because that was “normal” cap, not “extreme case” cap. Good times, Wrath.
In PvE Resistances were big deal because often some boss would deal strong X damage, so naturally you’d boost X resistance to reduce it. Think Ragnaros, hell, EVERYTHING in Molten Core - you can stack Fire Resistance or try to outheal. Auras, Shadow Protection, Aspect of the Wild, Resistance Totems, all these X resistance sets in Classic/TBC were about that. Frost Resistance gear was still used in Wrath by Sindragosa tanks. By then you wouldn’t gear for Resistance anymore, except said Sindragosa, but raid-wide 20% damage reduction from X wasn’t anything to scoff at.
Int was increasing mana pool size and gave you some spell crit. Many specs had talents like “You get 10% of Int as spell power”.
And i prefer to remember it in a different way: Your mana pool size didn’t depend on amount of Mastery gems in your gear and Int was behind everything except (direct) spell power
Found this about spell pen after googling it for a sec and it was as i remembered it. To cap spell pen 1 spell pen gear was needed with an enchant rendering any aura + mage armor useless. So 1 item made talents from 2 classes combined null and void, thats just bad.
Funny how the Arp is no longer needed to bash in those plated tanks these days… its not their armor that saves them either its their healthpool/selfhealing/mitigation talents etc.
Judging by dates and values, it was Cata thread. We don’t talk about that thing here, it’s unbecoming in polite company
The details varied a bit, it was really like that in Cata because they started that “dumbing the game down” trend. Before you would either stuff your gear with spell penetration or someone, somewhere, would have some resistance pts over your ability to pierce it.
Yeah, everyone and their pet deals non-physical damage, or ignores armor, or has a bleed so it ignores armor, or has armor-reducing debuff, or the damage is just so massive that armor doesn’t help it… What is vexing me most about this is how soft and squishy Shamans became. Mail armor+shield should equal some 40-50% reduction so kinda tough? Wrong, they’re paper. Toughest spec in game? Leather-wearing Havoc or rogues with their 20% souls, 30% vials and bazillion of defensives.
They tried dumbing the game down by removing some “meta” elements, they ended up with worse meta than they had. And it’s like that every time when they try to make WoW suitable for e-sports, monkeys, kids with their parents’ credit cards, challenge-fearing casuals, illiterates, you name it, it ends badly.
Edit: Maybe let’s remind peps what Retribution Aura actually DID back then. “When you’re attacked, attacker gets hit for X Holy damage each time they hit you”. Small amount, not very noticeable unless you were mass tanking trash packs for a long time, or a Rogue was scratching you and between stuns, blinds, saps Retri Aura was doing half of your DPS output
