WoW Itemization Dreams

Con­tin­u­ing yesterday’s expla­na­tion of Wrath item­iza­tion, let’s exper­i­ment and take it a step fur­ther. Here are some fur­ther class changes Bliz­zard could make to sim­plify the “nobody in our guild could use this loot” prob­lem. (Ram­pant arm­chair game design follows.)

Remove all plate caster armor

Pal­adins would wear caster mail.

Rework shaman heal­ers, shaman nuk­ers, and pal­adin heal­ers to share stat item­iza­tion goals. (Maybe add a tal­ent to shaman heal­ers that their Chain Heal hits another tar­get if they crit.)

What about the armor the pal­adins would lose in drop­ping to mail? Give the holy pal­adin an armor mul­ti­plier buff (+20%, 10s?), renew­able each time they cast a heal­ing spell. Make this buff incom­pat­i­ble with Right­eous Fury, to pre­vent self-healing pally tanks. Sham­mies and pal­lies already share shields (and are the only ones who use them), so all caster shields could use the new system.

Remove all caster leather

Druids would wear caster cloth.

Make the tree of life and boomkin forms add an armor mul­ti­plier (+25% flat) so that druids don’t lose any armor in this transition.

Most caster druids I know already mix in cloth by neces­sity, anyway.

Remove all leather tank­ing gear

Druids would wear melee leather.

Rework bear form/abilities/talents such that leather melee gear and tank­ing acces­sories rings/trinkets/necklaces is good enough for bears. There’s barely any druid tank­ing gear out­side pvp anyway.

The GoW “Maybe Some­day” Revision

Con­tin­u­ing the exam­ples from yes­ter­day, after the above changes, we’d end up with:

1. Plate melee — deathknight 1.5÷3, pal­adin 1/3, war­rior 2/3
2. Plate tank­ing — deathknight 1.5÷3, pal­adin 1/3, war­rior 1/3
3. Mail non-caster — hunter 3/3, shaman 1/3
4. Mail caster — shaman 2/3, pal­adin 1/3
5. Leather non-caster — druid 2/4, rogue 3/3
6. Cloth caster — mage 3/3, war­lock 3/3, priest 3/3, druid 2/4

We’ve gone from twelve kinds of gear in TBC to nine kinds in Wrath to six in my myth­i­cal redesign. My redesign has zero niche cat­e­gories; it has one tank­ing set, three non-casting dps sets, two caster sets.

This is a leap, but it’s not out there.

Cloth would get too many peo­ple wear­ing it (11 builds) when com­pared with plate, leather, and mail (3 or 4 builds per spe­cial­iza­tion). So let’s do one more rebal­ance and in doing so, head out to la-la land!

Remove Leather and Mail armor, replace with Scale

Hunters, sham­mies, pally cast­ers, rogues and druids would wear the new armor type Scale.

Align the abil­i­ties and gear goals of leather/mail cast­ers (shaman, pal­adin, druid) and the mail/leather non-casters (hunter, shaman, druid, rogue) in ways like the ones listed above. Which yields:

Remove all (plate) tank­ing gear

Put all tank­ing bonuses in sockets/enchants/rings/necklaces/shields etc. Plate would make tough and help you attack, but wouldn’t be tied to tank­ing unless you tanki­fied it your­self. That’d make the feral druids happy, they like rings and neck­laces and trin­kets and so on.

The GoW “La-la Land” Revision

1. Plate non-caster — deathknight 3/3, pal­adin 2/3, war­rior 3/3
2. Scale caster — shaman 2/3, pal­adin 1/3, druid 2/4
3. Scale non-caster — hunter 3/3, shaman 1/3, rogue 3/3, druid 2/4
4. Cloth caster — mage 3/3, war­lock 3/3, priest 3/3

This isn’t per­fect, but you see what I’m get­ting at: WoW loot, now with Niche­guard. There are cur­rently entire instances with­out loot for some niches. This would very much fix that. Would every drop be a per­fect match for every mem­ber in that cat­e­gory? Nah, there’s still a lot of room for opti­miza­tion, with some pieces being bet­ter than oth­ers for each class. But will stuff flat out be dis­missed due to one class/spec not being present? Unlikely!

The down­side to any of these revi­sions? Well, the game-wide reit­em­iza­tion for one. The tal­ent rework­ings, basi­cally a redesign for some classes. Also, the pro­fes­sions sys­tem is cur­rently built on armor-type, so Leather­work­ers would become Scale­work­ers(?), while black­smiths would finally drop their weird mail­craft­ing abilities.

Quite a bit of work for a game cur­rently live with ten mil­lion sub­scribers clam­or­ing for cool new content.

This is why I don’t think we’ll see any­thing along these lines in the cur­rent WoW, but given how Bliz­zard is tweak­ing the game, I wouldn’t be sur­prised to see some­thing like this in WoW2 or what­ever their next MMO is.

More Words!

• WoW Wrath Class Redesign and Reit­em­iza­tion Explained
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Your role in a PvE raid
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Vari­ety vs Specialization
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: PvP vs PvE
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Solo Per­former vs Group Utility