https://twitter.com/AlternativeChat/status/723465836812460032
Chose that tweet to lead with, as it contains a link to Alt’s blog, which, as per the Blogroll page, is always worth a read 🙂
So, to the matter at hand…
Fuck those pesky and confusing stats, amirite?
Who cares how much of “X” stat you have? Who cares if you have your gear gemmed and enchanted, or if it’s even the right armour type. Who cares if you’re using a wand as a rogue? Or wearing spirit mail as a Fury Warrior?
FUCK THAT GAIS!
Blizzard are now going down the “ITEM LEVEL IS YOUR NEW GOD” route.
And that character sheet?
Looks like something from a pretty shitty action game, where there’s only 1 stat that matters.
Eurgh.
They may as well stop calling it Item Level and just call it E-Peen, or Power Level.
I love fiddling with my characters’ stats. I’m not a min-maxer by any means, but I do like to tinker with stats until I’m happy with them with the gear I’ve got. Item level isn’t really the end all and be all for me personally.
I’d rather have stats I prefer or feel are more useful for my individual character than a higher item level.
An attitude borne out by my characters frequently never wearing the highest level gear they have, unless the gear they have marries up with my preferred stats.
As a consequence of this change by Blizzard, which you should note may or may not make it to live btw, you will need to use an addon just to see the stats that you can see today.
The biggest pain? The change from points to percentages for the likes of Crit etc. I’d like to know if I have 2100 Crit, or 2158 for that matter. A single percentage display is terrible, and obfuscates breakpoints and an awful lot of variability.
Hopefully this is display at the very least in the tooltip as it is on live, but again, no beta Alpha.
Plus, any unused stats are now hidden, which may be streamlining, but to me it, in conjunction with the other changes, just dumbs down the individual character’s entire existence to less than a handful of numbers.
I get what Blizzard are going for here, I really do. They wanted to go one further than the greying out of useless stats that they went for in WoD. However the result just simplifies the stat sheet far too much.
It looks sad and pathetic, and frankly like someone who’s been asked to write 10,000 words on the American Civil War, and all they can think of is Capt America vs Iron Man, and wrote down #TeamCap then left the rest of the page blank.
I really hope they beef it up a bit more before it goes live, I really do. I know on live all that the idiots running pugs care about is iLevel. I tweet regularly when I’m pugging about some of the ridiculous item level requirements pug leaders look for, like 720+ for Mythic Highmaul:
THE STUPID!
WHY WON'T IT STOP!
/flail pic.twitter.com/6KH2rsD7dK
— Sar@mastodon.online (@NerdRooted) April 11, 2016
Or 720+ for Normal Archimonde, a fight which rewards 705 gear…
And we end today, with our regular broadcast of "Idiots in charge of Pugs"!
Tonight: 720+ For Normal? 740+ for Hc? pic.twitter.com/oxY54rtAmD
— Sar@mastodon.online (@NerdRooted) March 28, 2016
So are Blizzard just going with the flow and caving to the iLevel morons?
Sadly it looks like it, and as gear increases in power until the next squish, the problem will only become more compounded as increased iLevel over the next couple of expacs will lead to greater increases in power.
So yeah, you’ve got it from the horse’s mouth: Item Level is soon to be the One True Stat, the Only Stat That Matters.
