Evangelysm Podcast Show 1, Season 1

Show 1, Season 1, 3 February 2015.


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In this show I looked briefly at the big news of the week which was:

• Blackrock Foundry opens with Normal and Heroic difficulties available.
• World boss  Rukhmar becomes available in Spires of Arak.

In the Talk Talk section of the the current secondary stats and how viable they actually were. 

At the beginning of Warlords the secondary stats changed. In Mists we had Critical Strike, Haste, Mastery, Hit, Expertise, Dodge, Parry.

• Critical Strike: Increases your chance to get bonus damage/heals
• Haste: Increases the speed of your attacks/heals
• Mastery: Increases a spec specific bonus to your abilities
• Spirit: Increase mana regen for healers and hit for damage dealers
• Hit: Increases your chance to successfully land an attack on your target = GONE!
• Expertise: Decreases the chance of your target to dodge your attack = GONE!
• Dodge: Increase your chance to avoid all attacks regardless of direction = GONE!
• Parry: Increases your chance to avoid attacks from the front = GONE!

Crit, mastery and haste are great stats as is spirit for us healers, but even to me, there seemed to be duplicity there as hit and expertise always felt like they did the same thing and for casters in Mists that was the case.

Dodge and parry are very different in the real world, but in game they were only tank stats and therefore achieved the same thing, unless the tank decided to not be facing off with the target.

One of Blizzard's reasons for removal of these stats is that they were unexciting, which let's be honest, they were.

So it made sense when they announced the removal of those stats. But rather than remove the stats they were replaced. The stats that were added were:

• Bonus Armor: Increases armor & is stronger than other stats for tanks.
• Versatility: Increases damage and healing, and reduces damage taken
• Multistrike: A chance for your damage/healing abilities to repeat at 30%

Now is it me or does there seem to be duplicity once more, with the exception of Bonus Armour?  Which seems to be a great stat and therefore is just fine by me.

Versatility introduces a new concept, reduction of incoming damage as well as boosting our damage/healing output. But couldn't this have been rolled into armour by making armour reduce spell damage as well as physical? Would that have broken PvP by making casters ineffective? Maybe but just have armour work differently in PvP by NOT reducing armour, it's how it works anyway, so no harm no foul. While in principle it is not a bad stat it is just plain old dull, less interesting than hit and expertise. So dull I can't think of a reason to carry on talking about it.

My real biggest pet hate is Multistrike. It sounds great, we all love free attacks right? While for some classes this is a mathematically wonderful stats it is simply a bad stat, it is lazy and also seems to be counter to another design philosophy to counter lag in encounters. Remember when Blizzard told us they had identified smart heals as the cause of lag in encounters and that they want to eliminate the cause by reducing the amount of healing activity in the combat log? Well doesn't multi-strike just repeat that mistake? Are we likely to see a repeat of the lag as our multistrike chances rise? I think we may.  Also isn't this pretty much the same as Critical Strike but instead of doing 100% extra damage it does 30% extra damage. That makes it Critical Strike Lite to me and is that exciting?

So what is the answer?

For me Bonus Armour stays, it works perfectly as a tank stat even if there is a question mark on it increasing their damage output.

Versatility is a dull stat, make it Amplification, which was a planned stat, if there is felt to be a need for more than crit/haste/mastery for damage dealers.

Multistrike isn't a dull stat but is really very flawed therefore remove it completely and increase the amount of crit on items by 30% to counter its loss in the game.

If you'd like to get in touch with me the email address is:
podcast@evlyxx.co.uk

The show twitter account is:
@EvangelysmCast

My personal twitter account is:
@evlyxx