Legendary Items for Casters?
by Elizabeth Harper 
Feb 23rd 2006 at 10:30AM
If you saw this earlier post on legendary items, you may have
noticed something odd about them - they're all designed for melee characters. While I sometimes wonder if this
isn't a good thing - it means casters do not feel compelled to go through the long and arduous process of obtaining a
legendary item - community manager Eyonix has made a post in the official forums suggesting that we will be seeing legendary items for
casters at some point in the future. We'd like time-line, please, Eyonix!Filed under: Items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mike Feb 23rd 2006 11:14AM
Ummm, yeah... It makes perfect sense to me why the legendary items are for melee characters. The melee characters are more gear-dependent. Their DPS doesn't necessarily scale up naturally over time and experience. Casters rely mostly on spells. Most spells' effectiveness scale up over time and experience. Doesn't it make perfect sense?
elizabeth Feb 23rd 2006 11:27AM
Well... we may be looking at this from different perspectives.
At level 60, a caster stops getting new spell ranks and stops gaining in power. The only way for a caster to improve at this point is via gear with +spell damage, +spell crit, +spell to hit, or +spell penetration.
Prior to level 60, I'll agree with you - casters are far less gear-dependant than characters that rely on physical DPS, simply because every two levels they have access to additional (and more damaging) ranks of spells. But once everyone hits end-game - and I assume you'd agree with me that these legendary items are end-game items - everyone is reliant on gear to continue to be competitive.
Mike Feb 23rd 2006 11:43AM
Excellent point. I hadn't looked at it from that perspective.
Kevin Feb 23rd 2006 12:24PM
Wow, that was the most mature interaction I've ever seen on the Internet - point, counter point, agreement. Beautiful.
That said, I'm a 53 Druid and would like to see some legendary items for casters - it would give me something to look forward to in the later stages of the game.
Mike Feb 23rd 2006 4:29PM
Kevin -
I try. Although I realize it's utterly futile to try and bring civility to the infinite and mind-numbingly 1337 droves of idiots that traverse the interwebs. I just like my little corner of it to have some shred of dignity and uprightness (?).
Long Poster Feb 24th 2006 1:16AM
I found this gem on the wow forums. A good read, but a bit lengthy!
I have played MMORPGs for nearly a decade. My Ultima Online accounts each have over 100 months played. I raided EverQuest with several high end guilds and enjoyed challenge after challenge until AA and other changes got out of hand. I followed WoW closely over six months before release. I even experimented with sandboxes and the alpha and beta versions before the game was even released - this included "playing" the alpha "Friends and Family" edition before nearly anybody else. I have sampled Shadowbane, Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online, Everquest II and many more "popular" MMORPG games for various periods of time. I have even thought seriously about fleshing out a business plan and funding a mmorpg company. I am and have always been a bit of a powergamer, in and out of gaming.
In WoW, I play 5 characters simultaneously. 1 Priest and 4 Mages, much to the chagrin of the Alliance on my server. I enjoyed WoW from release until a few months after I hit 60 simultaneously on all 5 accounts. If some of the fundamental design directions are followed, I highly suspect many of you will follow. Let me explain to you, the members of this forum and fellow WoW players what I see to be the latent but looming problem on the horizon. World of Warcraft may never be the same again if large, sweeping and perhaps unpopular changes are not put into place soon. What kind of changes? Why are these changes needed?
Let me explain:
WoW, like EverQuest, Ultima Online and many other popular MMORPGS rewards, among other things, time invested. This is not always a bad thing but it becomes a problem when time invested significantly outweighs the ability for a highly skilled player to perform. This divides the players who are able to invest so much time into a category that no casual player can ever hope to even get close to. This is becoming more of a problem in WoW and may very well lead to a severe unbalancing of the classes and a very unhappy playing experience as classes begin to appear to be "better" than others, so much so that some classes will simply be undesirable and ?casual gamers? (WoW?s core demographic) will be left behind by hard core gamers. Those of you on PvP servers will feel this the hardest, but normal servers are by no means immune. A similar situation occurred in EverQuest. Rangers simply became a joke of a class, with low damage and limited utility. Over a long period of time this was corrected, but most likely too much in the buffing direction. Ultima Online also suffered a similar fate, with the Diablo II item property system currently in place. In WoW, the low rewards of PvP combat aside, this skill disparity will be a major problem if not addressed, at its root cause, soon. Let me give you a quick explanation and example:
In WoW, a top geared player (such as a rank 14 PvPer with full PvP gear) soundly trounces nearly any less geared opponent (say a casual PvPer, the likes you would find in any pick up group. This happens even if the lesser geared player knew how to play his class far better than the superiorly equipped player, but just does not care to play for 10 hours a day. Granted, everything else equal, better gear should make for a better player and make it far more likely that a lesser geared player will win but things are beginning to go too far. The problem is that the ability for gear to unbalance the equation is becoming larger and larger. In short, the best gear gives one far too much of an advantage than it normally should. Let's face it - one does not need but to invest time in any of the BGs to rack up honor and as a result of honor some of the best gear (for the time being) becomes available. This gear beats nearly anything else out there, save for ultra high end instances. Is it becoming apparent how time spent can lead to not only a much, much better equipped player, but a player that will beat a casual player almost every single time, no matter what tactics or skills that player has? Talents only scale so far. Spells only scale so far due to level cap. Where is the cap on gear? If there was one, the thrill of advancement would be removed - so we are stuck with a perpetual state of "mudflation" where gear has to get better and better. To some extent, the problem that we have now where many players are level 60 and growing bored is another symptom but is outside of this discussion. At any rate, the eventual expansion will bandaid that problem for a few months.
Why WoW is Mudflating -
This mud and ?gearflation? situation leads to currency being severely devalued (1 gold now may be the same as 100 gold in the future), the best, rarest armor of today being many orders worse than tomorrow's blues and a whole host of other issues related to pvp and pve scaling. Unlike most previous games, in WoW, mudflation brings unique problems. Because talent damage and spell damage is largely capped, and melee damage and resists are able to scale up practically forever; there exists a very large, very serious problem. Once resists on melee armor gets high enough, and damage on weapons goes up, melee classes will become nearly invulnerable compared to casters. This will impact mages, priests and warlocks the most, rogues and druids less so. Imagine for a moment if every single cast was resisted 50% or more. Your armor as a caster does not go up as fast as +damage gear. One and two shots against cloth casters become commonplace before talents such as mortal strike, backstab or eviscerate even kick in. Ice Novas will be resisted and fears trinketed away. A serious problem is on the horizon.
The point of the mage class, for example, has always been high burst dps, and poor survivability. The glass cannon syndrome if you will. This should not change. However, the propensity to become killed in one shot or intercepted before being able to even DO damage is particularly troublesome. Priests are designed to heal - but how can they heal when damage is being done faster than they can heal, especially against other cloth classes? What about trying to heal 3.5 second heals when being destroyed by a maximum crit, maximum haste, maximum resisting melee class? Patch 1.10 should fix some of these concerns and itemization revamping is helping but it is just a bandaid. Real, fundamental changes need to be discussed and implemented before this gets so far out of hand that time invested (mainly in the form of gear) is the sole differentiator between the classes. As previous games have shown time and time again, this is not a situation that players enjoy.
In Ultima Online, one with the proper balance of skill and time investment would be amazing both in PvE and PvP skills. There was a catch though. In Ultima Online, skills (think spells and melee abilities) would cap - negating further time gains. The only way to improve was to hone your skills (or use the correct choice of equipment to assist you in combat - potions, bandages, etc). Back in original UO, gear was not important at all. It later became increasingly important and now so is critical, as it affects your ability to mitigate damage, resist spells, cast spells faster and even improve skills beyond what is normally allowed. Naked UO characters are one shotted. Items, not skills are now the measure of a player's ability. In EverQuest, once you hit a level cap, and before there were AA points, getting better at timing spells, effects and the approach you took to fighting mobs made the difference. Gear was important but not critical to success. Complete Heal (CH) rotations, tashing (reducing magical resist) and slowing (reducing the damage per second of the monster(s)) was all critical, and doing things in the wrong order was usually fatal. Particularly at the early stages, gear was important - but not critical. When the game progressed and mudflation set in, the differences in mana pools, health, armor and resists skyrocketed between a naked character and a well geared character. The differences between a well geared character and a character that had ultra high gear was staggering. Hence, a greater time investment (in the form of better gear, not better tactics or abilities gained) made the difference. This is where the fundamental flaw arose and has not been offset to this day. One thing that EverQuest has done right was ensure that relative gear remained largely balanced. Casters still die quickly but not instantly to melee classes. Taunting was never improved by gear. Through better gear, core abilities were enhanced (damage dealt, healing done) but changes outside of the main purpose of the respective classes was not implemented. Casters never became tanks, Melee never became casters. Haste was capped. Criticals were capped. In WoW, not only are spell criticals not shown, but melee criticals can in some cases reach 50% of the time, or more. Every other attack will crit? These melee crits will be significantly +damaged already. Caster armor does not scale to match. Hence you have the problem WoW is facing today.
Enter WoW. You may be thinking - well you cap at level 60 and you have a hard cap of talent points and spell damage, what is the big deal? Gear and itemization. Like Diablo and the current Ultima Online (and soon to be EverQuest with augments), more time investment means better gear (and hopefully better tactics, but this is not always the case). Jewelrycraft is only going to make things worse for WoW. Due to mudflation, a player's gear begins to always have to get better and better (mudflation) and as a result, causes a larger and larger gap between the classes that have and have not. Sound familiar? This can be "bandaided" by granting gear to lower time investment players through easy means. See the following post below about itemizations, a hot topic and an area of growing concern for months now as melee classes have been able to increase their damage and damage mitigation (armor) at rates that far exceed cloth, leather or even mail (in some cases). Once this relative difference falls out of balance, melee classes will become so much more powerful, possibly to the extent of removing much of the skill from the equation entirely and instead basing the ?relative worth? of a character on what they are wearing, now on how well they can play the game. This is a dumbing down of the game and will remove much of the incentive to play and progress. Nobody wants to be on an endless treadmill with the only reward being gear that is always slightly better than the last set. Who needs skill when you can easily acquire gear that places you in a position to beat almost any caster class, no matter how skilled. This situation will only encourage out of game sales and ?ebayers? (and farmers) to flourish. Depending on your perspective, that may or may not be a bad thing.
Example:
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Quoted from Eyonix - 2/3/2006 - Thread Title "Itemization Improvements"
We've been making a number of improvements to item drop rates in Stratholme, Scholomance, Upper Black Rock Spire, Lower Black Rock Spire, and Black Rock Depths. In the next patch, the drop rate for many items will improve. In some situations, we will even be improving the quality of select items found in these dungeons.
Beyond this, we're also adding several new items to existing bosses, and even to new bosses which will be available at various locations throughout these instances. Many of the new items will offer statistical improvement with certain classes in mind, such as rings which offer both spell and melee crit, ideal for the Paladin, Shaman and Druid.
A brand new eight piece dungeon set will also be scattered through the locations outlined above. This set, available only to the Warlock, Mage and Priest will offer a substantial amount of armor, hit points and intelligence, making it great for PvP. Below is an example of the set:
Ironweave Robe
219 Armor
+24 STA
+15 INT
Durability 80/80
Classes: Priest, Mage, Warlock
Requires level 58
Set bonuses:
(4) Increases your chance to resist Silence and Interrupt effects by 10%.
(8) +200 Armor.
There are a number of other itemization improvements going into patch 1.10, however, we'd prefer for everyone to discover them through their own adventures. I just wanted to give you a sneak peak. ;)
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End Quote
This change is welcome, but only representative of another bandaid. To solve this problem, two things must change. Itemization needs to be redone, completely, and long term melee and caster differences need to be critically examined and addressed. Adding +spell damage to caster armor is nice, but does not maintain the balance between casters and melee as melee damage, armor, haste, crit % and resists continues to scale up faster than caster damage can improve. Adding more armor to caster gear works, to a point but largely is useless against preventing casters from dying within a few short hits due to the way caster damage calculations are done.
To sum everything up, caster gear and melee gear (weapons AND armor) are scaling at entirely different rates. This is removing the skill part of the player experience out of the equation. Like Diablo, gear is becoming nearly the sole measure of a player's abilities. Putting in many hours of time is the only way to get exception gear, and skill is becoming meaningless once you have the best gear. On top of all of this, WoW's PvP reward system needs to be completely redesigned. As it is now, the only reason to even put in 8 hour days, farming PvP is for the melee rewards (which are going to be surpassed soon by other raid gear anyway) - and which are far more favorable to melee classes than casters. High warlord weapons are head and shoulders above caster "weapons".
Gear needs to be less emphasized and skill and abilities of the players need to be improved. This is the only clearly apparent, long term approach to solving this looming and growing problem. Letting this go unchecked will result in what we currently have with Ultima Online, Everquest and even Diablo ? a game experience that rewards time and not ability. With the growing number of casual gamers unable to put in more than a few hours a week, this is going to come as a rude awakening to many players as the problem gets worse and worse. I recently cancelled all five of my WoW accounts. Somehow I suspect that I may only be the tip of the iceberg is these issues are not addressed. Suffice it to say, WoW should do what it can to avoid a similar fate.