Petition for Strength Improvements Part 1; DPS

As always, this weeks Care and Feeding of Warriors always has me wishing I actually enjoyed playing a warrior. Rossi hit on a few things, but mostly his comments about making strength a more valued are what hit home.

I know he probably wouldn’t be completely excited that a paladin is screaming the same thing, but the reality is that str needs some work. Most mail has multiple stats on it. Agility, intel, stam for main stats and some combination of hit, crit, attack power, and armor pen for secondary stats. Why in the world do plate wearers get screwed on stats? On top of agility doing double duty by providing AP and crit for mail wearers, I don’t know a single enhance shammie or hunter that doesn’t have int perform double duty and offer more resource as well as talent to allow it to bump AP.

Str needs buffed and it can do so in ways that it will bump some secondary stat while not making it OP. See the glory of talents is they can be tuned to correctly provide Blizzard’s intended benefit. Too high and the talent can be tuned down, too low and it gets turned up, just right and Goldilocks falls asleep in your bed (if you know what I mean).

In today’s DK Q&A, GC stated that the devs liked variety in plate gear and it was ok for one spec to value things like armor pen, haste, and crit over other specs, so why not fold the stats they want you to have into something you already stack? And what do plate wearers stack? Well DPS plate wearers are stacking STR. You could probably find a warrior, 6 dk, and 3 pallies in the dark corners of Ironforge performing certain favors for shady jewel crafter willing to make them Bold Scarlet Rubies if you look hard enough.

I AM NOT ADVOCATIONG MORE PLATE DROPS! There is enough shit in the loot tables that cause enough people to raise and eye brow and say, “WTF” already. Last night after downing Auriaya the Archaedas' Lost Legplates dropped and no one really knew who they were intended for. They have some pretty nice tanking stats but I don’t know many tanks that can afford some legplates with NO defense on them. They are lacking any of the real DPS stats for the other plate wearers and so everyone was trying to figure out why no one else wanted them. What I am advocating is allowing talents to boost the secondary stats that each spec wants.

Make deep tree talents that look like “increases armor pen by x/y/z of your strength.” It can be done effectively with all the DPS trees and though they run the risk of all looking alike, who the hell cares. They would be raw stat boosting talents, and you could either attach them to more class specific talents so things don’t get watered down, though there is little evidence to show that Blizzard isn’t already watering down the classes. To those who will ask how someone who complains about the homogenization of classes advocate more of it, I will answer, “if you can’t beat’em, join’em, and hope they do it right.” This will help with cluttered loot tables and holding DKP until you get the one drop that’s really worth its dps boost for you. Leave the 6 stat gear to the mail wearers, but let the plate wearers get more stats for their iLvl buck.

-Rhab