It's Evolution (of stats)

~ Crabby pic courtesy Wowwiki.com

It was dropped into the Dev Watercooler last night from Ghostcrawler himself that there are a few stats going through some significant changes for Mists. The full repercussions of which, or if they even go through, are of course unknown until we can get our hands on them. The stats we're looking at are Spell Resistance, Hit/Expertise, Block, Criticals and Resilience. So without further ado, the stat changes.




Spell Resistance
Remember back in vanilla having those few pieces of fire resist gear just to be able to kind of survive Ragnaros? How about major Nature resist stacking in AQ? Maybe you only remember putting on a couple of frost pieces for Sapphiron in Wrath Naxx. Either way, that's all they'll ever be again, memories that is. Spell resistance and all increases of it (totems/auras/etc.) are all gone. "GONE", I say. No more shall we have to suffer putting on pure resist gear and figuring out how terrible the rest of our stats are going to be just because we have to use it to live. For PvP the repercussion is that there is no longer a use for Spell Penetration either. I'm not necessarily thrilled about this. Can't really say I care, but can't really say I don't care. It's just not actually been that important for most everything and when we got the new character panes, I dropped resistances to the bottom of the stats because even when minimized I cared that little to see them.

Hit/Expertise
This is going to be a big one going forward. The changes being that Hit and Spell Hit will no longer be separate stats. We'll just have Hit, period, the end. Casters will end up just as skilled at hitting things in the shins as melee. They'll just be terrible at it. In combination with that Expertise will negate dodge and spell miss first, and then parry chance. This is good, especially for Enhancement shaman. They've always had to cap spell hit. Now as you'll see, they'll just need Hit + Expertise to add up to 15% and they won't miss with any spells. They're going to list expertise as a % chance just like hit, instead of trying to go "well I have this much expertise rating which means I have this expertise score which means I have this % chance to..". No, that was terrible and they removed that. 1% of expertise will require the same rating as 1% of hit. Now you may have noticed I said 15% up there. That's because they're going to normalize it, such that Spell hit = overcoming miss + dodge rate. So in the example they give against a boss level (+3) mob, you require 15% spell hit, or 7.5% hit + 7.5% expertise. Now the last bit also gives us that ranged attacks are going to be able to be dodged so they'll be putting expertise on Mail for the Hunters and Enhancement shaman. Another item to note is that Rogue poisons are now going to work of melee hit chance, rather than spell hit chance.

Picture found here: http://blog.newsarama.com/2010/06/11/agent-of-s-t-y-l-e-captain-americas-avengers-ensemble/

Block
Another big deal change is the way block will be handled in Mists. Block is going on a second roll. This is huge, and will change the way block works on a big level. Gone are the days of CTC capping for Paladins and Warriors. It will not longer be possible to push normal hits permanently off the combat table. So the two rolls are going to be 1) to see if the attack is hit/miss/dodge/parry; 2) to see if it is blocked or not. They didn't say in which it will be determined if the hit is a critical or not for softies but that won't matter to tanks anyway. Block will also have diminishing returns on higher rating just like Parry and Dodge do now. This will certainly change the way the two classes tank and I think it's a big step in making the tanking classes more uniform in ability while still doing things differently. Having a CTC capped tank during Cataclysm has been quite useful and put those above the Druids and Deathknights in certain areas for the raids looking to min/max everything.

Criticals
This one is very simple, everything that has a chance to crit will now do so for double damage baseline for everyone. There are a couple things that will crit for more they say but other than that it'll be a very nice change for Enhancement Shamans and Rogue poisons.

Resilience
The devs over at Blizzard are looking for a big change in the game for Resilience as well. The plan is to replace it with Defense (PvP) or PvP Defense or something of the like. Everyone at all times will have a base D(PvP) of 30%. This should allow for a much easier time getting started in PvP no matter what season it is. They are also going to counter D(PvP) with Power(PvP). P(PvP) is going to increase the damage/healing you do to other players in all PvP situations. The interesting point to note here is that the current tier PvP gear is going to be a lower ilvl than the current tier PvE gear, but this is countered by the D(PvP) and P(PvP) stats on the items being "free" to the stat budget of the item. This would make the same ilvl of PvP gear and PvE gear equal in terms of use for PvE. The overall goal of this is to make it easier to get into PvE if you're a PvPer or vice versa. The lower ilvl of PvP gear will push PvE gear the obviously better choice in PvE, and then D(PvP)/P(PvP) stats will push PvP gear as the most beneficial for use in PvP. This will still make the top of the line (Gladiator/Heroic Raid) gear the most desirable for it's own combat style.

Many of these changes are going to have a big effect. The change to block and hit are going to be big for PvE. The changes to PvP stats are going to mean you no longer look at that DK in pure pvp gear and go "LoL you're wasting all your stats on resilience, gtfo my LFR." I see only good things from these changes right now and as always I look forward to everything that Mists of Pandaria is bringing to our World of Warcraft.