Agi weapons...

05/29/2011 06:13 PMPosted by Matuk

So... it's been many, many patches since Rogues gained the ability to wield axes. I remember when the decision was made, and GC explained in a blue post why Shaman didn't get swords... it had some very strong points. I felt a little suspicious of how it would turn out, but I figured "What the hell, it'll probably work out."

This kind of itemization isn't that unusual, nor is it peculiar to this situation. As others have pointed out, there are slow off-hands available which aren't broadly useful.

There's enough room in itemization for some flexibility, and that allows us to create niche items like slow off-hands or 1-handed swords with agility on occasion. Of course, if a particular item has a comparatively narrow niche, then it's more likely that fewer of those items will be introduced. Or, perhaps we'll place an item like Stormwake, the Tempest's Reach which potentially appeals to several different classes.

If I'm reading that blue post right, is he basically hinting that Enhancement is considered a "comparitively narrow niche" by Blizzard? I guess this isn't too unreasonable if there are as few raiding Enhance Shaman as I imagine. If you read into that description further it doesn't sound like we have too bright of a future.

Of course, I could be completely misreading his post. It looks like he quoted something of Matuk's and then talked about something completely different? It wasn't particularly easy to follow.

Upon re-reading, I should have been more clear, no question. What I was getting at is that that there's enough room to itemize for everyone, even if we’re designing items that aren’t 100% efficient. I'll clarify further, though.

Generally speaking, we don't set out to provide perfect itemization for every spec in the game for every tier of content (though we don't want to leave anyone totally out in the cold, either). Sometimes the item a particular class or spec wants is going to be a bit tougher to get. While that’s not an ideal situation and some specs are more prone to the effect than others, it is the kind of thing that is going to happen sometimes - otherwise every desirable weapon would be sitting on the first boss of every dungeon. We like to put weapons on end bosses because they feel exciting. I know some of you are frustrated about where it ended up, but we particularly wanted to put the axe on Nef because he also dropped one in Blackwing Lair.

We work very hard to keep itemization, including loot tables, from feeling too formulaic. We don’t want shaman to use swords for the same reason we don’t want druids using swords. Itemization would certainly be easier on us if every player could use every weapon in the game, but we also think it would be a lot less interesting. We've done some stat streamlining to make things easier, but we don't want to do so much that every weapon in a tier seems to be the same item with a different model.

With an eye to the future, we're looking forward to two weapons suitable for Enhancement in Firelands that do not require killing Ragnaros. One of these weapons can drop from multiple bosses, so you can hold out hope that even if the first boss doesn’t drop what you're looking for, the next one might. There are also no agility swords this time around to take up those one-hander slots.

Finally, some of you may be relieved to hear that the Shatterskull Bonecrusher was fixed to be 2.60 speed some time ago.