Although I still subscribe from time to time, I played vanilla WoW more than anything. A big part of that was the exciting variety of items out there. Nowadays, I can' t tell the difference between gear. It's all a mix and match game of +hit rating, +crit rating and a chance to increase haste by x%.

Anyone else miss items like:

Flame Wrath -- http://www.wowhead.com/item=11809
Ironfoe -- http://www.wowhead.com/item=11684
The Unstoppable Force -- http://www.wowhead.com/item=19323
The Eshkandar item set -- http://www.wowhead.com/itemset=261
Glacial Spike -- http://www.wowhead.com/item=20035
Truesilver Champion -- http://www.wowhead.com/item=7960
Blade of Eternal Darkness -- http://www.wowhead.com/item=17780
Fist of the Damned -- http://www.wowhead.com/item=10804

Yeah, these are technically in the game (many of them nerfed/standardized from previous renditions), but it's clearly not the same as having a fun but useful weapon like this at level 80. I suppose these were phased out to help with balancing, but I'm still sadface.

The main problem they bring is how to balance them. You mention several items that were definitely cool back in the day, but some of they also had to be nurfed into oblivion due to the problems they caused. Then on the other side is that a proc sounds cool but to keep it balanced the proc chance is super low or something like that which makes a stat-stick item more consistent and more useful.

That said, the unique item procs idea made a bit of a comeback in Icecrown Citadel and is something we like doing. We have learned a lot of the years on how to balance these types of items while also trying to prevent it from interfering with something like arena PvP. We would like to keep doing procs and we'll see how things go in Cataclysm.

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Q u o t e:


Why does everything have to revolve around arena pvp?

Seriously.

Just make those procs not proc in arena.... or better yet just end arena and then you don't have to make everything revolve around it.


Hardly anyone plays arena anyway.

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When examples are used that doesn't mean they are the be-all-end-all reasoning for things. We have also run into problems with procs that are so awesome the item is used way beyond the expected range for it. (Hi Thunderfury, how are you today? Have you been chatting with your buddy Stormherald lately?)

We want the procs to be cool, fun, but not overpowered. The overpowered aspect applies to both PvP and PvE. While we would love to make procs that just ignore the min/max factor of gear, we can't really do that as it will either make the item overpowered (see above) or possibly so bad that even the previous tier is ahead. Also, while we stayed away from them for awhile, we did make a bunch in ICC and they were pretty successful so will see how things go in the future.

And for the removing arena comments, I have one word to say: No.