A word for reforging

So, there you are, a new piece of loot. You quickly equip it, and then you find out that you are below hit-cap. You think it over, and try to remember if you have another piece of gear in the bank to raise your hit cap again. But for now, you leave it unequipped. And a lot of times that new piece of loot stayed in our bank until we found another piece, to offset the hit-loss.

That's how we used to raid, before Cataclysm. But Cata introduced Reforging, and there was much rejoice. No longer would we need to leave new gear in the bank, because we needed that 'lesser' gear for a cap.  I don't remember hearing one voice that said; "Mmm, wait a minute..."

Now I must admit, that after the ICC-summer, my own theory crafting was low. I was not raiding, just playing around for fun. And I really liked the mantra; "..to change unwanted stats in wanted stats..". No more useless hit over the cap, no more useless crit as Boomkin (how things can change). 

Little did I foresee the snake that hissed below.

This snake actually wouldn't be much of a problem during Cata, maybe at the end. The stat-numbers where a lot lower, then now in Mists of Pandaria. In my memory, I did reforge, but not in excess. It would take a website called Ask Mr. Robot and the stat-increase from Mists to really rear its ugly head.

Up to this point there where some complaints about stupid reforging and using add-ons, and such, but the stat-numbers weren't that high to actually make much of a difference. But after a few bosses in Mogushan Vaults, when people where getting more purples, the complaints where rising, an they all where the same;

What happened was simple, you equipped your new piece of gear, checked MrRobot (or any other add-on), and you found out that you had to reforge at least 10 pieces of gear (not to mention gems/enchants), and all the rejoice was gone.  Reforging now became something to be afraid of. Every time I hit that optimise button, and only had to reforge 5 pieces of gear, a sigh of relieve escaped me.

So, when the news came that reforging would be gone, I didn't wept a tear about it, hurray no more endless hitting buttons to get you your caps/breakpoints. But in the past few months since that news, more news cam out, and I am starting to think that maybe axing reforge is actually not that needed.

Now why would I think that? Well, as mentioned before, it was introduced to change a 'lesser' stat for a 'better' stat. I think they even used the example back then about you really don't needing Crit, so why would you go for a Crit-piece, but now, you could change some crit to say, Haste, and it would not be absolutely bad. So more gear would be used. the problems where the caps/breakpoints.

As far as I know, there are no caps on Mastery, Spirit or Critical Strike. There maybe some caps on Dodge and Parry, but who cares, most Tanks don't actually go for those anymore, or the caps are out of reach (102.4% dodge anyone???). But Hit/Expertise (hard caps) and Haste (Breakpoints), now there is the problem... combine those three with the higher stat-ratings from Mists, and you have your problem.

The fun part is, that with Warlords of Draenor, all those caps and breakpoints will cease to exist. Dodge, Parry, Hit and Expertise will be gone as stats on gear, and the Damage-over-Time and Healing-over-Time effects will be changed such that the main Idea of Haste breakpoints (getting one more tick in) will be gone. Even the stat-increase will be lower because of the squishing of stats.

So why would you still need to remove Reforging, if all the things that actually made it bad, are removed? Couldn't we just keep it in, to actually do what it should have been doing, changing some of that unwanted mastery into crit? Now, it seems Blizzard is in this making-all-things-simpler-mode, less enchant/gems, so having an option open to change all your hear seems a little strange, but still, having an option to change a little bit of your gear seems to nice to throw away.

And then I am not even talking about spirit...  and I may be completely wrong about this, considering we have not yet much clue about how healing will be in Warlords, but in the past, all the first months of a new expansion were hard on healers. Not much regen of mana, so they were having mana-issues. With keeping Reforge in for spirit, healers could reforge to more spirit at the start of an expansion, and to less later...

And for that matter, Tanks could reforge more into their less-squishy-stat at the start of expansions, and dps into, well..dps maybe lucky then..  still, as a Boomkin I'd rather have crit then mastery, so even for dps it could mean a little.

I know this opens up a whole new aspect of reforging, to actually compensate for the lack of useable stats, because all stats are low. But wasn't this maybe one of the ideas why we all liked Reforge at the start of Cataclysm???

Maybe we should not throw away Reforge that easy, and with the announced changes, you actually only would need to change that One piece of gear that just dropped, and then only to make it better than it now is, so you could equip it right there, at the spot, without reforging, and reforge it later when you have time, to make yourself a little better. Which is what we all want?  Isn't it....?