Character stats in the Burning Crusade

By introducing jewelcrafting and items with sockets, the Burning Crusade for the first time made it possible to customize items. You yourself can decide whether as a warrior you prefer strength, stamina, crit or defense rating. As a spell caster, you can choose between intelligence, spirit, spell critical rating, added spell damage (or healing) or spell penetration. But while you can choose what to take, you have less choice of how much of it you get. There are three levels of gems, very cheap from vendors, cheap common gems from jewelcrafters, and rare expensive gems, also from jewelcrafters. While you can thus choose your price level, the relative ratio between the stats remains fixed.

For example Blizzard considers 1 intellect to be worth the same as 1 spirit, strength, or agility. The vendor gems give you +4 to one stat, the common JC gems +6, and the rare gems +8. But stamina you get +6, +9, or +12, in every case 50% more than the other stats. Taking the middle level of common jewelcrafter gems, this is the relative scale of what you can get for the same price:

• +2 mana per 5 seconds
• +6 int, str, spi, or agi
• +6 crit, spell crit, defense, or to hit rating
• +7 spell damage
• +8 spell penetration
• +9 stamina
• +12 attack power
• +13 healing

But what if the players don't value the stats in the same way? As a jewelcrafter I can tell you that not all gems sell equally well. That is because not all stats are equally useful, both in respect to how many differenct classes and builds can use the stat, and in respect to how much quantity of that stat you need to make a difference.

The prime example here is spirit, compared with lets say intellect and stamina. 8 out of 9 classes have only very limited use for spirit, and +6 on any other stat is significantly better than +6 spirit. And if stamina is one of the prime stats of your class or build, of course +9 stamina is far, far superior to +6 spirit. The only class that can make some use out of spirit is the priest, and even as a holy priest with a build that maximizes the impact of spirit, I'm hard pressed to declare +6 spirit to be better than +6 intellect, +9 stamina, or +13 to healing. That means that when I put +spirit gems on the auction house, I'm nearly certain not to sell them, even at a discounted rate.

Why should you care if you aren't a jewelcrafter? Because the same principle applies to the looted items without sockets. The same item with an "of the eagle" attribute, giving +stamina and +intellect, sells a lot better than if it was "of the whale", giving +stamina and +spirit, because spirit is valued less by players than intellect is. In fact a green "of the whale" item you might as well vendor, you'll only lose your auction house fee if you put it up. Which is obviously a fault in the game design, as Blizzard obviously considers the different "of the animal" items to be equally valuable, when for the players they aren't.

And curiously the relative scale of Blizzards evaluation of stats has changed with the Burning Crusade. If you compare items pre-BC and post-BC, it becomes immediately obvious that there is much more bonus to spell damage, spell healing, and feral attack power around than before. Of course all the stats went up from pre-BC to now, but for the same item level these stats increased by a higher percentage than others.

Changes in how much stats items give are not neutral towards class balance. Some classes are a lot more reliant on stats for effectiveness than other classes are. For example the basic stats of int, str, sta, spi and agi have a large effect on how much damage a melee fighter deals, but no effect whatsoever on spell damage or healing, or spell critical rating or penetration. Which is probably why Blizzard increased the +healing and +spell damage stats on the Burning Crusade items.

The biggest change in stats is that to stamina, which used to be given out in the same quantities as other stats, but now regularly appears in much larger numbers, about 50% more than the other basic stats. That had a profound impact on the relative levels of health points, damage done, and healing done, with significant consequences especially for PvP. It is easy to see how for example a warlock, who can convert stamina into mana, profits much more from this move than a mage, who cannot.

I think Blizzard should review the balance between stats, and their effects on the balance between classes. Ideally items of the same level, but with different combinations of stats should be balanced until they are considered to be worth the same thing by the player economy. This undoubtedly would mean increasing the spirit bonus that items give, but also balance some other stats against each other.