Quote:What's a crit rating? Are we doing away with 10% crit and instead going to a crit rating of 10, or what?
Things that are turning into a "rating" system:
Defense
Weapon Skill
Crit
Hit
Spell Crit
Spell Hit
Resilience (new)
I'll assume Dodge/Parry/Block, but haven't seen it.
Required Rating scales with level. At level 60, 14 "Crit Rating" will be equal to 1% crit. Before that level it'll give you more crit, after it'll give you less (haven't seen numbers for the scale yet).
This was done to fill a loophole in itemization. I'll use physical crit as the main example. Three things help your crit: Talents, Agility, and +Crit gear. Talents are finite and can be accounted for. Agility can rise with clvl and ilvl, but its effect on crit diminishes as your clvl increases. +Crit gear (pre-expansion) can rise with ilvl and has nothing to diminish it. The higher ilvl goes, the more crit everyone would have. Another unintended side effect is how itemization itself would be handled as characters gain levels. At level 60, it takes me 29 agi to get one crit. If it takes me 33 agi to get one crit at level 70 (a guess), the value of +crit% gear has gone up but the cost has not changed at all.
Weapon skill is another example. To completely negate the glancing penalty currently, you need +10 weapon skill. A rogue can get +5 through talents, so only needs +5 through items. Under the current system, that means one of two things. Either I'm using a really, really old item because it was the last +skill item I got, or the new items that do have weapon skill will be using a smaller % of the item budget to get the same benefit. Imagine being able to spend 1% of an item's budget on something that will increase your DPS as dramatically as +5 weapon skill.
I'm not sure these would be bad problems in TBC (it depends on how fast they raise ilvl), but with each expansion the problems would get worse and worse.