This is the “Fix It” Expansion

OK, day 2 of BlizzCon 2013 is officially over.

And the video quality was even worse today somehow.

Even pulling up yesterday’s archived stuff was unwatchable.

I suffered through the panel that dealt with itemization and got some good stuff out of that. And coupled with yesterday’s announcements about improvements to the inventory system, I have dubbed this the “Fix It” expansion. Screw the space goats.

Normally, I’m anxiously awaiting an expansion while at the same time feverishly trying to somehow prepare for it. This time, I just want the damn thing NOW because it addresses so many quality of life issues.

Back in the day of Wrath, and even Cata, I used a tool called RAWR. And RAWR rocked. It was Ask Mr. Robot… but different. There was a lot more control and a lot of features that you didn’t have to pay for. It could also be downloaded and you could store all sorts of character files and loot wish lists. It was awesome.

But there has been a slow trickle of the theorycrafters (particularly in the mage community) to the twisted nether. I imagine most finally got bored and moved on.

That left me with Ask Mr. Robot, which is useful, but I really missed the ability to lock down a loot list to “I can reliably kill these bosses, I have realistic expectations of getting to these bosses, and fuck these bosses I won’t kill them for months so please don’t include them in my loot list rankings.”

And I missed my spreadsheets.

Reforging also really fucked over my mental game. In Wrath, I could pick up a piece and pretty quickly make a determination if it was an improvement, even without consulting my spreadsheet.

But with reforging, it became “Well, I’ll take it if no one else wants it. I’m afraid if I take the piece I won’t be able to hit cap and my haste is going to do something funky and I *just* reforged everything right before this raid.”

So much to my amazement, Blizzard has fixed my gear issues.

• No more hit and expertise.
• No more dodge and parry. (OK, doesn’t really affect me, but I gather it’s important to you tanky types out there.)
• No more reforging.
• Fewer items will be able to be enchanted, but there will be greater variety in the enchant selections.
• Gems will be fewer and more powerful.
• No meta gems and no gem set bonuses.
• Gems and new random tertiary stats are actual BONUSES, much like Thunderforged, and do not count against an item’s budget. Tert stats could be things like increased movement speed or no durability loss.
• No more Int plate. Or leather. Or cloth. Or mail. As in, when you equip a piece of armor, the primary stat matches what your spec needs. Plate is plate and it changes to suit your class/spec. (This will apply to the major armor pieces – jewelry, trinkets, cloaks, and weapons will continue to be more specific.)
• This means only one tier set per class.
• This means a fuckton less gear in bags.
• The Item Squish is coming so my little brain can process the smaller numbers.

All of these things are things I want to see in game now – along with the Adventure Guide because I’m somewhere on Wrathion’s stupid legendary questline and I have completely forgotten what the hell I’m doing.

I can wait for a garrison. I can wait for Draenor. I can wait for the new raid lockout/structure craziness.

But the fixes to inventory and gear I want NOW.

How did you all take the gear changes?