Project Lore

It Takes Longer To Find All The Weapons Than To Level The Skill Love it or hate it, Blizzard has been changing the leveling aspects of World of Warcraft with each additional expansion.  As the level cap continues to be raised, the developers feel that blasting players through levels is a reasonable solution.  Sure, the slow to level players, and highly casual alt creators may feel a sense of abandonment, but according to Blizzard, the game begins at max level.  With increased XP gains from questing and grinding, lower level access to mounts and cheaper training costs and Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, leveling has become nothing more than a quick chore.  So why is it that we still bother with Weapon Skill? From what I can tell Weapon Skill was part of the combat calculations for two reasons.  Mainly to limit a players ability to take on much higher level mobs than themselves.  Perhaps your skill would let you drop a beast 10 levels higher than you, but all the dodges, glancing blows and misses from your puny weapon skill (still hardcapped at 5*level) negated your epeen.  The second attribute is to please our incessant need to see our character "progressing".  Even though we'd only see an increase of five in between levels, the great driving force of rising statistics kept many of us cracking skulls. Now, at level 80, the statistic is completely meaningless.  Yes, it does impact your DPS when you aren't capped, but does anyone not have max weapon skill with their weapon of choice?  If you grab a new weapon of a skill you aren't proficient in you can have that skill capped within the hour.  The incoming influx of axe wielding rogues are a perfect example.  So what's the point?  Why is it that we have to bother with a relic from vanilla WoW that has ultimately lost its purpose to Expertise?  Is it hanging around for archaeological reasons and the achievement? Unfortunately, we can't completely abandon the system since its main purpose is still in use.  But it'd be nice if Blizzard made it an actual task to accomplish, rather than a challenge to find an elite mob to swing away at.  Of course having to invest additional time into a pointless statistic, repeatedly no less, wouldn't make much sense either.  Make it so once one class of weapons (melee and ranged) is leveled they all would be?  That wouldn't please the RPers out there.  How about giving the statistic back some of its stats that Expertise now possess?  That would require additional dev time and rebalancing for no actual change.  Hmm. The state of Weapon Skill is a sticky situation.  Ultimately, its pointlessness for 'when the game begins' just bothers me, and frankly, reeks of a poorly planned change to a former core mechanic.

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