Alienation of Dedicated and Skilled players

[Underdog2204]

Healer A: I like to dps as much as possible, if I have this robe that has a good bonus to healing potency percentage I can afford to dps a bit more and when I pop out of cleric stance i won't have to heal as much and can go back to cleric stance.

Well then you have:

Healer B: I'm not so comfortable with my healing abilities just yet and I run out of no quickly, but I got this staff that increases my mp refresh rate so I can keep up better.

Tbh I think your problem is that you are interpreting why people want these changes. There aren't going to massively zomg brand new game changes. They aren't that major is exactly the point. It is just that blindly chasing item levels is rather boring.

Ok pretty good.

But in that example healer A and B can both use that staff and robe, both get what they want and nothing is different only how well they play their class. Unless healer A uses a staff that increases damage but then what's the point of that? Healer damage is good mechanically as it is and a staff that increases it means a loss of their primary role which is healing.

I still see optimistation winning out in the long run, I agree ilvls are getting tedious but I'm still skeptical of how much this will actually fix.

I'm just skeptical by nature I suppose xD

Yep. Mastery was introduced into WoW, and other stats were revised and/or eliminated. And it only took 13 months between the last content update and the new expansion to implement it.

Are you willing to wait that long?

I only remember mastery being useful for some classes and not others.

So you either went into it as say a Disc priest but didnt bother so much as a holy because it just resulted in overheal.

Optimisation won out here. WoW is ruled by optimisation raiders and non-raiders alike.