Thoughts on Armor Specializations, Picture time!

A new beta build was deployed today and while there aren't a huge number of unexpected changes to the feral talent tree, they did release information about armor specializations.

Essentially armor specializations are Blizzard's way of rewarding players for wearing the correct type of armor (cloth, leather, mail, plate). Basically if you wear the correct armor type in all of your item slots you get a percent "bonus" to one of your primary stats. Does anyone else think this is really lame...?

As a feral druid this basically means NOTHING. If you wear all leather, and why wouldn't you, you get 5% additional agility in cat, 5% additional stamina in bear, and possibly 5% agility overall? Well first of that's a bit confusing, does that mean all druids just randomly get 5% extra agility for wearing all leather, even non ferals? Not that it matters much which is actually my point.

It's not any different than having a random talent deep in each section of the druid trees that reads: "Increases your (agility, stamina) by 1/2/3/4/5%". It's not interesting or unique at all, it's just a zero-thought attempt at making sure each class/spec wears the correct armor type. Honestly I'd much rather them just restrict armor types better based on class/level. If you are a leather wearing class, you only get to wear leather, there are enough drops in the game, or should be, to handle that type of requirement.

Here are the specializations for druids:

Leather Specialization - Increases your Agility by 5% while wearing only Leather armor.
Wild Leather Specialization - Increases your Stamina in Bear Form by 5% while wearing only Leather armor.
Wild Leather Specialization - Increases your Agility in Cat Form by 5% while wearing only Leather armor.
Astra Leather Specialization - Increases your Intellect by 5% while wearing only Leather armor.

So it's a baked in 5% agility and for all feral druids and then an extra 5% agility for Cats and 5% stamina for Bears. I think the real reason this rubs me the wrong way has to do with the new mastery system. Everything that isn't directly a talent just increases something by X amount or X%. There are so many class specific/spec specific "modifiers" nowadays.

The 5% stamina increase for tanks could not possibly be missed if it's never introduced, so why even bother. I can't possibly view the specializations as a reward for wearing the correct gear. Max level gear restrictions aren't impossible to implement, they should have gone that route.

Anyways this is a silly argument, it doesn't much matter so rather than worry about it - I present to you some awesome screen shots from yesterday, as well as my signature that a guild member created for me.

Signature created by Relmesh, he's actually made quite a few for GCR members. Here is mine and some more of his recent work can be found here.