Based on this article on Wowhead, Blizzard will be implementing rating penalties if you go above certain thresholds of rating points. I was wondering if you were aware of this in the development of AMR for Shadowlands, what your opinion of the change is, and whether this will affect your development in any major way? Will it make simulation and optimisation even more complicated than before?
I do think it is a good change for the game though, it will hopefully make more of the stats attractive to various specs, instead of stacking a single stat (which has been amplified in 8.3 with the stacking of the stat corruptions). It will probably make optimisation tools like AMR and simc/raidbots even more important than they are now, if you want to make the best of the gear that you have.
We are aware of the change. We’ve already implemented it into our simulator on the dev server. It won’t be an issue for simulation, since it is an easy calculation.
Optimization could be trickier, we are still working on our model for Shadowlands, but I’m sure we will be able to deal with it.
I’m not sure that I really have a strong opinion on it. This idea is already in the game in bfa. As the item level of an item goes up, the budget for secondary stats gets further and further reduced. I see this change as a way to prevent rating buffs outside of the rating on gear from side stepping the intended secondary stat scaling.
I do like the idea of outlier secondary stats getting reigned in a little as you gear up - that could end up being good for the game. We’ll see how it turns out.
To put this in perspective, if they were to apply this to BfA right now, you wouldn’t see any loss in value from critical strike rating until you had more than 1800 rating on gear. That’s actually pretty tough to get until you are in about 475 gear (ignoring corruption effects for the moment). That’s the highest level of gear available in the last tier of content.
Looking at the budgets available on shadowlands gear and the current budgets and rating conversions, I estimate that you would need all gear of around item level 280 to start hitting the diminishing return at 25% total critical strike from gear. I don’t expect item levels to reach that until the last tier of content in shadowlands.
So for most of shadowlands, this change will have zero impact on people. Towards the end, it will have a very minimal impact – not even enough to care about, unless…
…they add in something like corruption effects that multiply gains from rating again, then it will come into play. Corruption stat multiplier effects let the total amount of stats gained from rating for a particular stat get extremely high. This curve will help prevent those effects from dominating all of the alternatives.
I guess the only other thing to consider would be procs or on-use effects that give large amounts of rating. When those effects are active, you would suffer from this penalty if they push you to very high rating totals. We’ll have to factor that in when ranking such effects.