The new stat customization feature requires a little more trial and error if you are going for very specific amounts of stats, but it also allows you to do things that are very difficult (or impossible) with stat weights, such as striking a balance of two or three stats.
Also, this approach more closely follows how stats actually work in WoW. Stat “thresholds” and “caps” in WoW are extremely rare, and rarely optimal. You usually want a balance of multiple stats to maximize output, which is what our optimizer has been designed to do since Legion.
Stat weights were never that great a way to rank gear – they were just easy, which is why everybody used them. It took too much work to do anything more complicated. Well… we decided to put in the work, and now you have a much more powerful tool and more accurate model at your disposal.
Even in this particular case – getting a certain amount of haste with a protection paladin – there isn’t a specific threshold that you need to get. It’s not like having 17% haste would not work at all, but 18% haste would be amazing and all of a sudden your WoW life would change. The goal is simply to get an amount of haste that is in the ballpark of 15-20% and feels good to you in-game.
Using a threshold or cap would be awkward – it would try very hard to get you exactly to whatever you set it at… rather than allowing some flexibility around your target. Our new system gives you this flexibility and is thus a lot more powerful once you get used to it.