Forum:Warlords item tooltips

So hopefully everyone's caught up on the Warlords stat/gearing changes coming with 6.0. But for the purposes of this thread, here are some highlights:
 * Non-stamina primary stats (agility, intellect, strength) on armor will change based on spec.
 * Plate has either strength or intellect. Mail and leather have either agility or intellect. Cloth has intellect.
 * Casters (including healers) get intellect, and melee/tanks get strength or agility as appropriate.
 * Secondary stats (mastery, haste, crit, amplify, multistrike, readiness, spirit, and bonus armor) are fixed at item creation time and will appear on all copies of an item
 * Bonus attributes ("Warforged" bonus item level, gem sockets, a tertiary stat) have a chance to appear on any item

Swapping between primary stats is easy enough, as shown in the example to the right. (|req= was used as an easy way to add a random line. We'll have a proper implementation when beta hits). The issue is: how do we handle the bonus attributes on an item? We could continue to do what we're doing now and have separate tooltips for each version of an item, but that is not going to scale. Just on the normal version of an item, there's 8 possible options:
 * 1) No bonus attribute
 * 2) Warforged
 * 3) Gem socket
 * 4) Tertiary stat
 * 5) Warforged + socket
 * 6) Warforged + tertiary stat
 * 7) socket + tertiary stat
 * 8) warforged + socket + tertiary stat

This doesn't factor in the fact that it could be any of the six tertiary stats. That brings our possible options to 28. Then, don't forget the raid finder, heroic, and mythic versions of the item. We're at 112 now! This is already untenable...

My current thought is to have a new section after the secondary stats that works something like this:
 * Possible bonus:
 * "Warforged" (+6 item levels)
 * One tertiary stat:
 * +54 Cleave
 * +32 Avoidance
 * +52 Inspiration
 * +28 Leech
 * +14 Speed
 * +10 Sturdiness
 * +10 Sturdiness

I already don't like that this is going to make every armor tooltip 10 lines longer. If all of the tertiary stats have the same number, we could replace tertiary stats section with a "+X " line, but I doubt Blizz is going to make our lives that easy. We could also just punt the issue away, showing  without any numbers like how we already show . I'd really rather not, though.

We would still probably have to have 4 versions of an item (raid finder, normal, heroic, mystic), but that's not as much work as we've already had to deal with implementing SoO loot.

Anyway, this is months away before we have to implement it, so I'm just looking for ideas right now. I don't have my heart set on anything at this point. Thoughts? Improvements? Pokes from the WoWDB folks, since they're going to have to deal with this too? -- k_d3 18:20, 27 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I've been trying to wrap my head around this and it's giving me a headache - it was hard enough with 6 versions of each item in SoO. Personally I'll wait until we have any examples of how tooltips look like, either from alpha (for later - nothing would be posted on Wowpedia) or beta. -- 18:58, 27 November 2013 (UTC)


 * For our purposes, the specific combination of stats on some specific rolled item is almost never useful, so the initial 8 options collapse into one (8th: show all possible bonuses), which basically means we just need some way to distinguish a guaranteed effect from a possible one, and which possible bonuses are drawn from the same pool (the d3 item tooltips on battle.net might be an inspiration there). The +Item Level bonus is annoying (changes all numbers, boo!), so it might be worth simply ignoring it and treating "+X item levels" as a possible bonus. — foxlit (talk) 19:06, 27 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Yep, that was largely the intent of my "current thought" paragraph. We'd display something like that on the tooltip. The enumeration of options was just to demonstrate that we can't have separate tooltips for all versions of an item. -- k_d3 19:43, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Part of me is wondering whether it would be easier to wait until the beta and see how this is implemented. Because if all tertiary attributes turn out to be equal, then we can save a lot of headache simply by putting "+54 Tertiary Attribute" in the tooltip. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 22:39, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
 * (updated the tooltip) I'm not too worried about our future implementation yet. As previously mentioned, beta's still some time away. At least the primary stat is easy, since currently they have the same number. So, |primary=100 will work, and the display logic is trivial. Hopefully blizz implements the item that way. Tertiary stats don't yet look like they're going to be that way. :( -- k_d3 22:49, 27 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I just asked chaud about WoWDB, and he said "we will worry about it once we get our hands on the client, or at least see what tooltips look like." -- Alayea (talk / contrib) 04:30, 2 December 2013 (UTC)