World of Warcraft: Current Year

Noodleface said:

We are all.armchair devs

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Wrote industrial software for telcos ("Specification: customer billing must work. The rest is optional") for about 10 years, then MMO for 2 years, then security firewalls for 6. I have enough experience on complex software to know how you do code right and how you write steaming pieces of garbage. And figure out how it's implemented from its behavior.

There's no current visible hook anywhere in the system that carries trigger data to loot generator. Every "Use:" effect calls a "spell" that exists independently of the item that triggers it. Unless they've written code to do that in advance, and never used it, it's simply not a feature of the way loot is generated at the moment.

There's a good example in the 7.2 patch that shows you exactly how trivial it is to change an item's ilvl bonus to "whatever". In 7.2, crafted items change ilvl. They go from 815-860 to 835-875. But they cannot track and change the item based on what it was before. The only thing they could do, and it's an obvious ugly hack, is that the first improvement script call will raise to 835 even if you're 815. But they cannot even go back, count the number of +5 ilvl improvements the item already had, and reapply them on the same item. Can't be done apparently.

That should give you pause when you say it's trivial to count the number of +5ilvl bonus on a token, and carry that to an entirely different item, generated using a function that hasn't been designed to do that (so you should generate the item, then change its forge bonus after).

Alkorin said:

I think you're making this overly complicated. Final bonus tally should be all that's important here, not number of individual +5 bonuses, unless the number of individual bonuses will factor in to a decision later on (which, as far as I am aware, it doesn't).

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It factors at least into the "warforged"/"titanforged" label, anyway. Unless, of course, you want to drop that label, and just let ilvl.

And what about the other boni. I mean, we're talking about how the token warforged status should reflect the final tier status. But the socket? I mean, unless the final item no longer generates a socket (unlike the personal loot version which does, making it worse than personal looting), you have to roll a socket on the token, and carry the socket to the item. Same for tertiary.

So I stand by my professional opinion: it is almost certainly a lot more complicated to implement than you assume it is, and it has the potential of breaking several internal core systems (loot generation), which is why, even if it's a very good idea on paper, Blizzard is going to be very leery of implementing it, and not just because "it's going to artificially prolong stuff" (which it doesn't, since the random still occurs as much in both cases).