Post by xaratherus
To my understanding, only the core attributes will be available through reforging. That means you could turn, say, Stamina into Spirit, but not Crit rating into Spirit.
Regardless, I don't really see how this ruins itemization. What your real complaint seems to be is that it will communize gear. I don't personally see this as a bad thing; I'd rather see gear used than sharded. If your worry is that healers will be rolling on caster DPS gear and vice versa, or that Hunters will be rolling on Shaman gear, then yes, that will probably happen. Although you can always join a guild that enforces rules regarding who rolls on what gear.
I'm scared of all the noobtards going "LOL I AM DEEPZ I DON'T NEED STAMINAZ and turning it in for spell power on there hunter. Then show up with 9k health and get one shot by AOEs.
:P If they were the type to do this, then they'd already be showing up wearing Shaman mail and Balance Druid leather decked out in Spirit gems. People don't need reforging in order to be idiots. It might be another excuse for them to be stupid - but does that mean that the rest of us should be punished for it?
EDIT: As said be4, spirit is removed from mage and warlocks gear in cataclysm.
And from where do have you seen its core stats only?
I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong. :) I've actually found Blizz sources that mention using reforging to add +Hit to an item.
GhostCrawler
did specifically state, however, that they don't plan on allowing stats to directly translate into increased DPS. As he put it:
As an example, letting someone turn stamina into a dps stat is something we'd be unlikely to do (or at least impose a lot of restrictions) since that lets you turn an undesirable stat for most characters into something good.
Think of reforging more as a consolation prize or as a way to work around things like hit caps, and not the kind of thing that clever players are going to be able to use to vastly min max their character power.
For anyone looking for sources, using Google's advanced search to query blue.mmo-champion.com and then searching for reforging will show you all the blue posts on the official forums related to this.
For anyone interested,
here's the Google search.
Here's the GhostCrawler post I quoted. And
here's an excellent compilation post by Freyja which references a lot of other sources.
Summary: There's evidence that reforging
can be used to add non-core stats to gear; those alterations will be similar to the enchants that are currently available, and will likely not allow you to shift more than 50% of a given stat; you will be able to add new stats to gear, but not increase stats that already exist on the gear; and lastly, they do not currently plan on allowing you to directly increase your damage through reforging.