WoW Forever players have discovered another reason Blizzard is hiding thousands of item stats from dataminers.
Some of the loot is introducing mechanics we did not even know existed.
Beta players pushing beyond the normal level-20 comfort zone have now uncovered caster equipment carrying a brand-new stat called Spell Pierce. The wording indicates that your spells can ignore a specific amount of the target’s Magical Resistance, potentially making the stat particularly valuable in PvP and against enemies with resistance to specific schools of magic.
If that sounds suspiciously familiar to anyone who played The Burning Crusade, it should.
Spell Pierce Looks a Lot Like Spell Penetration
The newly discovered stat appears on items including Ambassador’s Bloodrobes, with the tooltip describing the effect as allowing spells to pierce the target’s Magical Resistance. The items were only revealed because players actually obtained them in the beta, which is precisely how Blizzard wants Forever’s new loot system to work.
As highlighted in the first reports of Spell Pierce appearing on Forever gear, the mechanic sounds remarkably similar to Spell Penetration, the secondary stat introduced with The Burning Crusade.
Spell Penetration reduced the effective magical resistance of your target. If somebody had 50 Fire Resistance and you carried enough Spell Penetration, some or all of that protection could effectively be bypassed when your Fire spells landed.
Spell Pierce appears to be following the same basic idea.
Blizzard has not yet published a detailed explanation of the new stat, however, so we should not assume every old Spell Penetration rule applies exactly the same way. Forever is still in beta, and both the numbers and underlying mechanics can change.
This Could Be Much More Important in PvP
The obvious use case is PvP.
Classic players can deliberately stack resistances against dangerous schools of magic. Frost Resistance can make life considerably less enjoyable for Frost Mages. Shadow Resistance can interfere with Warlocks and Shadow Priests. Nature Resistance has its own uses against Shamans and certain encounters.
If Spell Pierce directly counters those defenses, caster gearing suddenly gains another decision.
Do you take the item with more raw Spell Damage?
Or do you sacrifice some conventional power for enough Spell Pierce to make somebody’s carefully assembled resistance set less impressive?
That question becomes particularly interesting after our recent coverage of Forever’s $100,000 dueling tournament. Even relatively obscure secondary stats can become extremely relevant when players start optimizing level-30 PvP characters around very specific matchups.
Boss Resistance Could Make Spell Pierce Valuable in PvE Too
There is also a potential PvE application.
Classic bosses and high-level enemies can possess magical resistances that reduce or partially resist incoming spell damage. Depending on how Forever implements Spell Pierce, the stat could therefore become valuable against encounters that strongly resist a particular school.
That would give Blizzard another way to create specialized equipment rather than simply putting more Intellect and Spell Damage on every caster upgrade.
Forever’s itemization overhaul is already heading in that direction. We have seen low-level dungeon items connected to level-60 set bonuses, strange new class-specific gear and redesigned dungeon drops that create choices rather than simple stat upgrades.
Spell Pierce fits beautifully into that philosophy.
This Is Exactly Why Blizzard Hid the Loot
The timing is particularly amusing because we only just covered how Blizzard has hidden more than 12,500 Forever items from dataminers.
The entire point is to stop every new stat, item set and strange proc from being catalogued months before players ever enter the dungeon that contains it. Blizzard wants loot to become known when somebody actually finds it.
Spell Pierce is an excellent example of that system working.
Players did not read about the stat in a complete pre-launch database.
They pushed into dangerous content, killed things they were probably not meant to be comfortably killing yet and brought the loot back with them.
Our broader look at Forever’s enormous Classic loot overhaul already showed that Blizzard is rebuilding itemization across Azeroth. New stats like Spell Pierce suggest that overhaul may be considerably stranger than simply improving weak old items.
There are still more than 8,000 hidden item stats left to discover.
If Spell Pierce was hiding behind one of them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to guess what is behind the others.
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