WoW Analysis: The Current State of Randomized Stats

When 5.4 came out, the Timeless Isle zone was introduced. While it featured a couple world bosses and an excellent way to farm Lesser Charms of Good Fortune, among numerous vanity items, there was also much epic loot to be had in the form of Account Bound armor tokens, which could be turned into item level 496 gear. Furthermore, players could loot Burden of Eternity, a rare drop that can convert an armor token into item level 535 gear.

Considering that a player can effectively skip a large amount of content and get to LFR Siege of Orgrimmar very quickly, it is to be expected that the gear that can be gotten from the Timeless Isle should be a bit inferior to gear that can be purchased or acquired from raids and LFR. Instead, the budgeting of the gear has a severe rift of disparity depending on the random secondary stats rolled on the gear. This also applies to other random stat epics such as certain Throne of Thunder drops(actually this one might be a bug). An example of this disparity is shown below:

An example of a piece of gear with only Crit as its secondary stat.

As you can see, this piece of gear rolled only the Critical Strike secondary stat, with 1498 points of secondary stat allocation (599 of which is reforged). However, if the gear were to have two secondary stats, as shown here, it would instead have 1864 points of secondary stat allocation. It is also worth noting that when the gear has two secondary stats rolled on it, it's about as strong as a typical epic piece of that item level (though that's a different problem, and one that can be subjectively considered an issue with minimal factual basis at best).

What can be concluded, then, is that if a randomly generated item like the Timeless Isle gear generates one secondary stat, it has a stat budget that is inferior to an equivalent piece that generates two secondary stats. In very rare cases would this be of a benefit and while I understand why double-dipping a single secondary stat can be severely problematic, the question is why the gear rolls only one secondary stat at all. Since there's a strong chance gear like this will appear in the future, gear that generates random stats like this should generate with two secondary stats all the time. Whether the gear should be made deliberately inferior to equivalent pieces from another source (like a raid) is another question entirely.