I regret that Jayelle made
Pauldrons of Ferocity and especially that I made
Salus' Reckless Pauldrons based on their precedent. Without these two items, raid-level melees wouldn't have the expectation of having Damage Increment type stuff at all.
My main beef with melees and focus effects is that melees already get the bigger piece of the scaling-with-items pie without them. For the most part, when casters get stuff that is made for melees--haste, weapon ratios, melee procs, ATK, weapon skills--all it adds up to is an exp group toy. But when a melee gets stuff made for casters, it's absolutely integral and don't you dare take it away. It's not enough that haste and weapon ratios already scale way, way better than focus effects and whatnot. Melees get it better, and then on top of that they get what little casters get too, just to rub it in.
Precedent sucks. Can't just make an item with a one-time, special bonus stat. Once something makes it onto an item for class X, it's not a bonus. It's an obligation. Class X had better be able to maintain this forever without having to wear a single item below their current tier.
If I could go back to when I was newbie item designer I would avoid putting focus effects on melee-usable gear at all (except maybe pet focuses for Beastlords since that's pretty integral, although Beastlord pets could be done better in general without them...) and avoid the whole mess. Even more recently when I made casting skill mods do stuff--purely to give casters more useful things to look for on items--I made the same mistake of making them work for melees and procs and all that. And then based on the precedent of those Marza made overcap dual wield and double attack do extra beneficial-for-melees-only stuff for yet another screw you to casters concerning items.
So yeah. Just to say it again: precedent sucks. But there's no turning back once you've made one mistake in the realm of item balance. Someone can put whatever focus on whatever melee stuff at tier whatever, but it won't be me.
