Boring Gear Stats

I play World of Warcraft. I've played on and off since it was released in November 2004. Just now I was thinking about my warrior tank's gear.

It seems to me that gear stats are a little more boring now. I don't disagree with them removing what they did, but there's relatively little variation in gear now. For tanking specificially it'd be cool if there were armor pieces that had increased armor or some amount of regeneration if only to make people wonder if they might be better. Also, there's no gear with Str + Stamina + agility. Or even Strength + Agility. Agility is still good for crit rating and SHOULD be good for dodge rating.

Also, enchants seem a bit more limited. There should pretty much be enchants for all stats for all pieces. Why couldn't you put + armor on your chest piece, for example. Maybe it should be a leatherworking or blacksmithing thing. People should be able to fully customize the stats on thier gear. Of course, getting better gear to put the enchants on would still give you an advantage.

I once imagined a video game based on D&D's Spelljammer world. I had a whole notebook full of notes for it, and lost the whole thing. I wonder if it is in a box somewhere.

I wonder how game designers do thier thing. Do they come up with the names of everything first and then make up some stats? I can imagine that they have a guy who sits around all day and makes up names for items, checking that they don't already have an item with a too-similar name. And another guy who sits around all day dreaming up different looks and textures for armor pieces. I imagine that to cut down the work for the name-making guy they had CATA gear come in normal and heroic versions. After a couple of thousand names you have to start getting pretty damn creative. In fact, they've come up with some item names that dont' even sound like they should really be item names at all. For example: Burned Gatherings. wtf?! Fortunately with this expansion they can just whip out a bunch of Egyptian-sounding words and names. Orsis, Pharoah's, Setesh, etc