Azerite gearing is worse than ever

I don’t post much, so take this as a customer complaint. The titan residuum system takes the worst parts of a currency system and combines them with the worst possible RNG system.

Titan residuum can only be obtained (essentially) by completing 1 single mythic dungeon a week. You can’t gain any more by running additional dungeons, like say completing 5 or 10 Mythic 10 keys in a week. And running dungeons will never get you gear that can used for additional residuum. So essentially there is a cap on the amount of currency that you can obtain, it’s just a hidden, frustrating cap.

So after farming this very hard to get resource over 3 weeks, possibly more, what does a player encounter? A terrible RNG system where you can see the piece you want, the piece you definitely don’t want, and several in between that really aren’t upgrades at all. All for the low, low cost of 3 weeks of work. For possibly nothing. And if you want to target something specific? 12 weeks? For 1 piece of gear? Absolutely ridiculous.

Azerite traits are everything. Everything. 30 item levels is not an upgrade if the traits are all wrong. This isn’t like getting crit over mastery. There are simply awful traits on gear, and if you get stuck with them, you are better off using an item with drastically lower item levels. This whole system is broken.

The way I see it, costs for this need to come down. A lot. Or there needs to be more ways to get this currency. Or both. Because right now it just does not work.

RNG based gearing is not fun when traits make or break your performance. This is nothing like the other stats. It isn’t exciting. It isn’t fun. Its frustrating. Frustrating to spend weeks building up a currency that will only buy you things you don’t want.

3 Likes

Still true today. There are 385 slots that still sim and perform better than 415’s. Only hope is for them to revamp the system in 8.2. Seeing that they still have completely unbalanced traits and still could not figure it out I don’t have much hope for 8.2. Gonna have to wait for it to pop up on the PTR to see what they have been planning.

Even while completing in the range of a 12-14 key each week it will still take ~10 weeks excluding other sources to get a specific slot. If you just login to do a single 10 key each week you are looking at closer to 12 weeks excluding other sources. Even if you are completing a ~14 key each week you will still not have saved enough residuum by the end of a season to buy 3x specific. It’s obvious they don’t want players buying specific azerite slots and want us to play the slot machine ever 3 weeks.

You can break down azerite from the raid but that should be a non factor considering the vendor was built for people who do M+. I also rather trade azerite armor I don’t need to other players who will use it.

It might not be so bad going random if traits were more balanced. It also might depend on your class/spec. Some specs have a wider variety of decent traits and for others generic traits are significantly better.

3 Likes

I would balance the talents on the gear. I don’t understand why the developers would put undesirable and ineffective traits in azerite gear.

Oh wait I do know.

Because it makes the player have to play the casino again.

Trinkets have always been much less ilevel dependent than other gear slots. Azerite is essentially multiple trinkets (one for each “trait”) in the place of three armor slots. Trinket balance has historically been pretty difficult. It is no surprise that there are very definite winners and losers in azerite pieces.

The traits are so specific that a holy priest would optimally have two different sets of gear for mythic+ dungeons vs. raids. (Anyone trying to do pvp probably needs another one, and this is before you try to have a dps spec for doing world quests).

The system encourages playing the lotto for bad azerite to shard into currency to try and get good azerite (run all content that isn’t going to be an upgrade but awards or might award azerite gear). Is 370 gear from an incursion going to be an upgrade? No, but it might be 370 azerite. Is anything from lfr an upgrade? No, but it might be azerite. Does the old world boss drops an upgrade? No, but it might be azerite. Is my class suitable for pvp? No, but it conquest gives azerite some weeks.

“Do I want to suck less at world quests or shard it for currency?” isn’t a fun question. For the record, I’ve just gone with the “suck all the time at world stuff” route and pick world quests that involve killing one mob or memory or maze running before all others. I hit some aoe heals and run around spamming holy nova (or heal the person with the biggest mob pile. Shadow often sucks at world content, so I’ve gotten pretty used to the “boring stuff to death” world content approach. The open tagging system just makes it a lot easier to leech from others. (I’m a nice leech as much as possible; everyone gets fortitude and some heals.)

3 Likes

Eh, yes and no. It takes 1725 residue to get a random, and there are 6 possible randoms, which means the expected average residue to get one specific item you need is 10350. This is 45% higher than the cost of simply buying an individual 415 directly, 7150, and that difference is large enough that even the residue from sharding/scrapping bad ones won’t make up the difference.

So statistically, if only one of the items available is tolerable, you’re better off simply buying it directly. This is true for me, for example, with my shoulders, where only one of the 6 M+ Azerite items has the pairing of my BIS traits. Where it breaks down is when you have situations like my chest, where two of the items have that pairing, or my helm, where 3 do, in which case using the slot machine is better for getting any of the set (even though one of the 2 or 3 might still be slightly better than the others)

But it worked so well in Diablo 3!!!

Which of course is the motto of the current WoW development team. Legion legendaries, M+, world quests, aiming for every spec to have a 4-6 button rotational set of abilities, warforging (ancient and primal ancient items), artifact and neck exponentially scaling grinds (Paragon), the massive uptick in RNG in general, all of it stems directly from Diablo, a game that has perfected the mindless grind playtime extension.

Now, not all of these were failures. M+ and world quests were a definite success, and I generally had mixed feelings overall on the AP grinds, as there were/are both redeeming and debilitating aspects to them. And that mindless grind isn’t necessarily a fault itself, since D3 is generally quite fun despite being nothing but that grind.

The problem is and always has been that the devs are trying to hammer square pegs into round holes. D3 and WoW have very different reward models. Loot in WoW is a relative rarity compared to D3, but the lack of variable stats means that items have a fixed value, while D3 items have enormous potential swings in the value of an item even aside from the chance for ancients. D3 has an infinite amount of soloable activities that reward loot, and the group content is the exact same content with just a bit higher numbers, with the net effect that an individual can farm loot and paragon pretty close to as effectively as a group can. WoW much more intensely emphasizes group activity as its end-game, with very little in the way of solo progression models (mostly just world quests, LFR, and warfronts, the latter two of which I include because while they are technically group content, they require no friends or premades to complete).

And frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep doing it. Maybe next they’ll amp back up glyphs or a variant to act sorta like runes in D3. Maybe they’ll make item stats variable.

The problem is getting duplicates. To my knowledge there is nothing that says you can’t get a duplicate each time. On average it may work out to being 10350. You could also get burned rolling random and spend over 20k before getting BiS.

I agree with that. For a lot of specs there may only be 1-2 that are decent. Given that it is 3 weeks of currency with only a ~16-17% chance of getting BiS (or in some cases the only good azerite) that is not a risk I’m taking.

World of Warcraft is more Diablo than Diablo 3 is atm. At least you can farm shards and mats to no end in D3 and use Kanai’s Cube to try getting specific items.

Yes, but the average takes duplicates into account. Across everyone using the vendor in game, it will take an average of 10350 residuum to get the item you want. Sometimes it’ll take 1 purchase, sometimes it’ll take 20, but on average it’ll take 6, and the average is what the relevant decision should be based on.

Personally I don’t like how the traits are tied to gear at all. It would be better to just get regular gear for the helm chest and shoulders and have the traits either tied to the necklace directly or unlocked through some other means.

Changing gear and losing traits just feels bad, especially when its tied to an upgrade rather than a choice.

2 Likes

But it’s not three weeks of work. It’s three hours tops, plus all the time we wait due to timegating. It’s nowhere near as much of a grind as gear used to be.

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