Players will always want to use the best traits on Azerite gear for every situation. Why punish the player with a big gold cost to reforge?
We draw a distinction between items and character attributes like spec or talents. Usually you can’t change the former at all, or there’s a destructive process involved like replacing a gem or enchantment, or Artifact Relic in Legion. A healer trinket is a healer trinket, and can’t be morphed into a tank trinket if you want to switch from Holy to Prot. If you want to perform at a given level in both specs, you need separate trinkets of similar quality for each.
However, we’re mindful of feedback we’d gotten regarding spec flexibility. We want Azerite armor to be flexible, so that you could switch from Fire to Frost if you want to, or you could switch from Arms to Protection for a week if your raid’s tank was absent. Without some friction, the system would just turn into a secondary (and awkward) set of talents, and a mere cooldown could create situations where you switched from one trait to another, and then couldn’t go back at all without having to wait. We ultimately settled on a respec cost that started out very low (5 gold) and increased and decayed rapidly, such that periodic respecs would be essentially free, but swapping back and forth routinely would be unsustainable.
Nonetheless, mistaken choices or experimentation can quickly spiral out of control and leave even occasional respecs feeling overly costly. In Tides of Vengeance, we’ll be doubling the rate at which the respec cost decays, so it will go down by 50% every 24 hours. Additionally, given the changes to several Azerite traits and the new ones coming with the update, we’ll provide a one-time reset of all respec costs when the update goes live.
I completely understand their desire to maintain this distinction. However, they seem to be bandaiding the problem, rather than fixing it completely. Doubling the decay rate doesn’t solve the fact that it’s an endless increase, and that’s the problem, not the cost itself. If I’m playing a Paladin and I dps in my raid, tank for M+, and heal in PvP, I’d have to respec my best azerite pieces for every activity and it’d never be sustainable. Getting duplicate 385’s is a very time consuming process there’s no real way to ever get 3 sets of perfect pieces for every spec. If the justification is that they want it to feel as if azerite is similar to a trinket or weapon that can’t be changed, then the respec costs should be relatively similar.
Solutions:
A) Remove the the endless doubling of cost, and make the base respec cost relatively similar to re-enchanting a ring because your stat priority changed - something like 500-100g gold per respec would be pretty reasonable, if the cost stays there permanently.
B) Remove the reforge NPC, make 2-3 different profession items that can do it instead. Bonus points if they can consume Sanguicells. Mat cost could be balanced to be in the same range as the above, but it would also be driven by players and add some expansion long value to professions.
C) Both of the above, but the NPC has a higher cost, and the profession items are relatively cheap to make if you put the effort in. Kinda like how tomes use to be bought at a vendor for 10g, but made for 1g.
Thoughts?
I understand that some people are just going to be of the opinion that there shouldn’t be a cost at all, and I don’t disagree with that, but Blizz has clearly stated that they think there should be a cost. This post is an attempt to discuss the cost itself and how to make it better, not to discuss whether it should exist or not.