Just wanted to ask what everyone's opinions were on Azerite gear. Speaking purely for a Brewmaster, it feels like there is just a lack of new mechanics to spice up the playstyle this expansion; as most of the traits for Brewmasters are entirely passive. I just was wondering what everyone's opinions were on their own class:
What key traits have dramatically changed your playstyle personally?
How has deciding between traits been for your class? Has there been one dominant choice that, to be competitive, you must slot in?
Personally, I have found that for Brewmasters in particular, the traits and lack of diversity in what to pick have left for kind of stagnant gameplay and often leave me apathetic in what Azerite gear I actually equip. I know monk in general is one of the lesser played classes, which is why I am curious to hear from people who play the more popular choices and what their take might be.
Most of the traits for all of the specs are entirely passive. The only traits for Windwalker that sort of changes the way I play are Glory of the Dawn and Open Palm Strikes, because they cause my abilities to sometimes restore chi. And it doesn’t even change the way I play that much, it just has a chance to remove a small amount of downtime from my rotation since I have extra resources.
Deciding traits is a non-factor. For DPS you just sim it, you HAVE to sim it. There’s no way to tell if a trait is good or not. There’s no deciding, if you look at DPS rankings every single person in the top 1000 of a given spec are running nearly identical trait setups.
Mistweaver is a bit more diverse in the trait selection (probably because you can’t sim healers). But absolutely none of the traits will change your gameplay. Secret Infusion had potential, but >90% of your Thunder Focus Teas are going to be used on Vivify so again it doesn’t matter. Font of Life and Uplifted Spirits decrease certain cooldowns but that doesn’t change your gameplay, it just makes it so your abilities are available sooner. It especially doesn’t change your gameplay as a healer because your CDs are assigned and having them available a few seconds earlier doesn’t matter.
All in all azerite is a failed system. Bring back tier sets blizz.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for traits to be more interactive and have style changes, but that’s a whole new level of balancing blizz could ever hope to accomplish, especially with 3 of them. I think they need to scrap them and unprune dozens of abilities, or make it to where it’s sandbox style and you can pick your traits and them just tune off what would be optimal for that.
I think it’s fine. The only change I would make is expanding the pool of spec specific traits by 50% or so. As a MM I would love to have traits that affect nearly every ability I have in a couple of different ways.
This is the case with almost every class. Azerite traits, as even said by the dev team, are problematic because they’re 50 different ways of saying X does more of Y. And that’s it. They’re all passive, boring, and lackluster, and I’m sick of 3rd party progression systems tied to my character’s power.