With a few new embellishments showing up on Alpha I wanted to voice some feedback to this system that is being carried over from Dragonflight.
Overall I love that crafted gear is relevant, especially at the high end. It has varied slightly but having a few crafted items in the top setups feels great. 1-2 items feels like the sweet spot, any more or less is probably unhealthy.
The way that this has been enabled is partly due to the strength of Embellishments on crafted pieces. These embellishments are typically a small throughput gain which makes them worth running even other slightly higher item level pieces.
The frustrating part with the system is that these often do not have impact on your gameplay, with a few exceptions. Most of them were simply proc effects that you don’t actually play around with your gameplay and many of those ended up being popular.
Picking between different proc effects that you don’t actually play around just isn’t very interesting to me. The effects that are interesting are the ones that are more defensive or utility oriented that can change up aspects of my gameplay without feeling forced.
Effects like the Hood of Surging Time in Dragonflight were more interesting than others since it gave you a strong item that was somewhat niche but felt impactful when you did get good value of it. Most of the others were passive effects you would not interact with. The other exception to this was effects like Undulating Sporecloak or Choker of Shielding. These defensive effects were seldom used (particularly after Sporecloak was nerfed) but gave players the choice of a defensive power which is way more interesting than “which secondary stat proc effect sims better”.
Looking forward to The War Within and the embellishments we have so far things look like they are following along a similar vein of proc effects that have little to no gameplay changes. Would really love it if we saw these change to not be throughput based, but instead purely utility or defensive options like Alchemical Flavor Pocket or Choker of Shielding.