I was very disappointed with the Zandalari. They look really cool but they run like cartoon characters, all bouncy. At least the males do.
In a word: Homogenization.
And not only longevity. If a person saw you riding a Frost Saber, they knew damn good and well you’d spent weeks (or months) getting it. Same with the flying carpet for tailors, it took forever to get the mats. Or the plane for the engineers - geez, I spent weeks just mining the metal. These were things that lasted forever.
And of course, most items required rep gains to even be able to talk to the vendors. I lusted after a mechanostrider - it took forever to get the rep to the point of being able to buy one for my human mage. Now, I just buy one for a gnome alt and Voila! I have one for my human.
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Bfa gear is definitely more interesting when including different effects and the traits on azerite armor. Most of that stuff you listed was useless bloat. Bloat doesn’t equal interesting
To be fair most azerite traits are pointless bloat aswell.
what was good last time was there was no real stat budget. you could get a low level item with just pure attack power or int and people would sometimes want to stack them for glass cannon builds (which are fun, dont lie to me) even if it meant farming for those items or dropping their “more balanced stat” higher level item
Pure AP worked really well for some PvP oriented rogue builds.
i remember the first time i received thunder fury, the blessed blade of the wind seeker [
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do the azerite pieces not count as interesting? my entire playstyle as a SV hunter changes based on my azerite traits. Even more interesting is the fact that my BIS traits for raiding come from Pvp. I dont even focus ilvl for the most part, the rule is to get lots of haste and no mastery. My 370 piece with a socket doesn’t get replaced by 400 gloves with no socket.
For the same reason gear in Diablo 1 and 2 are much more interesting than gear from Diablo 3, because good gear is much harder to come by and not freely available (raining down on) everyone. And the “one gear fits all” doesn’t really help either…
For years and years the Blizzard design team has tried to make obtaining upgrades less reliant on running 3rd party models to determine if a item is actually an upgrade.
Blizzard kept removing interesting stats from gear in order to make upgrading simpler to understand.
After all this work they reached a point where they were like “Let’s completely undo all the progress we made and really screw with the player base making upgrades almost impossible to understand” and now we have Azerite.
Don’t forget that some gear even had negative stats too.
Because getting gear in vanilla wasnt thrown at you and actually meant something. Only a few pieces of gear would drop per raid and theres an unlikely chance that you could equip it for your class. So you would need to wait the lockout to reset. There are alot of factors that made vanilla gear so memorable.
Mythic raid or glad gear means something.And I’d actually disagree, once you hit cap gear does get thrown at you, it’s just not a potential upgrade.
Just because a piece of gear is purple means it’s anygood. This holds just as true in vanilla as it does now.
Why is vanilla gear more interesting?
The devs no longer have any imagination or ideas. Instead they let a RNG do the “thinking” for them.
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Exact same reason why D2 loot is more exiting than D3 loot.
You can’t theory-craft that well around stat RNG. Both vanilla and D2 with (almost) static values on epic/unique loot, meant you could set up goals for where you wanted your character to eventually end up. Goals are important. No goals, no direction, just grind and hope Lady Fortuna smiles at you! Grind with a specific goal is tolerable, grinding to get lucky is not.
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Their has to be a power gap or else the raids can’t get more demanding and you would be able to do any tier in low gear.
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Str/Agi/Int stats are as old as the rpg genre itself in its DnD pen and paper days. Why would they change something so iconic?
I think they’re saying it could just be a stat called “Power” for all classes, all specs, and it would have an identical effect. Basically, they could put in an equation that converts the Armor amount to the relevant power and remove primary stats without reducing anyone’s sense of character progression. It means that little beyond “I got more”.
Actually, vanilla WOW’s application of them was far more iconic. If a warrior had armor with both STR and AGI, they got different things from each. In Retail, there’s no such thing. They’re a warrior, so the only thing they get is STR.
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Feral Druid itemization favoured Strength over Agi in Classic, becaus Str gave you AP, whereas Agi only gave Crit and Dodge.
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According to the Vanilla attribute wiki agility gave cats melee ap. Classic WoWhead says the same.
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